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Monday, July 24, 2006
Towards one laptop per child
The possibility of every child having a laptop, as a way to bridge the digital divide in developing countries, gained the world’s attention when United Nation Secretary General Kofi Anan and Nicolas Negroponte, former MIT Media Lab director and now chair of the non-profit organization One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), unveiled a working prototype of a $100 laptop during the World Information Summit on the Information Society in Yunis, Tunisia last year.
The research initiative to develop a $100 laptop—a technology that would revolutionize how the world’s children are educated—was first launched by the MIT Media Lab.
A non-profit organization, OLPC, was established to realize this initiative. The OLPC is supported by such organizations as Google, Red Hat, AMD, Brightstar Corp., News Corp. and Nortel Networks (with each company donating $2 million for the project).
The laptops are being sold to governments and issued to children by schools on a one-laptop-per-child basis. Unfortunately, the Philippines is not included in the initial list of countries that will receive the laptops. Countries which will initially receive the laptops are China, India, Brazil, Argentina, Nigeria and Thailand.
However, the UN Development Programme has signed an agreement with OLPC to distribute some laptops to other developing countries not included in the initial list of countries. The laptops are expected to be ready for shipment toward the end of this year or early 2007.
The $100-laptops, which are designed for rough usage, will be Linux-based and have a 500 MHz processor, a 128MB of DRAM, and a 500MB flash memory. It will not have a hard disk but will have four USB ports. It will have wireless broadband and will use innovative power (including wind up), which makes it ideal for areas that do not have access to electricity.
Given such advances in technology, it is not difficult to imagine to equip, say, each freshman class in each high school in the province with a $100-laptop (which incidentally, is the approximate cost of a cell phone nowadays). This would probably be more cost-effective than purchasing easily outdated (and sometimes inaccurate) textbooks.
And given such possibilities, the Cebu Provincial ICT Council’s Task Force on Basic Education (which is co-chaired by Director Ric Borgonia of the Department of Education (DepEd) Cebu and Fred Kintanar of NEC Software Telecoms) is already taking steps that would prepare the province for this eventuality.
The task force has started to strengthen programs that would enhance the ability of our high school and elementary teachers to cope with the ever-increasing opportunities that ICT brings in enhancing basic education in the province.
For Bisaya stories from Cebu. Click here. (July 24, 2006 issue)
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