The $100 Laptop: Simplicity Can Be Complicated
Or: Simplicity Doesn't Have To Be Complicated

Wednesday, May 31, 2006, 10:00am - 10:30am

Presenter:
Michail Bletsas, Chief Connectivity Officer, One Laptop Per Child

Note Taker:
Amit Asaravala, Manager of Editorial & Content Strategy, TechSoup

Key Points
The Goal: "Revolutionize The Way We Educate The World's Children"

•     To do this, we must get one laptop into the hands of every child
•    "Teaching is only one of the ways by which learning [happens]."
•     Michail tells story of how, as a child, his peers with computers would get together and teach other how to use them.
•     When asked whether the OLPC group has plans to train teachers to support the laptops via curricula, Michail offers the following (somewhat controversial) remarks; "We think that teachers are, right now, the bottleneck. It's much harder to train teachers than it is to train kids.... I'm not saying that it's not important, but I'm saying that we shouldn't use it as an excuse not to move forward."
•     "Truly important not to train children in couch potato mode."
•     "We really have to get the kids to be participants from the beginning."

The Tool: Laptops

•    Laptops are ideal since they use 1/10th the electricity of desktops.
•     But are laptops the most effective way to interact with technology? In the previous panel (Business Model Revolution), panelists believed the best way was via cell phones and similar mobile devices.
•    Michail disagrees.  Question: If you had to give up one item, would it be your laptop or your cell phone? (Michail believes people would far more readily give up their cell phones than their laptops.)

The Problem: Laptops Are Expensive

•    ~50% of laptop cost is sales marketing distribution
•    ~25% is display
•    ~25% is support of obese software
• The Plan: Reduce Costs Through Business Practices and Tech Innovation
•    Cut costs by cutting all sales, marketing, and distribution work. (Units will not be sold, but rather distributed through government programs.)
•     Reduce cost of display by using new technologies.
•    Lower cost of manufacturing by ordering in bulk. First purchase order = 5 to 10 million units.
•     Use "Skinny" Linux operating system that doesn't require a lot of hard disk space, memory, or computing power.
•    CPU comparable to 500MHz PIII
•    512M Flash storage (instead of a hard drive). "We have to thank Steve Jobs and the iPod nano for driving the price of Flash memory down...."
•     128M DRAM
•     WiFi networking chip (no Ethernet or modem)
•    Lower power consumption to 3 Watts. "Much harder than doing a $100 laptop is doing a 3 Watt laptop."
• The Web 2.0 Technologies
•    Very big on the potential of wikis as a tool for sharing knowledge. "We want every laptop to have its own wiki server."
•    Get rid of "central server" mentality by using distributed computing principles. Michail notes that pretty much all of Internet communications these days is being mediated by servers. "The Internet was not meant to be that way."
•     Will build the communications stack into the firmware of the WiFi chip so that when kids turn off laptops, their machines still act as WiFi routers.
•     WiFi equipment will use a hybrid wireless mesh protocol that has energy-aware path selection.
• The Measure of Success: An Obsolete Project
•    Ensure that every child has a laptop and that they're using them to learn and share what they've learned.
•    "It is certainly our goal to put ourselves out of business as soon as possible."

Further Reading/Research

Web:
One Laptop Per Child
http://www.laptop.org/