The One Laptop Per Child Program
Recently I listened to an ABC update of the (OLPC) One Laptop Per Child Program - a presentation by Nicholas Negroponte, who expressed his views on this back in the 1980s in his book Being Digital.
I was fascinated by the progress made to date. A million of these laptops have now been installed and, while the $180 per laptop still has to go a bit lower, enthusiasm for the program is overwhelming.
At the Oceania Com conference I helped organise the small Pacific Island State of Niue announced that it would be the first country in the world where every child would have a laptop. The conference was also attended by Ian Thomson from the Secretariat of the Pacific Community (www.spc.int) an international organisation that provides technical assistance, policy advice, training and research services to 22 Pacific Island countries and territories in areas such as health, human development, agriculture, forestry and fisheries.
SPC coordinates the OLPC activities in the South Pacific.
A core element of the OLPC program is ‘learn to learn’. The OLPC laptops (called the ‘XO’ laptop) are not office productivity tools like Windows computers, but instead are ‘learning tools’ that help young children to learn.
The OLPC program is based on the constructionist education theory, or learning by doing. It also has a strong collaborative learning approach, encouraging students to share their experiences and learn together.
Some Education ministries are changing their systems to a more student-centric approach, to replace the teacher-centric or instructional approach. PNG policy includes the use of the vernacular as a language of instruction at elementary schools. This can be helped by the laptops, as their operating systems and speech synthesiser can be translated into any local language - assisted by the open software development community.
Generally there is a strong belief that the education system needs to change and with today’s affordable technology, especially the OLPC Laptop and Internet, the tools are available. The status quo for education in both developed and developing countries is not acceptable.
Several OLPC projects are driven by the need to reform the education system. For example, Peru had tried many times to make incremental changes to their underperforming system, with no success. Today, they find the Laptop and Internet are transforming the system very effectively.
Here are some things that have been mentioned as positive outcomes from an OLPC project. Many of these observations came up very early in the project. This list could also be considered reasons for launching a project.
- Reduced absenteeism
- Greater engagement by children
- Empowerment of teachers
- Increased esteem of teachers
- Reduced need for discipline
- Less disruption by students
- Increase in self-esteem by students
- Increased ‘connection’ with the world (other cultures, languages, ideas)
- Increased involvement by parents
- School becomes the centre of the community
- Development of a sharing culture (child to child, school to community, teacher to parent)
- Much better results than with Computer Labs
- The whole community becomes empowered, through access to the information society
One thing that is frequently emphasised is that the process of running the project is, in itself, a learning exercise. The best results come from an open approach to experimentation (learning by doing).
Many teachers comment that children instinctively recognise the value of the laptop, even when the teachers (and education specialists) are sceptical.
More information: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Oceania
Click the Solomon Islands page for some leading experience from one member country http://www.laptop.org
See also BuddeComm Report : South Pacific Islands - Regional Market Overview & Statistics
