Bridging the digital divide
In 2005 the One Laptop Per Child Initiative announced plans to deliver millions of specially-designed laptops to children in developing countries. According to OLPC, an American non-profit association, the laptops would cost only $100 US each, and they would provide even the poorest of students with access to knowledge.
Not surprisingly, most reactions – both by experts and the general public – were rather sceptical. Many schools in developing countries would be grateful to have functioning lavatories, let alone computers. Under such conditions access to the internet seems fairly Utopian. That is not to say that many teachers, headmasters and teacher unions do not see computer training as a priority, quite on the contrary; it’s just that if you have a leaking roof and no textbooks to give out to your pupils, these issues might seem altogether more pressing than a little laptop for the kids to play with. But we should not forget that during the last few years, literally a revolution has been going on in the areas of Information and Communications Technology. In little more than two decades, life in the industrialised world has become unimaginable without computers, mobile phones and all sorts of other electronic helpers. However, this process has also opened up a huge gap between industrialised and developing countries in terms of access to these kinds of technologies: the so-called “Digital Divide.” This gap has enormous social and economic consequences, both for the developed and for less developed countries of the world. Access to information is essential to education A study by the University of California’s Centre for Research on Information Technology and Organizations has found that in Asia only about four out of every 1,000 people have a PC, compared to 585 per 1,000 in the United States of America. Likewise, 88% of internet users come from industrialised countries. The impossibility of gaining access to the wealth of information on the internet is a real hindrance where education is concerned. Of course, technology on its own cannot solve the problems of poverty and exclusion but, as a tool, there’s no doubt it can make a real difference. Again, bridging the gap in digital technology between poor and rich countries may seem of secondary importance when compared to the necessity to give access to clean water and healthcare. But even low-income countries are prepared to spend billions for the latest military hardware, when that kind of money could be far better invested in educational projects. The OLPC Initiative’s “100$-laptop” (as it is colloquially known) ultimately turned out to cost about $180 US. But the XO-1 (its official name) actually set a completely new trend among notebook manufacturers: the emergence of “netbooks.” Netbooks – low-cost, small, lightweight, offering only fundamental functionalities such as word processing and web-browsing – have only been emerging since the XO-1 made front-page news. And they have been a great success: The XO-1 has been distributed to more than 700,000 children in countries such as Rwanda, Uruguay, Afghanistan and Mongolia. The government of Venezuela announced a few weeks back that it intended to buy 1 million “Magalhães” laptops, a computer manufactured in Portugal based on Intel’s competing low-cost platform, the ClassmatePC. When the Asus Eee PC hit the stores earlier this year, it was sold out so quickly that the company was struggling to meet the demand. What would it be like to be working with a netbook? We asked ourselves: What would it be like to be working with a netbook? The Fedora operating system with the Sugar Graphical User Interface that is used on the One Laptop Per Child Initiative’s netbook is available for download on a Live-CD, which means you can boot your own PC into the same environment XO-1 users experience. But in order to get an impression working on a real netbook, we wrote to a number of manufacturers and requested test models of their products. Asus, Acer, and Dell never responded, but Hewlett Packard sent us the Mini Note PC for a two-week test period. The Mini Note is one of latest additions to the netbook universe, and, as Michael Donck of HP Belgium told us, it is “specifically developed for the education market.” The look and surface feel is quite striking: the body of the Mini Note has a brushed metal finish that easily survived the “scratch test” in my daughter’s schoolbag. The remarkably large keyboard and the impressive, very crisp and bright screen make on-screen reading and word processing a rather pleasant experience for the little actual space available – in fact, the letter keys have the same size as a standard keyboard. Apart from an adequate array of standard input and output ports, the Mini Note comes with a built-in webcam and stereo microphone. Stereo speakers are built-in, too, and their sound quality is quite good. The Mini Note we tested was installed with Linux as operating system, and was equipped with a VIA 1.2 Gigahertz processor plus 512 Megabytes of memory, which results in performance fair enough for basic needs. For classroom use, though, it would need heavy customization. Out of the box, we could picture it as the perfect gadget for a student to take notes with in a lecture theatre, or for a pupil in secondary school to get the basic hang of Linux. Technological tools can serve students’ needs Clearly developing nations face pressing infrastructure needs in schools, but this fact should not serve as an excuse for governments not to offer their pupils ways to familiarize themselves with information technology. As always, technology in itself is only a tool, a means to an end. It can help provide access to information to economically disadvantaged children by making them more active in their own learning through collaborative and creative activities, according to Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the One Laptop Per Child Initiative. Education is a fundamental human right, and in the 21st century, much of education has to be based on information technology. The One Laptop Per Child Initiative was the forerunner in developing affordable hardware and learning-centred software specifically for the classroom, and other manufacturers have jumped on that bandwagon. This is a new development to be welcomed, but not only because it has given millions of children in the developing world the chance to work with computers. The general decline in prices triggered by the introduction of these small and less expensive subnotebooks also makes it more affordable for children from low-income families in the industrialized world to own – and learn with the help of – computers, and so to integrate better into the knowledge societies in which they live. By Timo Linsenmaier. Timo is EI Professional Assistant for Web Communications.
