CONNECT A SCHOOL, CONNECT A COMMUNITY

Governments and development partners around the world have implemented a wide array of initiatives to bring computers into schools.  Purchasing options range from the centralized acquisition of new computers by ministries of education to the donation of refurbished computers by non-governmental organizations.¹¹⁴  A frequent goal has been to reduce the ratio of students per computer in order for children gain more computing time.

A recent trend has been the adoption of the “one-to-one” model, in which each student gets their own laptop. This movement has its roots in the vision of Nicholas Negroponte (cofounder of the MIT Media Laboratory), to provide every child with an inexpensive laptop.  A prototype of such a computer was shown at the World Summit on the Information Society in 2005.¹¹⁵ Negroponte then founded the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) association, which manufactures the low-cost XO computer, specifically designed for children in developing countries.¹¹⁶  Some 600,000 XO laptops have been ordered, delivered and/or deployed in some 30 countries around the world.¹¹⁷ The biggest deployment has been in Uruguay, which has committed to providing all of its primary school children with a laptop before the end of 2009.¹¹⁸

Some development agencies are playing a significant supporting role in the OLPC movement.  The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) is providing funding support for pilots in Haiti¹¹⁹ and Paraguay.¹²⁰ The United States Agency for International Development provides assistance for Afghanistan’s OLPC project,¹²¹ while the Danish government is assisting with funding an OLPC pilot in Nepal.¹²²

The growing visibility of the one-to-one computing movement has attracted the attention of the electronics industry.  Semi-conductor giant Intel now offers a low-cost computer, the Classmate, intended for use in educational settings in developing nations.¹²³ The Classmate is being used for Portugal’s e-school initiative, and Venezuela recently ordered one million of them.  The ASUS Eee Netbook, manufactured by a Taiwanese electronics company, has also been deployed for education in several countries, including a one million unit order for schools in Russia.  Brazil recently awarded a tender for 150,000 Indian-manufactured Mobilis laptops as part of its One Computer per Student programme.¹²⁴

The relevance of these projects for school connectivity is that there is often a networking component involved. Most one-to-one deployments are designed to incorporate school computer servers connected to the Internet in order to download software, electronic textbooks and educational applications to the school laptops.  As a result, the low cost computing device movement is focusing increased attention on the necessity for school connectivity.