By conducting surveys and interviews, the spectrum of users and nonusers came out with the following actors in the order of increasing connectedness: the Truly Unconnected, the Net Evaders, the Net Dropouts, the Intermittent Users, the Home Broadband Users.
There are multiple reasons for those who are not actively participating and engaging in the Internet realm. They range from the immediate condition such as no one in the community or within the social network of the participants use the Internet to the more structural socio-economical reason that I’d like draw more attention to. It is the perceived structural unequal distribution of resources. as cited by Van Dijk (2005). This inequality causes unequal access to digital technologies, which causes unequal participation in society. This creates the vicious circle of unequal distribution of resources.
As an enthusiastic advocate for action-oriented engagement of citizens to create positive social impacts, I was quite interested in the foundation “One Laptop Per Child” (OLPC) initiated in 2006 and maintained by Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab. With all the ups and downs, initial success and challenging bumps along the way, the project has quietly come down to a rest. That said, it is worth a look into this noble and ground-breaking attempt to bridge the digital access gap.
The idea behind OLPC is the noble aim to build inexpensive laptops, $100 per laptop at that, which would be sold to governments in developing countries to be distribute to the children to assist them in their education. As education is one of the most effective ways to break out of the vicious circle of unequal distribution of resources, for ones would get more informed and better equipped with knowledge to utilize and acquire resources available. However, after 8 years of running the project, the final products came out with their own designed hardwares and softwares but would be sold at the cost of $200 per laptop.
During that time, much of the developing world has undergone their own mobile computing revolution. Every year, more and more low-cost manufactured devices are introduced in the market.
“There's the Intel Classmates PC, for example (with similar hardware, but more expensive software than its OLPC cousin); there's the Worldreader project (it delivers villages a library full of e-books via Kindles); and there's the now-infamous Aakash tablet (which was sold in India for $35 but with its reliability and functionality very much in question).
Arguably more significant than the competition OLPC faces from these low-cost tablets and netbooks: 95% of the world's population now owns a cellphone, by some estimates (See Wikipedia's list of mobile phone penetration, broken down by country). Of course, a clamshell phone is hardly the same as a laptop. One has SMS; the other, a command line. Nonetheless, the ubiquity of the cellphone makes it clear that the value proposition of the OLPC device needs to be more than just "access" and "connectivity."
Although the digital divides happening on a local and global level are very much happening, the effects and extends of their impacts are very much far-fetched, requiring thorough measurement the existence of these projects and attempts to bridge the gap is worth honoring.
“One Laptop Per Child” (OLPC) represents an effort to support larning through technology, to enlarge connectvity and to achieve literacy. However this project has some flaws, where some people argue that this is a political project instead a pedagogical.
ReplyDelete"But it does those things in a world of ubiquitous cellphones, which on their own have not transformed education either. In an effort to be "non-invasive" then, OLPC ends up often being unsupportive -- unsupportive of the tech, the teachers and the learners.
But is that failure? It doesn't feel like pointing to standardized test scores in math and language is the right measure at all to gauge this. It goes against the core of the OLPC mission. But then again, these measurements are political, not necessarily pedagogical. And these scores reveal less about the global reach or potential of technology, and more about the dominant narratives of the U.S. education system: "what counts" as learning, and "what counts" in terms of ed-tech's role in delivering or enabling it -- why, standardized test scores, of course."
Check this site (http://www.hackeducation.com/2012/04/09/the-failure-of-olpc/), it has a very critical look at “One Laptop Per Child” projet (OLPC).