[iDC] One Laptop Per Child - MIT/Negroponte Initiative

[lizlosh at uci.edu]

Hi All,

In answer to your question about "Western populist efforts," I would say
that there are certainly a lot of great people associated with this
initiative, and I support many of the principles in the project as
articulated by Negroponte and others at MIT.

But I saw the actual machines at SIGGRAPH and used them, and so I will not
be getting one of their laptops for my 11-year-old this Christmas season.

See below for my review essay that explains why.

(The version with photographs is at
http://virtualpolitik.blogspot.com/2007/08/story-about-bicycles.html)

Don't get me wrong.  I love open source; I love the emphasis on tools for
creativity and artistic expression.  But I think the choice to make them
essentially defective-by-design for adult use is deeply troubling, and
according to their demo videos on YouTube this decision was very
intentionally made.

A Story about Bicycles

Many years ago I worked for a delinquency prevention center, where
children from low-income households would receive bicycles as Christmas
gifts. I remember being horrified by the fact that by the New Year the
bikes had often been sold by the parents and that it was hard to interact
with people afterwards who could be so callous and selfish about their
children's rights to innocence and play.

I think I've gained a little more perspective on poverty in the
intervening years, although I still think that many of those parents were
users and substance abusers. Chances are that at least some of those
parents thought paying household bills that benefited the entire family
might be more important than supporting a resource that could only be used
for a single member. In other words, we often gave little pastel-colored
bikes to the smallest tykes without considering how the parents who
couldn't ride them might be coming up with bus fare to get to work.

Now that I have children of my own and have had to face certain fiscal
realities in helping to run a household, albeit on a middle-class
first-world scale, I see something different in the case of the missing
bicycles. And it makes me see the MIT Media Lab's program for the Hundred
Dollar Laptop differently. At SIGGRAPH I saw their prototypes in person
for the first time, which are designed to provide portable devices for
computing to the developing world.

In the past I've promoted the MIT laptop design aesthetic here on
Virtualpolitik and have been lukewarm toward critics who promote cell
phone technology as a more easily supported alternative. But since
actually using one to do word processing, peruse news feeds, and surf the
web, I find myself with concerns about their choice to create a model that
is so small and toy-like and so unlike a grown-up laptop in scale and
tangible experience.

The adorable little green-and-white devices had keyboards far too small
for even my very wee adult hands. (I've always been self-conscious about
having child-sized hands, and it made me feel like an even more inadequate
music student than I already was growing up.) The MIT laptops seem to be
both easily outgrown and hard to use for the rest of the family, even
though the older generation also might have pressing needs for web-based
information and editable text processing.

By going with this design aesthetic, is the MIT group making the same
mistake as we made with our bicycles? Do humanitarians need to watch out
for romanticizing ideas about the separateness of childhood?

Finally, how will this lilliputian device make a larger or older child
with equally profound or perhaps greater literacy needs feel in comparison
to his or her smaller and more nimble counterparts? I know from teaching
them that this sense of disproportion of size to ability is often a
feature of the lived experiences of special needs children here in the
U.S.

Is the project also unintentionally writing off girls who are kept at home
to watch younger children or being excluded from school to encourage an
unwanted marriage? It was difficult and time-consuming to type the
sentence that you see above, and I have hands the size of my
eleven-year-old. The hands that type these words are probably smaller than
those of many of the girls in Africa, Asia, and Latin America who
desperately need a broader view of the world and one enriched by literacy
experiences. For these girls, perhaps a six-dollar uniform is a better
investment.

Liz