OLPC XP? OMG--RIP!

Bruce Nussbaum performs the last rites, drawing a lesson that folks in international aid never seem to learn:

Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child organization admitted defeat in its effort to sell millions of open-source computers in Asia, Africa and Latin America by joining with Microsoft to load Windows XP onto its green and white laptops. The decision marks the end of the effort to spread Constructionist learning pedagogy—learning by doing—to tens of millions of poor children in villages around the world.

The original goal of OLPC was to use open source software to connect children directly to one another and the web so they could learn from one another and directly from many sources of information. Ivan Krstic, the key software architect at OLPC, explains this on his blog. That’s the heart of Seymour Papert's Constructionist theory of education. Open.

The OLPC has consistently been lauded in the US in terms of its design and its technology, not its underlying education pedagogy. But it is the pedagogy that has always been the crux of the experiment and it is the pedagogy, in the end, that proved unacceptable to governments around the world because they felt it insulted and challenged them.

The lesson here is that however brilliant the innovation, it needs to be appropriate to the context and the culture. It needs to fit in and not be imposed. And it needs coalitions, teams, to support it. In fact, in the case of education, which is extremely politically sensitive in every country, OLPC should have developed both the design of the computer and the pedagogy with the Indian and Chinese teachers and administrators, not for them.

With Microsoft's XP software now being loaded, the One Laptop Per Child XO laptop becomes just another inexpensive (the price will be around $200, double the original estimate) machine competing with Intel's Classmate and others. Its one virtue is that it will run all the educational software being produced by educators in Asia, Latin America and Africa.