Excerpts from the MIT Technology Review interview with Walter Bender, OLPC’s president for software and content:
TR: What was the purpose of the Give 1 Get 1 program?
WB: Our purpose was twofold: one was to enable us to jump-start laptop programs in places that couldn’t afford to start them themselves. So we’re trying to jump-start Haiti, Rwanda, Mongolia, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Cambodia.
The second point is that we want to broaden the base of participation. There are a lot of people who want to participate in this program, who want to be part of this global-learning movement. So the number of people who are engaged in our mission has increased dramatically over the last month. We’re finding that the community is really jumping in in ways that are beyond our expectations. So for example, now we’ve got 40 volunteers manning a phone bank, around the world.
TR: It’s customer support?
WB: It is customer support. But it’s customer support from the community instead of from us. Part of the reason we can make the laptop inexpensive is that we’re not building those kinds of things into the cost structure. We’re cutting all those corners. And the way that we can cut them is to design this so that people can have local ownership of the problem. And so, for example, quite literally–you can go to YouTube and see this in action–a nine-year-old can replace the motherboard on the laptop.
When the backlight in my Lenovo laptop dies, I have to send it back for factory repair, and they replace the whole display. And if it wasn’t done through warranty–and the warranty costs me more than one of our laptops–I’d probably toss the laptop and buy a new one, because it wouldn’t be worth it. If the backlight dies on our laptop, it is ten screws and a two-dollar part. And not only is it ten screws and a two-dollar part–that a nine-year-old can do the field repair on–but even without the backlight, the laptop still works.
TR: With natural illumination?
WB: Yeah. And that broken display that someone’s going to toss in a landfill somewhere–the one I have from Lenovo has mercury in it. The one that we make doesn’t. So we’ve thought about this stuff. This is not a hack. It’s not an academic exercise. It’s serious stuff, and it’s stuff that we’re doing better than anybody else right now. And we hope that the rest of the world learns from what we’re doing and does better than us. But right now they aren’t. But they will. And that’s part of the plan.
…TR: Okay, I have to say, I’ve played with the laptop, and it seems slow.
WB: Well, it’s certainly slow compared to the laptop you carry around. But the metric you have to measure things by is not Grand Theft Auto III. The metric you want to measure things by is learning. The word processor keeps up with my typing. The video camera works just fine. The music programs work just fine. It’s a perfectly adequate platform for kids for learning. Every decision we make is, How does this enhance the learning? And the bottom line is, if you can’t turn it on since you can’t power it, a fast processor doesn’t do you very much good.
TR: There’s also the question of whether laptops are really what governments should be sinking resources into.
WB: The way Nicholas [Negroponte] likes to put it is, substitute the word “education” for “laptop.” And then ask, “Should we be giving these kids education?” “Nah, they don’t need education! Education is a luxury. Why should we give them education?” What we’re advocating is that the laptop is the most efficient way we know of of giving them an opportunity for real learning. It’s not that we’re interested in laptops; we’re interested in learning. And it turns out that almost 50 years of research by people like [computer scientist and educational theorist] Seymour Papert has demonstrated that computation is a wonderful thing to think with. It’s powerful stuff. And it’s going to change these kids’ lives dramatically for the better.
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