What critics ignore is that the organization has changed significantly since 2009, when Negroponte, now in an emeritus position at the Media Lab, ceded day-to-day operations of OLPC to his friend, Rodrigo Arboleda. "I'm not the kind of person who has staff meetings at 8 a.m., but Rodrigo does," Negroponte says. A native Colombian, Arboleda has moved the organization's operating division to his hometown of Miami to be more convenient to Latin America, where most of the computers are located. Arboleda is running OLPC more like a business; while Negroponte once declared a goal of making XOs available at $100 a pop, Arboleda sells the computers to governments and not-for-profits for nearly $200, a price that's calculated to include overhead.
11:40
Building up communities
Furthermore, Arboleda has invested heavily in teacher training, unlike Negroponte, who still believes in what he calls "the gods must be crazy" approach to educational intervention (after the 1980 movie in which a Coke bottle falls from the sky into an African village and wreaks havoc with the villagers' way of life). "Ever since the day we started, we've been getting pretty endless criticism," he explains, "usually around the idea that you can give a kid a laptop and walk away." But that's exactly what Negroponte believes will empower self-directed learning in the developing world. In fact, he's been experimenting with leaving laptops in remote Ethiopian villages and has spoken several times in public appearances about literally dropping them out of helicopters.
Today's OLPC seems to have left that view behind. Chief financial officer Robert Hacker says "The fact is every new project we've done since 2010 has had significant teacher training." Arboleda's staff is also building local capacity to maintain and evaluate the programs. In Managua, for example, OLPC has a warehouse staffed with university students who repair the XOs and send them back out to classrooms. In the three years since Arboleda took over, OLPC has grown from 1 million computers in the field to nearly 2.5 million, in more than 40 countries from the South Pacific to Madagascar.
mms://203.69.69.81/studio/20130409ada6edc82c3cc6e06a7b1236acdf5552ccd.wma
No comments:
Post a Comment