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June 01, 2007, 11:21 AM ET
Low-Cost Laptop Project Ramps Up Production
Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society kicked off its annual conference for college IT officials and Internet-law experts last night with an update on One Laptop Per Child from that project’s indefatigable founder, Nicholas Negroponte.
Speaking to about 80 people gathered at Harvard’s Langdell Hall, Mr. Negroponte reported that One Laptop Per Child — which seeks to provide low-cost laptops to schoolchildren in developing nations — is proceeding nicely. Small groups of students in Nigeria, Thailand, and Uruguay have already received the streamlined laptops. And plenty of other nations are at least tentatively planning to buy and distribute the machines — although “none have sent us a check,” Mr. Negroponte said.
By the end of the year, One Laptop Per Child should be manufacturing about one million computers per month, according to Mr. Negroponte. And as the project has grown stronger on the assembly line, it has fought to keep production costs down. The OLPC machine has been widely billed as a “$100 laptop,” but its current cost has actually swollen to about $176, Mr. Negroponte said, though he added that the laptop’s price tag could be down to $100 by 2009.
Mr. Negroponte brought several of the low-cost laptops with him, and conferees seemed eager to take the machines for a test drive. In at least one sense, the iconic pictures of the laptop don’t do it justice: When folded, it really is a strikingly small machine, about the size of a Speak and Spell.
Of course, the OLPC machine is much more powerful. The models Mr. Negroponte brought to Harvard included a few simple word games, but they also made room for more robust features like a built-in camera, a Web browser, and a news reader.
And while the laptops are compact, they’re also quite durable — an asset that has already proved invaluable, according to Mr. Negroponte. In one Nigerian schoolroom, he said, sloped desks have caused the computers to drop to the floor at an alarming rate. “Every 30 minutes there’s a crash,” Mr. Negroponte said. “They’ve even started, in this school, a laptop hospital.” —Brock Read
Categories: Teaching
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