an end and a beginning
Well, today is the last dady of OLPCorps trainin, and tomorrow we’re on a 5:30am, 8-9hr busride to Kampala, Uganda!
It’s been a great time here. I really love Rwanda as a country. It is physically beautiful and quite an interesting place. Kigali is amazingly clean – apparently on Saturday a month everyone goes out and picks up all of the trash, and people actually do so – and it is much more developed than I was expecting. The hills make it quite an interesting city esign, there doesnt really seem to be a center, but it makes the city feel calmer and chiller than most other cities (and certainly morre so than Kampala) so it should be exciting.
I’ve learned a lot about the laptops, about the projets, and about my own thoughts about ddevelopment work here. I have finally pinned down what exactly it is that bothers me about OLPC, an it is really only because i have seen Amy Smith’s style of development, of identifying a community’s problem and working with the community to solve that problem through technology, that makes me so skeptical. This whole movement began as an idea, an educational goal that was developed into using technology as a solution. And while yes, maybe giving laptops to children will help them in the long run, it will give them skills hopefully for their future and keep them in school and emcourage the “constructinoist learning” that OLPC values so much, it was not as I am accustomed to seeing with MIT and the people I have interated. OLPC is not a response to an identified problem, that was developed with the help of the community that it will be used in. It was an idea that som professors came up with to push a new idea in educational policy, and then decided to use the laptops to solve it. And while maybe that’s not wrong, maybe that is an ok to try and do development, it is not the way that I personally would chose to do things in development. In my mind, working on a smaller, more organic scale, identifying a specfic community’s needs like we did in Peru and then solving that problem, I personally think is much more effective. When we were working in the Rwandan schools on Friday and Monday, it felt like we were forcing this technology on the teachers, that we were creating a great buren and task for them, which is something that I have never felt before on a development trip. And yes, the kids love them, an of course they are a great tool for them, but is this really evelopment? is my fundamental question. t’s an organization that needs large-scale donors and goernments to buy the laptops in mass quantity to function, and realistially it was not created out of a needd in a community, but of an iea some Americans had. One of the other biggest problems I have with this is that there is no ddirect link between these little laptops and evelopment. Sure, it’s great if kids have a new computer an are learning computer skills when they are younger, but if they are not actually contributing to a larger scale growth, to actually improving these childrem’s chances at jobs or to development of an area or country, then in my mind they are not worth all of the millions of dollars that governmnts are spening on them. When adderssin this very question last week, Nicholas Negroponte respondd with “when countries ask me for proof that these laptops work, I tell them that they are not ready.” WHile I not only find a bit demeaning and arrogant, but also really doesn’t speak to the questino of whether or not lthese laptops will really be effective. And for the amount of money it costs to completely saturate schools and a country, they had better be damn effective, because the government could be using that money to completely power a bigger portion of the country or provide better water or something.
Phew, ok, enough ranting for me. I will try an update once we are in Uganda. WE are staying in a hostel in the slums of Kampala near our school, so I am fairly sure we will not have as regular internet access, but there should be a bunch of internet cafes around 
June 29, 2009 at 6:39 am
Amy Smith has a very unique, but I do think, the best method of international development. I know I’ve been adapting my project here as I’ve been talking with people and think it’s vital for a project’s future sustainability. All that said, I think the OLPC is a good idea. I don’t know if it’s the right one, but it’s a unique solution.
do you think it would help if MIT developed country-specific software? or even region specific? I like to think of the OLPC as a blank slate of opportunity – it has potential, so the question is, will it live up to it?
on a side note, I’ve really enjoyed reading your blog posts =)