The Test: The XO goes live
So, after a decidedly mixed launch, the XO will finally be tested by the audience and in the kind of environment it was designed for. (As opposed to bloggers and podcasters who have iPods, iPhones, XBoxes, two laptops and power towers.)
MIT’s Technology Review magazine has a piece about the Peru launch. It might be a little gentler about the criticisms, since it’s an MIT publication, but they summed it up nicely:
The success of OLPC can no longer be judged against Negroponte’s early predictions and plans, nor by the technical merits of the laptop itself. Peru is what matters now. When I was in Lima, OLPC’s former chief technology officer, Mary Lou Jepsen (she has formed Pixel Qi, a startup dedicated to making even lower-cost displays for OLPC’s computers and others), visited the education ministry to offer help and show staffers how to repair the machines. But she acknowledged that OLPC’s future doesn’t revolve around the hardware she helped bring about. “Laptops are easy; education is hard to transform,” she said. “I don’t even speak Spanish. How can I even start to transform primary education in Peru?”
Negroponte gets a lot of heat for saying this isn’t a technology project, it’s an education one. It’s a comment I haven’t really understood myself (despite being a huge fan of the project and the actual product). But this article helps bring that dynamic to life. Henry Dietz, a Peru expert and professor at UT, points out that the XO is being introduced into very unpromising situations: “You get out of those provincial capitals, a half-hour in any direction, and you are in rural Peru, and things are pretty primitive. Electricity is a sometimes thing, and the quality of education–the school is four walls and a roof and some benches, and that is about it. There is very little there to work with.”
The first, and oddly, most important, thing the XO brings to this environment is books and light. Peru has brought nearly a half million XOs and warehouse staff are using flash drives to load them (individually) with classics, Aesop, Peruvian poetry, Mario Vargos Llosa. This is powerful education: learning to read one’s language through its greatest artists.
Along with the books, they’re adding chess, literacy training, sudoko (plus the usual stuff). And the 15 hour battery is, of course, a source of light in the home even if the XO isn’t in use.
Another overlooked, or at least underdiscussed, part of the XO is that its mere presence connects kids to the world around them. Children in even the remotest towns are aware that there is a world out there that has computers and books and cameras and that they are at a far remove from that world. The XO puts them much closer to that world. As one father of an XO owner said:
“Our hope for him is that he will have hope,” he said. “So we are giving them the chance to look for a different future–or the same, but by choice, not by force. These children who didn’t have any expectation about life, other than to become farmers, now can think about being engineers, designing computers, being teachers–as any other child should, worldwide.”
Some other interesting notes on the design and deployment:
- Peru spent $80 million on the hardware, and another $2 million on teacher training
- The Peruvian government consciously made a choice to go with poorer villages and towns outside of its cities, rather than towns that are better connected to the infrastructure
- Most of the XOs will have limited, slow, or bad internet connections
- The and X and O on the case now come in 400 color combinations, to help kids keep track of which one is theirs
