One Laptop Meets Big Business

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Three students, photographed in Luquia, Peru with their brand new, child-size XO laptop computers Jeffery Salter/Redux

Former MIT Media Lab director Nicholas Negroponte, photographed at OLPC’s offices in Cambridge, Mass. Dana Smith

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A chastened Negroponte no longer predicts mass adoption in short order, but he remains confident that OLPC can have a major impact. He sees it playing the role in computer-aided learning that Muhammad Yunus' Grameen Bank has had in the global spread of microcredit. Grameen started something that many others now practice. "We're not building an empire. We're building a movement," Negroponte says.

Now, as the initial tech development phase has wound down, the organization faces a more daunting challenge: deploying and integrating millions of laptops in schools and communities. If something goes awry, the fragile credibility it has stitched together in recent weeks could rip apart. "This is the moment of truth," says Chuck Kane, a longtime software industry executive who became OLPC's president on May 2. "One unsuccessful deployment and it might mean the end of the project."

SEARCHING FOR THE INTERNET

Spending time in villages where the laptops have been distributed shows both OLPC's promise and immense challenges. In Luquia, Justo Miguel Común, a fifth-grader who is the youngest of seven children of subsistence farmers, was delighted to get his laptop in late April. "I like the math games, and I love the camera," he said two weeks later. On a chilly evening, his mother, Alejandra, who quit school after first grade, watched proudly as her 11-year-old son sat at a small table outside their adobe house with his face illuminated by the light from the screen. "This computer is going to be a very good thing for learning," she said.

Yet when BusinessWeek asked her son detailed questions, it became clear he didn't fully understand the computer's capabilities. His teacher had told the class to search the Internet for information on the environment, but the boy was stumped. "I was trying, but I couldn't find anything," he explained. He seemed to think the Net was something contained within the machine.

Such are the challenges of introducing not just a strange new machine but an alien world to a child brought up in isolation from outside culture. The leaders of OLPC believe the laptops must be much more than electronic substitutes for textbooks if they are to profoundly effect learning. The group, an offshoot of MIT's Media Lab, which Negroponte launched 23 years ago, has based its educational philosophy on the theories of Seymour Papert, a Media Lab professor who pioneered the use of computers in elementary education in 1967. Papert, now retired, developed a theory called Constructionism, which posits that young children learn best by doing rather than by being lectured to. So to create a tool that could deliver more than rote lessons and e-books, OLPC designed the machine and its software to enable collaboration, exploration, and experimentation. "We're hoping that these countries won't just make up ground but they'll jump into a new educational environment," says David Cavallo, OLPC's chief education architect.

CULTURAL IMPERIALISM?

While this philosophy is essential to the mission of OLPC, it's also a source of tension. Current educational leaders in Peru embrace Constructionism, but most countries base their education systems on the idea that teachers pass their knowledge to receptive students. That was a problem for OLPC in China as well as India. India's education department, for instance, calls the idea of giving each child a laptop "pedagogically suspect," and, when asked about it recently, Education Secretary Arun Kumar Rath barked: "Our primary-school children need reading and writing habits, not expensive laptops."

Some observers accuse OLPC of cultural imperialism. "It's arrogant of them. You can't just stampede into a country's education system and say, Here's the way to do it,'" says William Easterly, a professor at New York University and author of The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good.

In fact, though OLPCers still have faith in Constructionism, they don't force the approach.