Mile Zero
if challenge had a taste, you'd be quite delicious
Mile Zero is the personal website of Thomas Wilburn. All statements and opinions here are my own, and do not represent the views or policies of my employers at Congressional Quarterly, Ars Technica, or other publications.
This letter from former OLPC security director Ivan Krstic is well worth reading. Krstic lays out the history of Nick Negroponte's "constructionist" educational failures, the managerial issues that have doomed deployment of the OLPC laptops to client countries, and the basic philosophical problems that continue to dog the machine's Sugar UI system.
There's also some tug-of-war in there about the conflicts between Linux, Windows, and evangelism on both sides, but I don't think that's nearly as interesting: it's fodder for the watchers on the sidelines, but not (entirely) why this project has failed.
As one of the people who predicted, early on, that it would indeed fail dramatically, I won't deny that it's a little satisfying. But mainly it's just sad. Poor countries paid good money for these machines. They bought into the Negroponte's hype. Well-meaning Americans did the same, hoping to benefit the lesser-developed nations through the Get-One-Give-One program. Those resources could have been used more effectively, and now they won't be.
It's worth pointing out, just to be clear, that the problem here was not technological. I don't think anyone doubted that the laptops could be built, or that they would be very cool toys. The OLPC has been a failure because it literally assumed that given the technology, learning would follow. It assumed that the laptops could form their own self-healing infrastructure, separate from any existing institutions. No need for a network: we've got mesh wifi! No need for power: we've got hand-cranked generators! No need for support: we're open-source!
No need for teachers: the kids will teach themselves.
But teaching is not something that comes from a box. It's part of a larger system, an institution built out of people. It's really hard work. You have to work hard to teach badly, and even harder to teach well. You can teach using technology. But technology on its own, as a general rule, is not in and of itself an education.
I didn't predict these exact failures when I wrote about the project a couple years ago. I was much more inclined to think in terms of capacity development. But in many ways, I'd argue that the lack of attention to capacity on the project's part is intertwined with its lack of attention to other basic social and pedagogical issues. Just as OLPC wasn't interested in building electrical or informational infrastructure, they weren't really interested in the workings of an actual classroom, or the problems of equipment distribution. Just as they simply assumed that their technology would make capacity development irrelevant, they figured that deployment and education would simply self-organize under the force of the OLPC's philosophical mandate.
Unfortunately, the real world doesn't particularly care about your philosophical mandate--just ask Marx.
12:03 x Thomas x /bank/analysis/development/technology x link x 4 comments
