OLPC Project

The OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) is a non-profit project conceived and put into practice by MIT professor and media analyst Nicholas Negroponte. The stated mission of the enterprise is to supply developing countries with affordable study tool, an XO-1 laptop, and, according to the project outline, “to create educational opportunities for the world's poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning." The project attracted a great deal of support from various companies and institutions including: AMD (the OLPC chipset designer), Ebay, Marvell among number of others.

Besides its lucrative possibilities, the project also received an enormous amount of criticism. The main areas of concerns involved such issues as:

-More vital necessities (food, water, medicine, etc.) in some of the targeted geographic zones,
-Technological determinism in non-technocratic cultures,
-Western cultural imperialism,
-Language barrier,
-Methods of equal distribution of computers, technical support and environmentally friendly ways of disposal,

and many others.

Yet, despite the valid criticism the idea of affordable learning and communication platform is enormously attractive, and, rather yields a strong potential in its technologically native “first world”. There’s great positive aspect about supplying local demands with cost- and resource- efficient alternative. Interestingly enough, Intel, one of the major opponents of OLPC idea, went on to release its own version of educational computer called “Classmate”, to supply the internal market with durable and low-cost tablet laptops.