[Its.an.education.project] Ivan's latest blog entry on OLPC

[info at olpc-peru.info]

Ivan... you say... "In fact, I quit when Nicholas told me — and not just 
me — that learning was never part of the mission. The mission was, in 
his mind, always getting as many laptops as possible out there..."

That information walks together with the facts: here in Peru I have seen 
that the goal is to say "we have installed 240,000 laptops".  Then all 
the people will applaud.  Nobody will ask more details.  Those 200,000 
laptops will reach some towns in Peru but not the "poorest towns".  The 
reason is easy to understand if you check the next data:

a) In Peru we have 85,000 cities, towns, villages and communities.
b) 5,000 towns (including all... the big cities and the smaller ones) 
have 24 million people in total, are located under the 3,500 meters 
altitude and have some kind of electricity, some kind of school, some 
kind of road to communicate with the road network.
c) 80,000 towns have a total of 5 million people, with less than 100 
families by town, located over the 3,500 to the 5,000 meters altitude, 
no electricity, no school (or a very irregular one), nearest big town is 
4 to 20 hours away by car (or by a combination of mule/horse/car).

So, from a political point of view I can understand Mr. Negroponte and I 
can understand my own politics: they do what they are intended to do: 
fill the big numbers, reaching the goal at gross, turning the bad 
happenings in the best situation that they can.  It is a normal 
political way of behaving (I am not saying is correct, just very normal, 
very frequent).

So, if we can see that the original OLPC goals will not be reached then 
we, the ones interested in keeping these goals alive, must push our 
officials (Negroponte or Peruvian Politics) to bigger goals and try to 
help them, AND we must be prepared to do our best with what they can do 
(and we can improve what they do IF we have enough energy, time, 
resources, knowledge and interest in getting bigger goals).

In Peru, for me, that means this (and these are my main concerns):
a) I need to study and look for energy sources for those forgotten towns.
b) I need to develop a "sneaker net" for those forgotten towns.
c) I need to "compile" enough content to fill many DVDs to send to those 
forgotten towns.

I don't care too much about open source (it can be done with any 
Operating System), construccionism (it is a normal way of learning, it 
will happen in one way or another, even in the most instruccionist 
world), and I hope that the next OLPC/XO concepts will find its own way 
to survive:
a) Laptops under the US$100 tag.
b) Collaborative environment between applications, programs, activities.

Best regards,

Javier Rodriguez
Lima, Peru


Ivan Krstić wrote:
> On May 13, 2008, at 9:46 PM, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
>> Just make sure you read all the way through before trying to
>> understand it. I needed to read it through twice as he is a very angry
>> person and his anger seems to go at a lot of targets..
>
> Do you feel that particular points were not properly supported or 
> explained in the essay?
>
> -- 
> Ivan Krstić <krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> | http://radian.org
>
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