The Charisma Machine: The life, death, and legacy of One Laptop per Child
morganya.org
morganya.org
The project placed excessive emphasis on nonessential high-effort software initiatives, like developing their own BIOS replacement, desktop interface, UI framework, and nonstandard file manager. Developing and supporting this software consumed a lot of time at the Foundation. Additionally, the project placed a lot of emphasis on unusual, experimental hardware features which they were unable to fully utilize, such as the infamous hand crank (never fully shipped), an unusual hybrid capacitive/resistive touchpad (resistive features were never used), the Pixel Qi display (monochrome mode was poorly utilized by software), mesh networking (software was never fully implemented), hardware buttons for software features that were never implemented (particularly "view source")... the end result was that a lot of time and effort went into designing/redesigning unique features which didn't provide a lot of value to end users.
However, the project placed very little emphasis on the development of boring-but-practical end-user software for the device, like educational games and tools, media viewing tools (like book readers and audio/movie players), or course management software. While they did thankfully ship an office productivity suite, it was literally just OpenOffice; it looked completely different from the rest of the OS, and was poorly integrated. The same was true of the web browser, which was a thin shell around Firefox. Given that these were probably the two most useful apps on the system, the system felt pretty disjointed overall.
Overall, my impression was of a project whose participants treated it as a vehicle for promoting their personal "pet" projects, rather than as a means to a specific educational/humanitarian goal. This severely compromised the effectiveness of the project.
OTOH, I recall that media interest in the OLPC project helped pave the way for the earliest "netbook" class devices, which could readily accommodate these features, and in turn found plenty of use as educational tools in middle-income countries. (Though not in the poorest countries nor in the earliest grades of primary education; in either case, this would have called for rugged subnotebooks - much like the OLPC itself or, more to the point, the Toughbook series which was very costly on the market.)
It really doesn't help that touchpads generally have oversimplified interfaces and poor support for any sort of peripheral that would aid in greater input speed or acuity. (Bluetooth doesn't count, I hate current wireless so much.)
Just wow. Sorry for your kids if you have any, or sorry for your childhood if this is what you were taught.
Sorry to be judgemental, but in 30+ years of raising kids, never did the word "tedious" come to mind.
I came here to judge others. Don't make me feel emotions!
My daughter who is almost 3 is definitely exhausting.
Non stop, hyperactive at night goes to bed at midnight lately.
We play/do activities for like 12 hours a day. Plus work full-time.
She has a tablet with learning activities, very smart for her age and helped her advance (reads at "3rd grade" level). We let her play 30-60 minutes a day if she wants to, or we need a quick distraction while I make dinner or something.
Everyone I know, including my grandmother whose tended to 30+ kids agrees she is simply exhausting.
She's very interested in alot of things. Technology one of them.
The 2 parents (or maybe 1 single parent) are supposed to do it mostly by themselves in what is called a nuclear family. That is a quite recent development. Earlier it was common to live in larger groups (like extended families) so the work of raising kids was spread out over more people.
The other thing is that is is no longer culturally acceptable to let kids roam by themselves. You always have to have them at arms length when they’re out. If you like to criticize parents for too much screen time, well, what are those kids supposed to do instead?
Kids entertainment evolves with the rest of society. Parents give kids devices for all the same reasons they give them other toys.
How is a child supposed to learn how to interact with people if you leave them with a device that might in fact teach them something, like counting and stuff, but that's not the case. Until the age of 4-5 your focus should be primarily to make your kid socially acceptable so they can participate in as many activities and get a chance to join as many conversations in the future as possible, you want to help them be social. Giving them a tablet will not help them become socialized at all, in fact it will just turn this around. You don't want that for your child. You want your kid to be liked, otherwise it will end up being miserable, think about it.
Spend every minute of your spare time with your baby, that's the way to do it, help them enter the society, by showing them how to interact with people.
Wasn't this implemented? I don't have my XO-1 in front of me now but I definitely recall being able to do that.
Funny enough it seems like the hype it generated was its main contribution, which led to the netbook product segment and ultimately Chromebooks. I'd say its spiritual descendent is the humble grades 7-12 school chromebook with much more conventional hardware and software choices. The killer app for school Chromebooks is the combination of Google Docs and whatever Google's classroom management software is, provided cheap to schools in a long-game move by Google to hook a future generation on their office suite. Ironically, despite the very agressive price points of sub-$200 Chromebooks, their current market is limited to the US and the wealthier Commonwealth nations.
Most likely, Chromebooks are too dependent on the "cloud" to be useful in middle-income countries with comparatively flimsy Internet connectivity. A general-purpose x86 laptop will simply go a lot further there. (And if you put a lightweight OS on it, you will almost never be limited by performance for basic workloads, even on old hardware.)
I don't think a laptop without network is ever going to be as awesome as one with network, but there's a lot of room on a laptop to do more than run AJAX applications in a browser (do they still talk about AJAX?) that offload all the smarts to a server-side app.
ChromeOS can now run Android apps and a full linux environment.
Chromebooks of today are more powerful, which they need to be because web developers of today waste more memory and CPU cycles than ever. But fundamentally the concept and limitations of these "online first" devices are similar. The ability to run Android apps is certainly a step forward, but these things are really designed to lock people into Google's cloud products first and foremost.
IDK, I have access to pretty much any hardware I want (cloud GPUs, rack-mounted DGX-type systems, actual supercomputers, yada yada) and in the evening I still sit down to use old ThinkPads. My oldest daily driver is an X201 which actually predates the Cr-48. I don't find my brain working any faster using a 16" macbook. I do find during the workday that the massive amount of screen real estate of 2 XDR monitors is handy to quickly refer across 2 or 3 applications (e.g. scribing for a document under discussion in a video call, while looking at the references under discussion, and checking my calendar with a glance)
Most middle-income countries I've been in had faster internet than the city I grew up in in Canada, and for about $10/mo.
Sure, internet goes down perhaps once or twice a month for half a day or so, but it often does in rural-adjacent parts of Canada too. And in middle-income countries unlimited or near-unlimited LTE phone data for tethering is also very cheap.
I never truly relied on wired internet in low-income countries, so I can't speak to those.
Unless you consider Thailand or Ukraine low income. Although my internet in Belarus and Albania was fast and reliable, and I guess those are low-income countries.
> Sure, internet goes down perhaps once or twice a month for half a day or so, but it often does in rural-adjacent parts of Canada too
With 90% of the population less than 100 miles from the US border, what's their excuse for being worse than Albania?
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/canadian-provinces-and-t...
Even if we assume their entire population is in that 100 mile range, it is 42 people/kmsq [37.7M/(8891*100)], which is like half that of Albania.
Of course the true answer is that it is our bad influence is seeping up across the boarder. Have you heard of Comcast?
What's the point? Why not simply have a fair market with competition?
> Also, in Nova Scotia, a government-supported private electricity monopoly.
I think Quebec has the same no? That's actually one instance where I was told the government was doing a good job. My colleague told me he pays something like 0.05$ per Kw/h. That's insanely cheap. I assume Nova Scotia does the same.
No, it’s mostly that phones are more convenient/cheap than computers. Everyone just has a cheap smartphone, computer feels redundant and expensive for what it can do. And computers are too expensive for educational segment.
(Actually, I was recently surprised to find that after an apt-get install on a chromebook, Emacs started up in full gui mode.)
I've been looking for a laptop with eink for a decade, so I can use it in the sun.
The new pine e-ink thing gives me hope, with a keyboard, but bah
Give it some time, they've just about gotten started on the low-level graphics support for that particular device. The next step is coming up with meaningful UX, probably no easy task given how different e-paper is from other sorts of visual output.
I bought both of mine for around 200 CAD.
There were some really good & powerful underlying OS concepts that I think we ought have deep reverence for. Even if the hardware-layer 802.11s wifi mesh didn't work, the systems-layer link-local XMPP mesh, used to create Telepathy Tubes, was ultra-advanced systems engineering that just worked, that was supremely well engineered by discerning sharp choices.
There's so many examples of really smart really sharp visionary engineering. To tick off all the places a complete rebuild of the computing experience failed is cheap and easy. Of course there were a lot of pet project hanger-ons, a lot of non-core engineering. It's just a pity we live in such a scarce, chased society, where such a novel engineering project failed to garner the love & attention it deserved. If there's a reason OLPC failed, it's as much because the rest of the world failed to show up for some bold visionary open source engineering. And in my personal view, it's because open source was already chiefly a husk, a shell, for industrial software development. I don't think the world ever really engaged OLPC at the level it deserved, we all failed to explore a delivered viable greatness & make it our own (a difficulty amplified how long it took for Sugar builds to be available on other platforms). The positive powerful lessons XOPC had for us weren't understood or appreciated then, and we're still today hooked on sad story of failure. Rather than anyone bothering to understand the victory & success & power that was built. Out of best of breed open source systems[1].
Effectiveness could have been higher. But this project chose great tech, & it feels as much like an indicator of failure by the geeks who should have seen further. It's hard to form open source community, but there were so many good ideas here, and just a little more getting-the-ball rolling would have lead to a radically different song we sing about this. There was an incredibly interesting platform for software development in a class-room scale, extremely well envisioned, and we all failed to rise to the high standards of possibility this new, vanguard capability set out for.
Everyone should have realised inventing something brand new for every part of the stack would fail.
We want new hardware, and firmware, and OS design, and GUI design, and apps? And make it all something no one is familiar with?
How many of these were funded PhD thesis vs software from salaried devs?
(I was a long-time salaried dev for OLPC.)
I assumed the research component was bigger since the project originated at MIT, and that it was one of the reasons they were pushing for a system that didn’t exist at the time instead of porting a known Linux distribution to it.
I'm so glad to see others speaking out about this. I'm 100% in agreement that's what "saviour" projects like MIT Asia, OLPC have all ended up being.
> the Pixel Qi display (monochrome mode was poorly utilized by software)
I've said this before about the Pixel Qi panel in the XO-1. I'm not attempting to be negative, but I actually work in the display industry and found the PixelQi display on the OLPC-XO-1 to be unusable. My perception of the display was one with very low quality color with backlight; and terrible viewing angle and unreadable contrast levels in bright sunlight. It also had low resolution. The XO-1 display I had access to had lots of pixel defects. If I am not mistaken (as I do not know actual pricing that Quanta got for the PixelQi displays) they were more expensive than LCDs and required additional parts that made managing their supply chain overall difficult. Most experts in my industry that I talked to expressed the opinion that it was a reality-distortion field type charismatic executive (ML Jepsen) who managed to convince people at OLPC to try that idea. It was funded by UN and money from developing countries budgets who were excited by the promise of being able to educate their masses. Sadly it looks as if those countries and their budget expenditures were taken for a ride by Nicholas Negroponte and his gang, rather than benefiting from a genuinely merit based idea.
Do you mean color resolution? The screen pixel resolution was 1200x900, which was unusually high both for a 7.5" screen, and for a 2007 laptop.
RGB XGA was dominant by 2006 so I don't think that's accurate.
XO-1's resolution was 692×520 (1/3 of 1200×900 which is the black&white resolution). Apples to apples means RGB XGA vs 692x520 bayer or whatever layout Jepsen claimed was better than industry standard.
There were many XGA 7" and 6" panels in 2006 from Panasonic, Sharp and others.
1200x900 in XO-1 is tft pixels not RGB pixels like XGA. In the simplest 1d layout, a 1x1 resolution RGB display is actually 1x3 tft pixels. That's why I'm saying apples to apples comparison.
I think the OLPC software still treated the display as 1200x900, but this meant that there were visible color artifacts on any sort of fine detail, and color rendition was pretty awful.
Nothing in that talk hinted at the possibility that instead of opting for a established and proven technology like LCD they'd choose to go with RDF (reality distortion field) displays instead.
I feel being lied to.
I notice this kind of response anytime I say something that goes against the faith of the OLPC believers.
If you feel something I said is factually inaccurate, then please point it out specifically.
Otherwise, I believe all my points have been proven out. Quite simply, we can all observe the fact that nobody is using a Pixel Qi display or any technology related to it. If your speaker's claims about "Nothing in that talk hinted at the possibility that instead of opting for a established and proven technology like LCD they'd choose to go with RDF (reality distortion field) displays instead." were true, then I'd have been proven wrong and the display industry today would be worshiping at the feet of Jepsen.
I have seen really cool stuff like Mirasol and CED displays come and go and it just sucks that we have seen so many nifty things never really make it. I am holding out hope for CLEARink ePaper and playNitride microLED.
Not to me. I had the chance to carefully look at an OLPC XO-1. It was terrible even by the lowest standards of the industry at the time.
> I wonder if given a few more revisions it could have been more competitive?
This is like saying Theranos' drop of blood test could laso have become successful if we just gave the founders a few more billion and a few more decades.
> I have seen really cool stuff like Mirasol
Yes, it is sad that we still can't make interferometric displays work reliably. Some day though. Some day. I still have some hope.
A display that you could actually read outdoors was super useful for me. I used the XO-1 for a few months as my actual laptop after my macbook died and I bought a macbook pro. Those were literally unusable outdoors and for a while I would carry the XO-1 around with me instead of my laptop just because I could actually use it. Honestly if they keyboard had not been complete crap I might have never replaced my macbook.
Even today my laptops 500 nit display is only usable outdoors at 100% screen brightness and destroys my battery life.
This sounds like something you would read in a SCP article, but is the perfect description for those kind of leaders
https://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/08/business/technology-rift-...
The declining costs of the hardware (screens, capacitive touch, battery, processor, memory, etc etc) via a Wright's Law/ Moore's Law type curve meant that over-optimizing around lowering the costs by choosing 'imperfect' hardware meant it was very difficult to ever get this going as a viable platform - which if we imagine a world of these costs declining 1/4 the rate (4x slower), this ecosystem would have more likely found enough backers and funding to get some more roots and sprouts going.
Ultimately, the cost curve declines of the other equipment meant that smartphones/Netbooks/tablets were bound to leapfrog it well before this OLPC 'formulation' was able to take off and be sustainable on its own.
So I suggest the goal was to trigger mass deployments, supporting subsequent refinement. I'm unclear on what/which technical improvements might have been sufficient to alter the deployment outcome. But people have been critiquing the unicorn-pathfinder-prototype-alpha-preview-0.0.3 unicorn corpse ever since. :)
Be that as it may:
1. The research projects were kind of cool.
2. I suspect that OLPC paved the way for the netbook/chromebook/cheap laptop era.
3. And cheap tablets are even cheaper and work great for accessing khan academy and wikipedia as long as you can get free wi-fi somehow.
4. I still think it's a great idea to make computing (including programming) accessible to everyone, be it via web browsers, raspberry Pi, micro bit, cheap laptops/tablets, or whatever.
Without the "meet customer demands or starve" dynamic that places pressure on for-profit organisations, a whole lot of critical but unsexy work just doesn't get done.
The lack of iteration and change of direction based on user/field feedback is probably the main difference here.
During the recent pandemic the program was fundamental because it allowed all children from all socio-economic backgrounds to switch to remote learning.
Most poor kids don't have a PC at home and it's hard to access the labor market without knowing how to use one.
The OLPC designers, developers, engineers, educators (and whoever contributed to the project) have done a fantastic job.
I got an OLPC for my kids through their Give 1 Get 1 program. The beautifully designed little laptop was a fantastic learning tool for children. The software and hardware kept my daughters engaged and exploring. OLPC was a way better educational tool than any available ipad software at the time. Considering the unique experience, and even now it is better than an iPad (although I am assuming the software might have caught up by now). My daughter loved programming scratch on OLPC growing up, and she preferred it to other computers and ipad too. Later on, I even installed the OLPC distro on my old Thinkpad because she wanted the simpler interface. During covid, they became more familiar with chrome and iPad, although, had it been pushed further, I believe OLPC would be a much better platform than Chrome, and iPad for learning during covid.
Moonshot projects usually fail, by definition. OLPC was likely to fail from the beginning. That doesn't mean it wasn't worth trying.
We can -- and should -- diagnose and learn from everything which went wrong. The name -- Charisma Machine -- is fair. It describes what's wrong with a lot of modern MIT: big names, big charisma, and marketing over substance.
On the other hand, for the burn rate (~$12M/year), it seems like it was a worthwhile risk. If it worked as promised, the gains would be in the trillions. If it kinda-worked, the gains would still be high. I gave it maybe 5% odds, and I think that's fair for this type of project.
Sometimes a project is the same old failure that has happened a 1000 times, and is otherwise owed condemnation as forseeable, but if a NEW class of person/org is getting that learning, then it can change their future trajectories in meaningful ways. I don't know what sort of org OLPC was, but perhaps it was uniquely valuable that these people to fail and learn. Or maybe it was stupid :) I'm just agreeing it's often more complicated to understand than it first appears
(The above applies to individual people, but also to organizations. For e.g., maybe non-profits or governments taking their first babysteps into failures of a certain sort, is valuable in the way its not to savvy startup communities who perhaps already know to avoid certain things)
No, but it can very well mean it wasn't worth trying this way - and this might have even been evident from the start not just in hindsight (see a top comment above from someone involved in the project).
I think the core reasons why OLPC failed include:
1) Bad people. By bad, I don't just mean "incompetent." I mean sleazeballs in it for themselves. That's not everyone on the project, but folks like Nicholas Negroponte.
2) Bad risk management. OLPC tried to reinvent everything, down to the display technology. If you take a dozen major risks like that, only one has to fail for the project to fail.
I don't think it got far enough to reveal any fundamental reasons why it had to fail. It was a lot of bad execution.
I don't mind repeating similar mistakes if we go further next time.
Just because they don't do computing like _you_ do, using a laptop, doesn't mean they don't have access to the Internet for what they need.
True enough. But can we seriously call such activity "digital literacy"? What is "literate" about it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asus_Eee_PC
These netbooks (and especially imitators running Windows that came soon after the eeepc) were very commonplace - especially amongst university students - when I was living in East Africa in the early 2010's. They were, as you say, really cheap and effective enough. Eventually phones have caught up for many use cases, but they certainly weren't there at the time...
Also speaking as someone who used netbooks throughout my time in K-12 ed, they were woefully underpowered and laggy compared to today's low end smartphones. A $80 Xiaomi phone can probably run most websites/apps at 60 fps, a 11 inch netbook with crappy internal HDD/EMMC and single core Atom, not so much.
Okay, can you write a book, programm an arguino, produce a song, calculate in a spreadsheets expected payments for your mortgage, design layout of your house, map out your farm for planting? No, not really.
They have devices that enable them to consume and feed the disguisting add industry and suvaliance machine, not to create.
It's you that's living in a fantasy world. Why don't you try using a laptop without internet, or with intermittent internet access, for a month and then come back and see how productive you were?
I did that for 5 years
All of these things can be done on an iPad or a Linux tablet.
Is there something preventing them from being done on an Android tablet?
Yeaaaaah. You know that had nothing to do with actually increasing digital literacy, and was actually directed at tapping into previously unexploitable markets right?
That mobile and telecom was realized before roads and secure ubiquitous access to potable water is not something that is impressive to someone whose sat through company meetings gushing over the value to be raked in by fee extracting developing markets.
>Many sub-Saharan and Southeast Asian countries have better LTE rollout than rural America does.
Population density does that.
>Everyone has a smartphone or tablet, made possible by the fact that cheap Android devices are really cheap but still effective. And that's because the free market doesn't care about the opinions of a bunch of committee members who all want a say in how the device is designed.
Android is also one of the most user-hostile computing platforms I've ever encountered, and I shudder to think of the people who have to tread their "first exposure to computers" being Android, then working their way back to a General Purpose computer. Android was never built as anything but a developer's portal to population of users. Nothing more. A general purpose computer, at least has utility as a springboard to conventions from which to bridge the gap to more special purpose computing regimes. Something, I might add, that that committee you disparage was more keenly interested in providing cheaply, robustly, and maintainable than any developer or architect of Android, or the handsets it runs on ever was.
>Devices either fulfill needs and make money or they don't and company goes broke.
Some problems don't lend themselves to profitable solutions. Free markets optimized around immediate profit potential essentially bury and write these problems out of the equation until there is simply no other choice, which is not guaranteed to be the optimal course of action in the long run.
>Just because they don't do computing like _you_ do, using a laptop, doesn't mean they don't have access to the Internet for what they need.
Correction: They can use the Internet for what someone deemed profitable to make available for them. The use cases that were not (General Purpose) remain out of reach.
It irks me when people don't fully render the positive and negative aspects of an implementation.
That's the point. The market trying to make money does a better job at getting tech access to people than specialized initiatives to promote digital literacy.
> Population density does that.
The point was that the standard wire-to-the-home plus WiFi router plus laptop model that we have in the developed world doesn't work if you're trying to build out infrastructure for a large number of people cheaply.
> Something, I might add, that that committee you disparage was more keenly interested in providing cheaply, robustly, and maintainable than any developer or architect of Android, or the handsets it runs on ever was
The first step to learning to access the internet is not learning how to code. Smartphones aren't exactly competing with laptops - you can first get a phone or tablet and when you go to university or into the workplace you have a proper PC.
> Correction: They can use the Internet for what someone deemed profitable to make available for them. The use cases that were not (General Purpose) remain out of reach.
Android devices are capable of running arbitrary code through sideloading, including JIT compiled apps like emulators. About the only thing you can't do is boot your own OS, which by the time you know enough to boot your own OS you definitely have your own laptop. You are referring to iOS.
The risk-reward calculation is important here. Arguably simply spurring interest in developing and using cheap netbook easily paid off the investment in the project in terms of benefit to the world.
The Media Lab has mostly stayed constant. The rest of MIT ramped up hype, marketing, branding, form-over-substance, and occasionally, corruption. Today, the Media Lab is one of the higher-integrity parts of the Institute, not by virtue of improving, but by virtue of the rest of the Institute slipping.
I would imagine that if you're an education ministry with a limited budget you probably want to focus on efforts that are going to make measurable improvements for the average kids. I don't think "we deployed 1000 laptops, most of them are now paperweights or video game machines, but 10 kids are doing super creative things of their own initiative" is all that compelling to an education ministry.
Maybe the problem was that most of the kids' natural love of learning and creativity had already been extinguished by compulsory school. Or as Papert put it, "Children seem to be such remarkable learners on their own, but then they enter school."
That’s the Media Lab in a nutshell. It attracts builders from all over the world. And it naturally selects for people that are self-learners.
Perhaps the logic is that the bright, self-motivated kids already have an advantage, so helping them get even further ahead is a net negative.
If we are thinking in terms of democratic societies here, then certainly the (utilitarian) point of education should be to raise the bar especially for the "average kids," shouldn't it? Don't we want a better average in a society that we all operate together? That's to say nothing of the richness in life that education can provide...
Not clear how the average is going to be "better" in any way by forcing them to.
> the richness in life that education can provide
The danger to deny the richness to those who can appreciate it.
Not in any society on Earth yet.
The utilitarian metric could also show that the average moves the most, and society benefits most, when those with the most potential can realize it. It's an interesting question. Either way though, I think it should be a basic constraint for an education system. Basically it's the same as saying classes should never be too slow for their students.
No doubt mistakes were made, and likely some where called out back then (including critiques I did hear at the time). But it’s also a very different world in 2022, where things like cell phones and Facebook have taken over the planet… I hope the book contextualizes this.
Do you mean to defend the OLPC folks as action-takers, or criticize them as scholars?
> "I also say that as a fan of some of the reviewers."
Without economies of scale that eventually came from cell phones, this was a pretty amazing and ambitious project!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Laptop_per_Child#Criticism indicates not much at all. The project was a beautiful boondoggle; their users didn't enjoy the product but the rich folk who donated could pat themselves on the back for looking like they cared. Even Bill Gates had the sense to walk away 5 years before OLPC even started: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2000/nov/05/billgates...
Let's also not forget that the founder of OLPC, and the chairman of MIT Media Lab, has gone on record praising a convicted, child sex trafficker: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Negroponte#Epstein_... and tried to cover-up their dirty money trail soon after: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-an-elite-univer... .
You shouldn't take criticism uncritically.
> Even Bill Gates had the sense to walk away 5 years before OLPC even started
Bill Gates didn't “walk away”, he used Microsoft to actively sabotage OLPC, by directly targeting their intended market to prevent it from getting hold, since it was seen as an existential threat to the Windows desktop monopoly.
You use such strong words and make such enormous claims but I don't see you citing any evidence. Has that become the norm on HN?
In the world of ad-hominem this is like a drive-by shooting with a nuclear bomb.
But is it inaccurate? I wasn't sure. So I googled. Here's what I found: "Nicholas Negroponte, who co-founded MIT’s prestigious Media Lab in 1985, admitted to encouraging director Joi Ito to take Epstein’s money and even hanging out with the late pedophile back in the day"
At first glance, it appears to have substance to me.
While it is definitely a critique -- and while Ames provides a debatable framing of her overall thesis -- the accounting of the actual, on-the-ground uses of OLPC laptops is invaluable. Assessment is not the same thing as inaction. It is worth understanding what happened and attempt to frame why it happened. In fact, one could argue that the "action takers" in computing today might do well to familiarize themselves with a bit more scholarship in the first place.
Everything done by anyone is a reflection of them, their needs, constrains, ideas, and knowledge. Intention matters, and inaction is intention-less.
However I don’t think your metaphor is apt — OLPC didn’t intend to be a conquest in any way that was about extracting resources let alone bring resources those back home.
The OLPC didn’t replace something, it created something. It pointed a way.
Does it really? We all know the saying about the road to hell, and I suspect the people on the receiving end didn't particularly care about intentions, especially if the result was a net negative.
> they were designed for “technically precocious boys”—idealized younger versions of the developers themselves
I was a technically precocious boy; I got my start on Apple II computers in the late 80s. I think it's common for nerds of my generation to look at newer computers, particularly mobile devices, and worry that they're robbing future generations of what we had in our childhood -- a computer that gave us an open, kind of hard-to-miss invitation to tinker, learn to program, and go as deep into the software stack as we wanted to go (it wasn't actually that deep on those old computers).
I'm tempted to think that I wasn't actually that special as a kid, and if newer computers were designed for technically precocious kids, there might be more such kids in future generations. But then, in my family with two brothers and a sister, I clearly was the only computer nerd. And I think it's likely that my siblings (and especially my mother, who was using a computer for real work) were happier with later computers than they were with our first Apple IIGS. So while I admit I was initially indignant at the quote above, I can see why it was actually pointing out a real problem.
I have conducted hours of interviews with early personal computing pioneers and have noticed a lot of similar backstories when they first talk about what attracted them to computing. Almost all of the men I've interviewed have some memory of taking apart and re-assembling devices when they were young boys and they recall this as being formative.
On the other hand, what is computing? What is it supposed to "be like"? Is it a technology like a car, or a bicycle, or other complex productive machinery? Or is it instead like pencil and paper and the writing systems / literacy that go along with it?
If we go with the latter concept -- a "new kind of literacy" -- then this argument of the "technically precocious boy" only applies to the specific form of the technology produced. In other words, imagine criticizing ancient Mesopotamian scribes trying to extend the reach of writing because they specifically sought to teach in other lands the imprinting reed shapes into clay. One could argue (for good reason) that this is probably a bad approach, but that's less to do with the fact that said scribes learned this process as boys and/or had some initial affinity for it.
Ames also hedges her bets in the book early on: she bases her critique entirely on the writings of people like Papert and Negroponte, but explicitly says she will not be evaluating constructivism as a pedagogical framework. That's sort of too bad -- Papert et al were not just creating computing systems they thought would revolutionize education. They assumed that there would already be some kind of forthcoming revolution in education regardless, and they wanted to secure computing's place in that new world. It never came to pass. I feel like it's an under explored angle.
Of course these are complicated questions. Ames' book is really valuable as a postmortem, especially the parts that are based on her fieldwork. And I do think that the "technically precocious boy" framing is good in that it creates space to have a really nuanced conversation about this aspect of computing and education.
Neal Stephenson "The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer"
It's a 25 year old book but slight spoiler, it's about what happens when this book made for a rich billionaire's child falls into the hands of a poor child. Among many interesting ideas, the book has its own source of funding (think, crypto) and uses that to hire actors (like zoom with full on mo-cap) to bring to life the characters in the story. IIRc, the lessons/dialog are all written but the actors can bring them to life and ad-lib, and one actor in particular ends up being the remote mother for this child.
Oh, another bonus part of the story I remember to give you an incentive to read it, there's a multi-page digression about how turing machines work retold as a fantasy allegory with like, castle bridges, chain links and trolls.
It's a no-win situation for the researchers.
The problem is that if you assume "being able to use a device" is what qualifies you as precocious then the argument becomes moot. But I'm not sure what else the authors could mean.
The average child is happy watching youtube videos about unboxing single use plastic toys 24/7
Yuck? Amidst the many confused claims people have made for OLPC cultural imperialism, one that's valid (but seemingly rarely mentioned?) was its insistence on On Laptop Per Girl, even where that went against the grain. And IIRC, that was as much over XO for reading books, as over XO for writing or "computing". Mashing "literacy for girls" into "toys for boys", or "access to books" into "tech toy"... I hope that's not the thesis?
Poor communities are used to repairing everything that can be repaired and it seemed to me, that giving access to standard pc platforms would be a much better starting point.
The rest is true enough and I'd add that there wasn't anything nearly as rugged at the price (used Toughbooks, or that style, were more expensive).
> The Classmate PC represents Intel's competitive response to the OLPC XO, whose unusually low prices and use of AMD chips threatened to steal market share from Intel and other major manufacturers.
The nice thing is they have come a very long way in terms of battery replacements. You can get it done by apple for quite cheap and soon you will be able to buy the battery officially.
But improving phone repairability wouldn't really do much for poor communities because it is more economical for them to just buy one of the dirt cheap working phones on the second hand market. You would never bother to fix an iphone 5 for example when you can get another working one for almost free.
The problem is a lot of the parts that tend to fail like a $part cost as much in parts as the $device is worth.
A general problem leading to too much stuff into garbage.
Anyone coming up with a beneficial solution to this general problem might just win themselves a Nobel Prize.
And if you do find alternative parts and offer repair services to the public they prosecute you and destroy your life
>giving access to standard pc platforms would be a much better starting point
i've been in similar situation - end of 198x / start of 199x in Russia where we like the 3rd world were scrambling into computerization, and the standard PC platform with easy swappable/upgradeable components was the key here to the extent that even slightly non-standard brand-name PCs like Compaq/etc. were shunned away because the even so slightly customizations they had to their case, PSU, high-end adapters with custom drivers, custom usually non-upgradeable motherboards, etc. were making them practically feasible only to very rich companies/people.
I honestly don't think that it would have been much different in this respect had the OLPC been a single model of a consumer-grade laptop - parts would have been scavenged from broken ones. Except perhaps that consumer-grade laptops weren't designed for the conditions the OLPC was designed for, so would probably have failed more often.
https://web.archive.org/web/20211221041947/https://morganya....
https://www.amazon.com/Charisma-Machine-Legacy-Laptop-Infras...
That’s fine! If you don’t appreciate the use of computers, what exactly could you program for? Something esoteric and arbitrary? What good is that?
Post-hoc reasoning.
I don't like some of the MIT post-hoc reasoning too. "we like this keyboard BECAUSE its hard for adults to use" is crap.
Lol...I'm one such commenter on this submission.
> how expensive these were at the time
This logic only works if you assume a direct, monotonic relationship between quantity of devices provided and net utility imparted to society.
> Making a special BOM to make a "cheap" laptop would have walked into precisely the same problems OLPC hit.
You don't explain why you believe this to be true. Different technological implementations face different problems. If that were not the case, engineering would be a purposeless discipline. And there is no reason why "cheap" has to be a component of a philosophy behind contributing to the development of third-world economies and the communities from which those economies draw their manpower.
> Post-hoc reasoning.
The book itself is a reflection on the project, so "post-hoc" should carry no dirty connotation. Moreover, the problem of providing technology to poor kids persists in the present day. Today, we see a very different device landscape and cost profile versus back in the year 2005.
> This logic only works if you assume a direct, monotonic relationship between quantity of devices provided and net utility imparted to society.
I'm not sure I buy that. MIT were driving to cheap because they were in a funding model which was value focussed on cost-per-unit. They rejected a lot of things which consumer devices have as normal, to reduce the BOM. If they'd gone with laptops they'd have driven to a higher cost outcome, irrespective of the social utility, and less units directly goes to less C in the OLP C sense. The utility function was "every child should have one" not "every classroom should have some"
>> Making a special BOM to make a "cheap" laptop would have walked into precisely the same problems OLPC hit.
>You don't explain why you believe this to be true. Different technological implementations face different problems. If that were not the case, engineering would be a purposeless discipline. And there is no reason why "cheap" has to be a component of a philosophy behind contributing to the development of third-world economies and the communities from which those economies draw their manpower.
This is two points in one. The BOM for a purpose built laptop would have wound up asking the same questions: can I get this made for my unit budget or do I have to find a compromise? They would have reduced the mAH of the battery, or reduced screen size, to the unit sizes which their supply chain could provide at the price.
The "cheap" drive was theirs. They brought cheap to the table, having rejected Gates' foundation support because it expressly demanded they adopt Microsoft product and align with that as the deliverable for "goodput" purposes. (I read this, I can't find references. If you have better information share, but I believe this to be the case right now) They brought cheap to the table because of their funding model. fixed capex but demanding maximum unit delivery. Uruguay wanted one unit per kid. They had a specified population. Uruguayan funding was contingent on every kid getting one. Now you have a budget problem, bring your BOM to the table.
>> Post-hoc reasoning.
> The book itself is a reflection on the project, so "post-hoc" should carry no dirty connotation. Moreover, the problem of providing technology to poor kids persists in the present day. Today, we see a very different device landscape and cost profile versus back in the year 2005.
No disagree on the last point. My primary complaint is there are a mix of things going on here, including stuff said at the time around how one-eyed Negroponte and Jepson were being, but some things said with hindsight were not how it was seen at the time. Like .. laptops. People are bringing modern unit cost to the table against what was feasible at the time. At the time, a viable laptop was going to bust their margins for their funding model. Negroponte was harking back to the glory days of the media labs, of MIT's influence on the nature of computing and society, and didn't want to be told practicalities and given what MIT had achieved in the past, it was tenable to think they might carry it off. Who knows, if sugar had more love, maybe it would be the interface du jour for education? I doubt it, but its not impossible. After all, nobody thought "zoom" was going to become the mechanism for education, and here we are.
Did they have customer validation that clearly showed that OLPC was solving real problems in educating children in developing nations? In hindsight it seemed that there were people on the ground that were questioning this already.
Did they have customer validation that clearly showed that their solution was usable by their customers?
Did they measure outcomes from shipped OLPCs and adjust the product based on that feedback? They shipped additional versions of the hardware, but was the hardware actually the solution that was needed? Did they know?
Is that a good measure? Is there any disruption that’s happened since the advent of speech that didn’t have someone standing to the side opining how this was a dumb and unnecessary idea?
> Drawing on a seven-month study of a model OLPC project in Paraguay, this book reveals that the laptops were not only frustrating to use, easy to break, and hard to repair, they were designed for “technically precocious boys”—idealized younger versions of the developers themselves—rather than the diverse range of children who might actually use them.
The top review on goodreads[1] also resonates with that view.
> Ames uncovered a far better theoretical paradigm in nostalgic design, in this case the tendency of the OLPC leadership to create something for their idealized childhood rather than the actual lived experience of children in the developing world.
If OLPC was able to see through themselves, they may have recognized the problem they were trying to solve was not the right problem at all. And that, by trying to solve it, they would alienate the very people who could help them. 5 years before OLPC came about, Bill Gates looked at the same problem space and decided against it[2]
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3040698985?book_show_a...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2000/nov/05/billgates...
Well I can't say I haven't made that mistake as a parent
There’s a certain similarity in some of the ideas of libre software, self-improvement, etc.
In retrospect, a decent amount of his thoughts came true.
In the classroom, bigger factors that limited uptake were breakage, drained batteries (most classrooms had minimal charging capacity, and even that capacity had been installed by Paraguay Educa), uninstalled software, and lack of teacher time/resources to develop curricula and work around all of these issues. Paraguay Educa hired teacher trainers in early 2010 and had a rotating tech support team to help with these issues, and this extra staff made some headway, but that kind of ongoing cost wasn't something the small NGO could sustain, unfortunately. (I have a long discussion about funding for charismatic new projects vs. maintenance/sustainability of existing projects in the book - as with many tech projects, maintenance was certainly a big issue!)
Kids who used them at home did tend to be stronger in Spanish, but relatively few were using them much at all, Spanish-speaking or not. While I didn't see improvements in reading or math among those who were part of the project there between 2010 and 2013 testing (though the testing was really not my focus - the observations and interviews were - we still ran them), it's common in other 1:1 programs to have modest gains in literacy because enough kids are motivated to practice reading to make sense of what they encounter on the Internet.
I hope this helps! Happy to clarify or answer follow-ups!
They wouldn't sell to individuals generally (“poor Americans” weren't specially excluded), because their entire model (and the basis of their pricing) was direct bulk sales (or construction licenses) to public education entities (principally, national ministries of education), for use within public education curricula.
Initially, they overtly were exclusively dealing with national ministries of education; later they became more flexible and had some discussions with lower-level US entities, including some deployments.
There was a rather badly-managed OLPC project in Birmingham, Alabama. I have a paper co-written with Mark Warschauer and Shelia Cotten on it - once my website is back up it'll be available here: https://morganya.org/research/Ames_OLPC_Birmingham.pdf
Actually, I saw a OLPC laptop back in the day. It was pretty nice, but you had the feeling that there was nothing there that other vendors couldn't do, and probably would fairly soon.
Is anyone in the Third World saying "Damn! If only we had those OLPC laptops!" No, they're using cheap Android phones and WhatsApp.
Then I adopted a dog instead, and sort of forgot about it.
Anybody interested?
The educational goals seem murkier. Not much has changed in the last 20 years, the plan still seems to be 1. laptops in the classroom 2. ??? 3. education!
IIRC there were no moving parts (fan? don’t recall), which was another huge plus.
Everything else was pretty bad. Sugar (the UI) was awful and would prepare 3rd world kids for exactly no other computer. The keyboard was borderline unusable. OLPC was severely underpowered when it was released. I only ever had one, so I never got to test out interconnectivity…it seemed like it could have had a lot of potential, but judging by the rest of the marketing embellishments it probably sucked too. I seem to recall having difficulty with wifi — to be fair, at the the time, most computers had questionable wireless capabilities.
Didn't it come with a hand-crank for powering the laptop? Surely that should count as a moving part.
Here's a video of an external panel running the laptop: https://youtu.be/ITHNbOrPQyM
Ideal? no. Better than having no power or using a crank? yes.
> would prepare 3rd world kids for exactly no other computer
The point wasn't to teach them how to use computers, otherwise they would have just shipped a Windows device. The point was to make an educational tool; even using it as an ebook reader is a big thing in places where there are no textbooks.
For me, it was a Commodore 64.
Sometimes, people in the first world take satisfaction in the act of helping, but forget that the impact of the help is the main object of importance. If someone were to give your kid an OLPC, you might say "it's better than nothing," but you might feel deep down that "they keep the good stuff for their own kids but they come to our country's kids with the dregs."
Funding is always the issue/constraint with these projects, so it’s not quite as easy as ‘just buying every child in the third world a Mac’ (if they cost three times more than an entry level PC, it’s not clear to me that 1 child with a Mac is better than 3 having entry level laptops). Ideally everyone would have the best equipment, but there is always a trade off given available resources and funds.
Furthermore, even if you had the funding to buy every child in the third world a Mac, would it be a good distribution of resources? For instance that’s probably $700 more than an entry level PC, but putting that $700 towards teaching staff for instance rather than a higher-spec laptop might have better learning outcomes.
First, inspiration.
If you give three children $300 PCs, you may not inspire any of them. Give one lucky kid a Macbook Air, however, and they may feel so special at having something beautiful and unusual that it draws them into a lifetime of working with devices and technology. That kid may grow up to generate more utility for his community than the other three kids combined. Additionally, the presence of a Macbook Air may inspire other children or motivate the parents of those other children. Think of your first experience with the most important activities in your life. Often the first blush was a small encounter that sparked an inextinguishable passion (metaphorically). For a musician, it may be a particular concert. For a pilot, it may be a first passenger flight. For an engineer, it may be a first time dismantling an old radio. I suggest that the more nuanced that first experience, the more substantial its impact on the rest of your life.
Second, frustration.
A utility function that overvalues quantity over quality is obviously not workable. For every device costing $X we can imagine a device costing $X/k that could be purchased in greater quantity by a factor of k. However, at a certain level of cheapness, devices will frustrate users rather than empowering them.
My viewpoint is that the resource constraints are not as tight as they have been drawn to appear. Rather, it's a question of priorities. Governments prioritize other things. The US government spends >$700 billion annually on defense. People prioritize other things, too. Many engineers who live in, say, San Francisco (one of many tech hubs) go on vacation in the third world. They could buy a Mac or PC before every long vacation, tuck it into their suitcase, and spend a day finding a poor family that seems deserving. That act would most likely change one or several lives for the better while costing a small fraction of the giver's annual salary.
The resources exist, but we pretend that they cannot be apportioned for certain things while over-apportioning them to other things.
I'm a firm believer that when we want to help someone, we have to help them in light of their needs and potential, rather than our own. Children are typically easier to help than adults, because they readily accept assistance as a matter of necessity, and they are less aware of the possibilities of gaming a system designed to help them. The number one challenge to affecting a child's life positively is not their buy-in, it's our own. We have to commit to helping individuals fully and meaningfully, rather than diluting the help down so much that the likelihood of lasting impact diminishes.
And because we are talking about resource allocation with fixed funds - it is absolutely a choice between giving a child a $1000 laptop and giving them a $300 laptop and $700 towards clean water, sanitisation and nutrition.
And if we just say "do both", then we are just talking about solving world hunger. Sure it's easy to point at the money spent on defence and then infer that solving world hunger will be easy, but again that's a little overly simplistic too (and if it's that easy - you can be the person that solves world hunger once and for all!).
As a matter of theory, your argument goes "B is more pressing than A, so we should allocate resources to B rather than A." But you present no comparative advantage between the two versions of solution A. Either we give three $300 computers or one $900 computer. Your argument does not help to make that decision. Clean water is important. But if we are to provide computers, what is the most growth-inducing and impactful way to do so?
As a matter of practice, families in the third world tend to prioritize things in ways that make sense to them but may not make sense to an outside observer. For example, I met a family with several children for whom the father had purchased the latest smartphones, but the family home lacked an indoor toilet. Access to internet and social media is a basic social imperative and it ranks as a high priority.
If the governments of the US and Canada really wanted to, they could foster growth and advancement in the rest of the Americas. The resources are available. What's lacking is a desire to help, rooted in a sense of friendship or Pan-American kinship. That defense money could be spent on devices, sanitation, and the other things you mention. We choose to spend it on warfare and cool stuff from Raytheon and Lockheed instead. The resources are available, but we spend them on less fruitful pursuits.
More generally, there is a certain equilibrium point where dividing up the treatment no longer provides as strong an individual benefit. Even the collective benefit may be less. A pretty good Acer may make a great impact, but what about the following?
Assuming there were 270 million children with no mobile devices, I would rather give all of them a Samsung Galaxy A01 that gives them all access to the information they need, than give 90 million of them a pretty good Acer or decent Chromebook and the other 180 million of the children nothing.
From an individual donor perspective, one factor I haven't mentioned is that it's easier to get one Macbook Air through customs in a foreign country than it is to get three identical Acer Aspires. Some countries are more permissive than others, but at a certain point all customs officers have to make inferences about you and your intentions to sell goods without paying import duties.
Yes, investment in better education equipment for some of the population will inevitably have externalities on the others. This doesn't necessarily mean that it's money well spent - but it will have positive externalities.
> This is especially true if you look for variables that correlate to success, rather than instituting a pure lottery. For example, a child who has already demonstrated an interest in science or mathematics may be primed to make greater use of a device.
My scenario was that 90 million need laptops, so I don't think it's useful to say "well I will assume only 30 million actually need laptops" - That's just a get out of jail card.
But even accepting your scenario - there is a bigger question - why are 60 million children getting nothing, when the government could just give the 30 million kids adequate laptops and spend the difference (54 billion dollars) investing in education for the remaining population.
The idea that it is a good idea to spend money on macbooks while some of the population still doesn't have access to primary schools, and where the difference between buying a macbook and an adequate laptop for one child could pay for another kid who can't go to school at all (and is working in subsistence agriculture), is crazy to me...
> Assuming there were 270 million children with no mobile devices, I would rather give all of them a Samsung Galaxy A01 that gives them all access to the information they need, than give 90 million of them a pretty good Acer or decent Chromebook and the other 180 million of the children nothing.
I don't think that's a useful comparison - it's like comparing an expensive pick-up truck ($30k), a lower cost pick-up truck ($10k) and a car ($3k). The expensive pick-up truck can do the same job as the lower cost pick up truck (hold c1000kg of cargo) but maybe doesn't have the same quality, while the car cannot hold 1000kg of cargo so can't be used in the same way.
Similarly, while I can write an essay or write software approximately as easily on a macbook as I can an entry-level windows laptop (I own both, and the difference is fairly small), I cannot do either of those in a practical sense on a mobile phone.
> From an individual donor perspective, one factor I haven't mentioned is that it's easier to get one Macbook Air through customs in a foreign country than it is to get three identical Acer Aspires. Some countries are more permissive than others, but at a certain point all customs officers have to make inferences about you and your intentions to sell goods without paying import duties.
Customs is not usually an issue, all laptops share the same commodity codes and customs fees are on a per-container basis managed by a freight forwarder. You will need to pay the same import duties on both (probably on WTO terms) because they will have the same commodity codes. (My day job is logistics consulting and I do some work in East Africa!). One exception to this is China which can be more difficult to import into and operate in.
One peculiarity of parts of Africa for instance though compared to the west though that does make an impact is theft. Theft of high-value items is very common, mainly because $1k in America is worth $10k-$20k in Africa relative to earnings. Stealing a few laptops from some kids, and stripping them and selling them for parts, is something that will happen with higher priced laptops. There is a good chance that this will also be done by organised crime.
You probably noticed that in Paraguay at least, the problem you describe has some cultural roots. Disadvantaged communities have at times received free stuff that they either rejected, failed to care for, or altogether destroyed. It may be due to a sense of resentment for having received the gift, or perhaps they lacked sufficient buy-in to understand the market value of the free items. Sometimes, the free stuff does not actually fit the needs of the recipient. And usually, there is a sense of contempt from Paraguayan society at large no matter how the recipients respond (a la "look at these ungrateful paupers who don't dance for joy as we spend resources on them").
Furthermore, in Paraguay a gift given without strings attached is often doubted anyway, because it may be viewed as a means to manipulate the recipient by making them feel indebted. The smooth way to give someone a thing of value in Paraguay is to make them believe that they have somehow earned it due to preexisting factors, or alternatively to state an innocuous and clear expectation for how the gesture will be reciprocated in the future.
Anywhere you go, the recipient of a gift values the gift based on his or her own understanding and needs.
Look up the construction of houses in Itaguá for residents of the Chacarita for one example.
https://www.cronica.com.py/2015/07/23/cartes-les-regalo-una-...
I can't find the text right now, but I recall reading about houses built for indigenous folks in the Chaco. When representatives of the organization that had built the structures returned the following year, they saw that the recipients had dismantled the wooden doors and burnt them for warmth during the winter.
There's also the factor of theft, and sometimes the stolen items are surprising. The school in Cateura where the famous Recycled Orchestra came to be is one such case. At a certain point in time, they had been gifted many instruments (think Yamaha and Vincent Bach) but someone had broken in at night to uninstall and steal the school's only toilet.
There does exist some parts and repair infrastructure in many Latin American countries, as well as a secondary market for devices. There are challenges in finding parts that are neither counterfeit nor stolen, and in my experience the most capable technicians (in terms of tools and knowledge) tend to be located nearer to affluent communities. Traditional devices have a better chance of tapping into that extant marketplace than do purpose-built devices designed intentionally for the economically disadvantaged.
That was the whole failure of the project in my mind.
Books are important. Undeniably, so are meals. A laptop can provide both books and meals in the long term. Speaking for myself, laptops were the most important (physical) tool in my educational and professional development.
Nowadays, it's tough to get a first-rate education without a computer...especially in (for example) Latin America, where physical access to informational resources can be challenging but data infrastructure tends to be present wherever you go.