Trials, Tribulations & Testimonials | One Laptop Per Child

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte’s non-profit effort that challenged PC makers to produce a $100 laptop for distribution into the hands of developing world schoolchildren.

Negroponte’s vision is to put a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning in the hands of the planet’s poorest kids. OLPC’s vision is not to give the world’s poor children first world hand-me-downs but rather to empower them with the most revolutionary technology on the planet.

This vision has always been a grand one. The first generation XO laptop never hit its goal of $100, and currently sells for $172. The project has been plagued with problems in its technology development and administrative structure.

In an early Jan. 2009 blog post One Laptop Per Child: What Went Wrong, the Walrus Blog says that the OLPC suffered from the arrogance of believing that they were bringing technology to the third world, and that their focus product should have been One Smartphone Per Child. Here is OLPC response.

The tech blog Gizmodo.com isn’t enamored with XO either and the comments blast Gizmodo for the critique.

In terms of numbers, the XO has been distributed to more than 1.4 million children in 35 countries and in 25 languages.

Proposed XO-3 One Laptop per Child via BBC News

This week OLPC released its vision for the $75 XO-3 laptop, which is in the hands of FuseProject founder Yves Behar, designer of the original.

“I wanted to bring the One Laptop Per Child identity to life in this new form,” says Behar.  “That meant taking the visual complexity away, bringing tactility and friendliness, touch and color.”

Behar says he hopes to shrink the frame around the XO-3’s display down to practically nothing, opting for a virtual keyboard instead of a physical one, and no buttons. The result, in his mock-ups, is a screen surrounded by only a thin green rubber gasket. “Nicholas [Negroponte] asked for something extremely simple and practically frameless,” he says. “The media or content on the computer will be the prime visual element.” via Forbes

Nicholas Negroponte’s TED Video One Laptop per Child

Following a hunch, I Googled Shakira+OLPC. Yes, Shakira’s Barefoot Foundation supports OLPC.