T-Bird Anni Rides Again

Saw this article on TV this morning.  Basically it’s a scheme to provide children in teh developign world with PC access trhough robust, low energy laptops.  They are aiming for a cost of $100 each but so far it’s $170 which is still pretty good.  I can see the point of this sort of thing, not so much of "bringing these poor people into the 21st Century" etc but in helping them access services from remote places rather than having to go and access them elsewhere.  There are the "nay sayers" who have stated…

(quote from article) 

"The big priorities for all these countries need to be to get all children into schools in a manageable class size," said David Archer of Action Air International.

"That means employing more teachers and having some fundamentally basic materials in schools. I am afraid that putting laptops into the schools is not the first priority for these countries." 

(end quote)

To which I would point out taht paying for a teacher to travel to and live in a remote village in the middle of no-where is an expensive business. So is building the schoolhouse and all those books ad up very quickly (don’t we know it!!)  Obviously we could just patronisingly tell these poor uneducated dears to move to less remote places to access education or insist that their children travel miles evrey day to school.

How much better to supply the families in that village with these laptops through which they could access "school" by wi-fi with teachers living in a more central location and being able to provide their services much more easily and accessably to a lot more children.  Books provided in e-book format are a lot cheaper than printed material and don’t get dog-eared nerly so fast thus saving on replacing them every few years.  Typing and e-mailing a bit of homework requires no paper or pencils (and of course, the dog/monkey/pet pig can’t be blamed for eating it….)  So over the course of a couple of years the laptops would pay for themselves.

Okay so someone needs to teach the families how to use their new "toy" but knowing how quick your average child picks stuff up, the basics could be demonstrated by a handful of techs on decent salaries moving from place to place rather than the huge cost involved in putting sufficient people through teacher training then their salaries.

I like the idea…. can you tell?