OLPC: One Revolution Per Child
April 20, 2007
The first Children’s Machine XO-1 $150 laptops from the One Laptop Per Child project are now in the hands of a test group of kids in Nigeria. Jamais Cascio weighs in with his thoughts on the project:
I’m excited about the OLPC machine’s potential because it’s so clearly a revolutionary device, both in the sense of it having capabilities that nobody has ever before seen in a laptop, and in the sense it being a catalyst for out-of-control social transformation. The OLPC project will drop millions of powerful, deeply networked, information technology devices into the hands of precisely the population (children and teens) most likely to want to figure out the unanticipated uses.
From the startlingly long-range wifi mesh networking to the “Sugar” social interface, these devices were built to treat hierarchies as damage, and route around them.
…
This is a participatory culture dream device. Using entirely open source software, the laptops are enormously friendly to “hacking” (in the exploration sense, not the criminal sense), yet can be returned to a safe configuration at the push of a button. Moreover, they’re extraordinarily, wonderfully, energy-efficient: at normal use, a OLPC laptop draws 3 watts, compared to 30 watts for a typical lower-end conventional laptop; and a full charge lasts for over six hours at maximum power use, 25 hours in power conservation mode.
Felsenstein notes that teachers will (rightly) see these laptops as a direct assault on their authority, and many will be banned from classrooms, leaving the kids to use the machines unsupervised.
I sure hope so.
A generation growing up believing in their capability to hack the system, work collaboratively, and make information a tool is probably one of the best things that could happen to a developing nation. Possibly not in the short run — backlash from fearful authorities will be nasty — but certainly in the longer term, as the first wave of OLPC children reaches adulthood.
The revolution begins in 2008.
