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I want to give poor children computers and walk away
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14 December 2011
by
<a href="http://www.newscientist.com/search?rbauthors=Vijaysree+Venkatraman"><b>Vijaysree Venkatraman</b></a>
</li><li>New Scientist Magazine issue <a href="http://www.newscientist.com/issue/2842">2842</a>.</li></ul>
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<img src="http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/ns/cms/mg21228425.500/mg21228425.500-1_300.jpg" alt="<i>(Image: William B. Plowman/AP/PA)</i>" title="<i>(Image: William B. Plowman/AP/PA)</i>">
<div class="lowlight"><i>(Image: William B. Plowman/AP/PA)</i></div>
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<div class="infuse">Can tablet computers "parachuted" into remote areas transform childhood learning, asks <b>Nicholas Negroponte</b>, the man behind One Laptop per Child</div>
<div class="infuse"><b>You'll helicopter computers into
remote areas so the children there can teach themselves to read and
write. Where did the idea come from?</b><br>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?"</div>
<div class="infuse"><b>When will this happen?</b><br>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.</div>
<div class="infuse"><b>How will you pick the sites?</b><br>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.</div>
<div class="infuse"><b>How will you know if this works?</b><br>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.</div>
<div class="infuse"><b>What about power and upkeep of the tablets?</b><br>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.</div>
<div class="infuse"><b>What is your target audience?</b><br>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.</div>
<div class="infuse"><b>What makes you optimistic that children can learn on their own, with digital tools?</b><br>There is provocative evidence from research. Sugata Mitra, who is on our team, is famous for his <a href="http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_themselves.html" target="nsarticle">hole-in-the-wall experiments</a>.
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".</div>
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<h3 id="bx284255B1">Profile</h3>
<div><b>Nicholas Negroponte</b> is founder of the <a href="http://one.laptop.org/" target="nsarticle">One Laptop per Child</a> non-profit organisation and co-founded and directed the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Laboratory</div>
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