In Case You Felt Self-Conscious Adopting a Llama…
Nicholas Negroponte (MIT professor, Being Digital author) and his OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) organization have unveiled the XO2, their second-generation laptop, according to an article from the BBC’s website.
The Mac Book Air it ain’t. What it is, however, may prove more important to OLPC’s target “market”: classrooms and children in developing nations. Like the first-generation XO, which has shipped 600,000 units since it was unveiled late in 2005, the XO2 is intended as a low-cost learning tool for classrooms in locales as widespread as Brazil, Nigeria, and China.
The project hasn’t been without difficulties. When it was first announced, the XO ran on an open source OS. Recently, it began to ship with Windows XP installed, seemingly violating the organization’s own stated stance on keeping the XO “free and open source.” The XP OS tacks an additional $3 per unit onto the cost, which is negligable on the surface, but which adds up quickly when you consider that the schools for which these computers are being purchased aren’t exactly flush with cash to start with.
Add to this the fact that the computers are environmentally questionable, and the fact that the organization itself has come under fire for mission creep; Negroponte, it’s been suggested, is more interested in getting laptops into kids’ hands than with the uses to which they’re being put.
On the other hand, OLPC has also revived its “Give One, Get One” initiative, which allows buyers in the US and Canada to purchase two XO’s–which are not otherwise publicly available–one of which they may keep and the other of which is sent to a developing country. And if you feel silly sending a cow or goat to a family in Botswana, this may be just the thing for you.
One thing about which I’m curious, and on which the organization is silent, is whether there are plans to make the XO, in either form, available to poorer school districts here in the States. Granted, the US of A isn’t what you’d generally call a “developing nation;” on the other hand, there are pockets of this country whose poverty and lack of opportunity give lie to that thought. I wonder whether the folks at OLPC might not be persuaded to dole out some of that technology closer to home, where it would be no less appreciated and useful than it would be in other parts of the world.
Tags: computers, education, Nicholas Negroponte, OLPC, XO, XO2