[Vision2020] Luna's not the only one

[Ron Force]

I want to give poor children computers and walk away 
	* 14 December 2011 by Vijaysree Venkatraman 
	* New Scientist Magazine issue 2842.
 
(Image: William B. Plowman/AP/PA)
Can tablet computers "parachuted" into remote areas transform childhood learning, asks Nicholas Negroponte, the man behind One Laptop per Child
You'll helicopter computers into 
remote areas so the children there can teach themselves to read and 
write. Where did the idea come from?
One Laptop per Child (OLPC),
 even after giving out nearly 3 million laptops, is still criticised 
along the following lines: "Negroponte believes that you can give a 
child a laptop and walk away." Whether I ever believed that or not is 
now secondary. It became such a refrain that I finally asked myself 
about a year ago: "What if you could?"
When will this happen?
A 
pre-pilot will start on 1 January 2012. Pre-pilot means that it will be 
small and there will be modest human intervention just to see children's
 reactions in order to better design the real, hands-off, 
dropping-out-of-the-sky format.
How will you pick the sites?
English
 has to be an official language. So, learning to read and write in 
English has immediate local and social value, as well as long-term 
economic value - in short, it will be a passport to 21st-century skills.
 Villages in Sierra Leone, Tanzania and Liberia are candidates. A 
pre-pilot will also happen in India. Right now, as researchers, we know 
how kids learn English and do not yet want to deal with the complexity 
of other languages.
How will you know if this works?
The
 experiment has no human intervention. But that limitation does not 
exist when verifying and testing results. At the end of the 
two-year-long experiment, researchers trained in educational testing 
will go to the villages. The kids are not connected to the internet but 
we are connected to them, so some data collection and assessment will 
also happen remotely during the experiment.
What about power and upkeep of the tablets?
Power
 is solar and by hand crank. With the OLPC laptops the kids could repair
 about 85 per cent of malfunctions. We designed it to be taken apart 
easily. In fact, I had wanted to put a label on that said: "Warranty not
 valid until laptop is tampered with." The tablets will be, yet again, 
more robust.
What is your target audience?
Five
 to 8-year-olds. Since the software is really centred on early childhood
 and immersive for that stage of life, they may be too babyish for older
 kids.
What makes you optimistic that children can learn on their own, with digital tools?
There is provocative evidence from research. Sugata Mitra, who is on our team, is famous for his hole-in-the-wall experiments. Over the past decade, he introduced the very first computer in a public space in remote villages across India. Children, who had never seen a 
computer before, congregated around this single machine and 
self-organised into learning communities to become computer-literate, 
with no adult intervention. In fact, their proficiency in computer 
literacy rivalled that of children who receive explicit instruction in 
schools. My general optimism is that children can do anything and, if 
you ask Sugata, collectively they seem to be able to. But I am really 
going into this with an open mind. It is an experiment, and one outcome 
could be "no, they cannot".
Profile
Nicholas Negroponte is founder of the One Laptop per Child non-profit organisation and co-founded and directed the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Laboratory
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