The United Nations technology agency (ITU) announced today that it will give away free laptops to each of the young participants attending its Asia conference in Bangkok this weekend.
Entries Tagged as 'Low-Cost-Devices'
01 Sep 2008
01 Sep 2008
Niue, a small pacific island, is the first nation where all pupils own a laptop – a “100 -$-Laptop”. There are in total 500 pupils living on that island. Furthermore it will be the first nation, where the market share of Linux will be several times higher than that of Microsoft. Read the full article in Financial Times.
20 May 2008
A number of leading developers have left the OLPC initiative recently – probably due to Negropontes’ mismanagement. A look at Ivan Krstić post shows a number of staggering problems, e.g. the deployment problem:
“(…) now the company has half a million laptops in the wild, with no one even pretending to be officially in charge of deployment.”
Looks like OLPC will run into huge problems this year…
09 May 2008
What began as a do-gooder effort in the Third World has quietly become cutthroat competition. Now one firm, Intel, has broken ranks with other behemoths trying to develop technology that is both affordable to buy and build.
06 Feb 2008
As prices of ICT hardware are decreasing, low-cost computing devices are spreading rapidly in schools, not just in industrialised countries, but increasingly in developing ones as well. There are many projects and programs currently underway that focus on the use of low-cost ICT devices for developing countries.
Only a few months ago the “One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Initiative” (originally a group at the Media Lab of MIT, now an independent organisation) developed the so-called “100$ Laptop” (or XO-Laptop). The main goal of OLPC is to introduce a low cost laptop that “is poised to empower and educate children through the use of technology, and connect the world’s next generation of thinkers.”
On this account GTZ conducted a pilot-test of the XO-Laptops in two Ethiopian schools. This report gives a first overview on possible use and impact of low-cost computing devices to poor people in developing countries.
Update (March 6): In the meantime also our partner company (eduvision) published its first implementation-report. Eduvision’s role in the project was to provide their solution for editable interactive textbooks as well as their educational consulting skills for a period of 3 month.
19 Dec 2007
Gestern bekam ich von der Praktikantin Anne Grau einen interessanten Bericht über die OLPC-Initiative aus Äthiopien, den ich hier mit ihrem Einverständnis publizieren darf. [Read more →]
29 Oct 2007
Child balancing $100 Laptop on his head (ABC-News)
The $100 laptop, first announced at the 2005 World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis, is becoming a reality. The “One Laptop Per Child”(OLPC) education project has developed the innovative low cost laptop as a learning device for school children in low income countries.
Small scale trials of the new technology and education concept are already underway in schools in Ethiopia, Nigeria, Brazil and Rwanda. The first large scale roll-outs are expected to commence before the end of the year. Devices will be priced at around $175 but prices are expected to fall as the project progresses.
IT-Experts from the German-Ethiopian “Engineering Capacity Building Programme” (ECBP) support the test of 40 laptops (beta 4) at an Ethiopian school. Today already it is clear that a successful large scale roll-out will involve a complex package of tasks reaching from the development of teaching concepts to training for teachers and support technicians and the logistics of deployment.
Further information: http://laptop.org
http://wiki.laptop.org/go
http://www.ecbp.biz/about/one.html
Contact: thomas.rolf@gtz.de
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Posted by Anna Rau