Lecturer proposes education by laptop

In a speech today, UC Regents’ lecturer Nicholas Negroponte plans to focus on how to bridge digital and educational divides in developing countries through his One Laptop Per Child project.

The presentation, “Eliminating Poverty by Learning Learning,” focuses on One Laptop Per Child, a program which aims to change education for over 5 million children by equipping them with durable and low-cost laptop computers.

Several countries, including Rwanda, Uruguay and Libya have committed to spending government money on the project.

Erkki Huhtamo, Design | Media Arts professor, said he appreciates Negroponte’s project as an incredibly complex, ambitious and extraordinary one.

“It’s linked with a lot of other initiatives from Bill Gates to Bono that have this idea that commercial capitalist structures are not going to cure problems of the world,” Huhtamo said

But some critics of the initiative say poor countries can improve education through much cheaper avenues such as building more libraries.

According to the India Times, India declined participation in the project because they believe money must be prioritized for other political and economic issues.

Instead of seeing laptops as unnecessary and too luxurious for these countries, Negroponte suggests looking at them as an essential education resource. In an interview with the Technology Review, Negroponte said that if children learn how to learn via the Internet, they can eventually improve all aspects of their society.

In the interview, his argument for the project largely depended on the assumption that if children in developing countries have a better education, it will eventually benefit the country politically and economically.

According to the project’s Web site, schools and libraries will improve the quality of education in developing countries.

“Experience strongly suggests that incrementally doing more of the same ““ building schools, hiring teachers, buying books and equipment ““ is a laudable but insufficient response to the problem of bringing true learning possibilities to the vast numbers of children in the developing world,” the Web site said.

But Jane Margolis, a professor in the school of education, has for the last five years been researching how blacks and Latinos are using computer science in L.A. school districts and is skeptical of the hope placed in technology.

“Most of the schools I see in Los Angeles are completely wired (to the Internet), and look what’s happening,” she said, referring to the problems currently facing the school district. “People have put a lot of hope on the computer in America that it would narrow the achievement gap, and it hasn’t.”

Huhtamo said whether the initiative takes off or not, it is an extraordinary step in media history.

Negroponte has been a pioneer on the digital frontier for decades, founding both MIT’s Architecture Machine Group in 1967 and MIT’s Media Lab in 1985. His book, “Being Digital,” which made predictions about the future effects of interactive media, also became a bestseller in 1995.

Huhtamo said that once the program is fully launched more work will have to be done to make sure the laptops are going where they are actually needed and not on the black market.

“There’s no reason to be naively optimistic; there will be backlashes, but hopefully those backlashes will be solved,” Huhtamo said. “It’s something to debate and think about very hard. There’s no single solution to any of it.”

The UCLA Department of Design | Media Arts could not confirm if UCLA will be directly involved in the project, but the founder of the department, Professor Rebecca Allen, is one of the advisors for OLPC.

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