If it had have been delivered using the same Linux base with any number of off-the-shelf minimal window managers it would performed much faster, and the body of people who knew how to make software for it would have existed many of whom would have been happy to make what they needed.
Instead they got a "We've chosen this for you" of something that had not proven its worth.
I still think there's scope for educational systems in all parts of the world if they facilitated development of software that does things that the teachers ask for.
I'd love to see a grant program that gave schools money ear tagged for development on open source projects. The schools get to pay for things that they decide they would like, but it has the requirement that it has to be open source because if one school wanted it there's a chance another school will too. They can choose to pool resources and produce even better things.
One Child, One Laptop ... And Mixed Results In Peru
https://www.npr.org/2012/10/13/162719126/one-child-one-lapto...
The conclusion of that literature being…?
If they were good at what they set out to do, the program would've been successful and desired in Western countries (perhaps with upgraded models). But it wasn't.
I'd say the lack of ability to self-reflect on the shortcomings of the HW/SW/Infra and the willingness of the program's creators to embrace such explanations is much more telling about the probable cause of failure.
I'm sure most of these supposedly cognitively inferior Peruvian kids are on their laptops right now, playing League or Overwatch, with most of them having smartphones.
In broader strokes, and with the benefit of hindsight, I think the story of Africa is worth exploring, after a century of Western selfless efforts of trying to civilize and develop the continent, very little progress has been made. Then the Chinese moved in with far less noble intentions and a profit motive, and succeeded beyond imagination at civilization-building.
https://waack.org/2010/04/27/put-more-computers-outside-the-...
https://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_kids_can_teach_themse...
Heck, most policymakers in LDCs panned the program at the time as well not actually prioritizing the aid that was needed [2]
[0] - https://econ.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/Bonds.pdf
[1] - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5859813/
[2] - https://web.archive.org/web/20170210165101/http://edition.cn...
Ever heard of something called a budget?
Teachers, aid workers, doctors, and others need to get paid. Their suppliers need to get paid. Infrastructure needs to be built.
All of that costs money.
My point is simply that the amount of productivity a given population can exercise is not bound to the amount of money in circulation.
It is bound by other constraints.
Wrong.
There is nothing magical about the idea that a resource used for one thing is unavailable to be used for another thing.
> it isn't true in general, where it's parallelized, distributed, discrete and largely independent instead.
Can you provide any concrete example of where the premise does not hold true?
The nature of research is that some things succeed/fail to different degrees than others, and some that have not sufficiently succeeded will in the future, or will inform other successes. If we already knew the answers, it wouldn't be research.
The programs I gave as examples above all had previously been tested in control groups via RCT before they were rolled out en masse. On top of that, these initiatives were done in coordination with local stakeholders.
This is why JPAL@MIT [0] (Banerjee, Duflo) and REAP@Stanford [1] (Liu, Wang, Rozelle) have had significant success in helping raise HDIs in the states in India and China respectively that they worked with.
On top of that, OLPC (and similar initiatives) took a significant amount of oxygen from the philanthropy ecosystem, with programs and initiatives that had a better strike rate being looked over simply because "it's Negreponte". Even Negreponte's MIT Media Lab largely failed from an outcomes perspective, and was buoyed becuase of donor relations.
> done in coordination with local stakeholders
That reminds me of my first impression of OLPC when I first read about it - a typical patronizing rich-world kind of aid, 'let them eat cake'.
I don’t have any insight as to what sort of aid would have been more effective, but quite frankly some of the criticisms were ridiculous when you consider the majority of people in these countries had a cheap mobile phone in their pocket a decade later.
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2018/10/09/majorities-in-...
OLPC only let you use a computer without internet in a number of areas where broadband and cellphone penetration was nonexistent until the 2010s expansion because of Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Indian commodity telecom infra.
I was under the impression that these devices were Wi-Fi enabled; I take your point that penetration rates for broadband were nowhere near as high back then, but I still think a lot of the criticisms were misplaced. The penetration of telecomm into these countries is going to have massive upside in the next two decades, and computer literacy plays a part in that. I suspect there are compounding network effects involved here that don’t really exist for linear problems like healthcare (though I could just be underestimating the immediate benefit of $1 in medicine vs. $1 in digital literacy).
Yet internet penetration in Kenya was only 43% [0]. Additionally, countries with significantly higher HDIs (ie. Significantly higher developmental indicators) like Thailand had lower internet penetration in 2014.
Internet penetration was extremely useful in building out infra, but it was just one piece of various other pieces of social infrastructure needed to build human capital.
> The penetration of telecomm into these countries is going to have massive upside in the next two decades, and computer literacy plays a part in that
Most households in developing countries don't have computers [1], so assuming internet penetration implies computer literacy is a fallacy, as most households globally instead use a cellphone as their primary computing device [2].
This is one of the reasons why OLPC failed. Steve Jobs was correct that the smartphone user experience is the best experience for non-technical users.
The organization would have realized this if they tested their hypothesis first, but they didn't. Even Bill Gates called them out for this when they were trying to fundraise in the early 2000s [3]
[0] - https://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users-by-country/...
[1] - https://datahub.itu.int/data/?e=AGO&i=12046
[2] - https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.CEL.SETS.P2?most_rec...
[3] - https://www.cio.com/article/254451/consumer-technology-bill-...
I was using computer literacy as a stand-in for technical literacy.
> Steve Jobs was correct that the smartphone user experience is the best experience for non-technical users.
We’re speaking about this in retrospect; mass-market smartphones were still in their infancy when the project launched.
> Even Bill Gates called them out for this when they were trying to fundraise in the early 2000s
Gates doesn’t mention anything about smartphones in this article.
That said, OLPC was extremely ambitious. I don't think they achieved any of the project's objectives. They get a lot of criticism because of that, and it's all ridiculously unfair.
And honestly, if you think that's stupid, I'm not really interested on whatever else you think on the subject. It happened to not work for several reasons, some of them mistakes from the OLPC project, but insisting it's an inevitable result is just uninformed blabber.
There’s one failed program indicating that it didn’t work. Are you aware of any successful programs showing that it could?
No significant effect except in the minority who have the drive and capabilities to leverage new technology to achieve their goals
There is always a bias on the effects of new technology because the early adopters are already highly capable people
I've learned a ton of new things from ChatGPT, some which might even be right.
The Charisma Machine: The life, death, and legacy of One Laptop per Child (2022)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29971982
OLPC’s $100 laptop was going to change the world (2018)
I doubt that happened, but i don't think this study would capture that if it did.
"In 2020, Chromebooks outsold Apple Macs for the first time by taking market share from laptops running Microsoft Windows. This rise is attributed to the platform's success in the education market.[79][80][81]"
Hmm.
This is interesting. Searches give you different numbers.
But it looks like the number of Chromebooks sold each year is comparable, but probably lower than the number of Macs.
At the same time, as far as I can tell, Chromebooks are pretty much all K-12 focused devices at this point. Which is fine. But I'd potentially buy something higher-end if it were available. But it isn't.
Of course, having found and incubated a useful niche, Google has canceled Chrome OS, so Chromebook offerings are going to be trickier to find.
I had a couple in the late 00s to avoid having to lug around my 15" MacBook Pro when on-call. For that they worked great, but other than that I avoided it.
Later I got the 11" MacBook Air, and that had many of the same issues (especially weird screen size). It also wasn't that small, by today's standards, as it had a massive bezzle.
Nowadays I have to check if my 13" MacBook Pro is in my bag, as it's small and light enough not to notice. However I'd love a MacBook Air that is same aspect ratio as the 13" just smaller width and depth (No Apple, it doesn't need to be thinner), maybe with a 60% keyboard so typing isn't weird.
One could argue that OLPC made people outside of Japan aware that the form factor was possible and even optimal for some users.
Then there's the fact that Peru is massive (compared to Europe) and most of it lacks internet connectivity, only just recently Starlink started giving newer phones SMS capabilities outside of coverage, but that's as far as it'll go and only for modern expensive phones.
Those kids are not going to open a laptop and have a good time attempting to learn something (if they can even reach the internet), I myself have ADHD and it took me so long to even search and discover khan academy (let's not even begin with how much worse sites like Khan Academy are when you don't have the primary instructor, giving said lessons), add in low energy/inability to concentrate or want to do academic work with memory issues due to intoxication and or malnutrition and... yeah, good luck with that.
There is high amount of talent in Peru, you can tell because there's government programs to give gifted students from public schools free scholarship to private universities and they all end up top of their class, the hardest university to enter into in Peru happens to be a public university too (national university of engineering), it's exam is pretty fucking hard for someone who just graduated high school and even then the vast majority of students who enter come from poor backgrounds.
I was able to access the NBER version of the paper, but it looks like working copies are also available in a number of other locations:
- https://publications.iadb.org/en/laptops-long-run-evidence-one-laptop-child-program-rural-peru
- https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5391874
- https://www.ofermalamud.com/researchTraining programs are expensive, and i imagine difficult to conduct across potentially remote areas with underdeveloped infrastructure.
Internet access is maybe more doable now with starlink, but how practical was it at the time? I imagine this varries significantly with region, maybe in some cases all that was needed was LTE modem -> wifi, but if actually new infrastructure needed to be set up, that could be very pricey very fast.
Like everything its all about trade offs, if olpc did those things would they have budget for other things?
education and teacher training is the only way to achieve progress in this world. and if training is expensive or difficult to achieve then that's a challenge we need to overcome, not an excuse not to do it.
What does that matter if food insecurity, stunted growth, low quality K-6 schools, and other critical issues remain?
From a human capital development perspective, the amount of money spent per year on OLPC could have subsidized a number of similar programs that are both cheaper and have been documented to lead to better developmental indicators.
And it wasn't like OLPC actually placed educators to teach programming at the K-10 level in most of the target regions.
On top of that, broadband and internet penetration didn't expand until the 2010s with Asian commodity telecom equipment being mass produced and exported to developing markets - so what use was a computer which had no internet to a household that was almost always in the lowest income bracket in a developing country?!?
This is why evidence-based policymaking has become the norm and why Banerjee and Duflo won a Nobel Prize.
Edit: can't reply
You (most likely) grew up in a first world country and in the top 5% of households globally.
For the target communities for OLPC, much more basic needs like clean water, school access, nutrition access, and other services were either limited or functionally non-existent.
Much of rural Peru during OLPC (the 2000s) [0] had HDIs comparable to what Laos, Cambodia, and Bangladesh today.
More critically, Peru back then used to be more developed than China [0], yet China's HDI has now outpaced Peru developmentally because local government took an evidence-based approach to developmental policymaking thanks to guidance from Stanford's REAP group [1]
I'm sure you can recognize that the policies needed in a developing country are entirely different from those in a developed country.
[0] - https://globaldatalab.org/shdi/table/shdi/PER+CHN/?levels=1+...
My outcomes would be better if I were just richer, smarter and better looking.
If you want to be richer, smarter, and be better looking, food and shelter security might go a long ways
Most non-college goers are not attending apprenticeship programs or joining union jobs - which nowadays increasingly require a college education [2].
This isn't the 1970s anymore where you can go to the local factory and screw parts by hand - manufacturing, carpentry, metalworking, and other industrial arts increasingly require STEM fundamentals which for most students they can only acquire in some form of college (be it 2-year or 4-year).
I've seen this first hand now that I've been taking carpentry courses at my local CC as a side hobby - the union track apprenticeship program that's part of the CC expects an associates degree at a minimum.
[0] - https://www.ppic.org/publication/is-college-worth-it/
[1] - https://static1.squarespace.com/static/60832ecef615231cedd30...
More recently, the impact of smart phones on the developing world has been transformational, suggesting some of the ideas behind OLPC may have been good, but the specific implementation lacking. Thanks to smart phones, developing communities now have access to media in global languages, online education, finance, communication, markets (without having to travel for miles), disaster recovery, health resources and much more.
You can even now see rural villages themselves prioritise phone infrastructure over many things that on the surface seem more important - such as by fixing the phone charger before they fix the plumbing!
With teacher training, yes. Internet access in schools would have allowed more propaganda and surveillance, while disturbing the education process.
The project was quite interesting and exciting, and I really miss the era of custom linux desktops, phones, tablets etc being viable projects, it's a shame the project never really directly worked out.
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