One Minute with Nicholas Negroponte
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 in those countries. 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.
Who 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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