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The vision
Years ago, only very well travelled people had access to knowl-
edge. Then, technologies such as the compass, paper and
printing transformed the world by expanding these limits. Today
there is a new opportunity to transform the world once again,
to create and disseminate a technology that will give school-
children in even the most distant places full access to knowledge
and learning.
That opportunity is expressed in a unique device, the USD100
laptop, which will be easily portable and can be used at home as
well as at school. Quantitatively, this permits greater high-quality
learning than can be achieved at school. But the real gain is qual-
itative: the USD100 laptop removes the barriers that separate
learning from living, school from family and society. It embodies
the new information culture and fosters individual growth within
that culture. Just as a language is best acquired by speaking it, a
culture is best acquired by living it.
OLPC and the USD100 laptop will be a portal to ways of think-
ing that did not exist in the past or which were accessible only to
much older students, the wealthy or professionals. The
programme will allow children to learn everything, old and new,
more efficiently and more thoroughly. A central theoretical prin-
ciple of OLPC, amply borne out by our experience, is that learning
more can be much easier than learning less.
Research has also demonstrated that we learn best when we
are engaged in designing and creating things, especially objects
that are meaningful to us or to others around us. When children
create pictures with finger paint, for example, they learn how
colours mix together. When they create houses and castles with
building blocks, they learn about structures and stability. When
they make bracelets with coloured beads, they learn about
symmetry and patterns.
Like finger paint, blocks and beads, not just children, but every-
one can use computers as ‘material’ for making things. Indeed,
the computer is the most extraordinary construction material ever
invented, enabling people to create anything from expressive
music to scientific simulations to robotic creatures.
In a world that changes dramatically almost every day, we
believe it is preferable to become a better learner than to focus on
the multiplication of fractions, or to memorize the capitals of the
world. The most important skill to master is the skill of learning
new skills and ideas. We call this ‘learning learning.’
Laptop economics
The global implementation of OLPC is clearly unfeasible when
the average retail cost of even low-end machines is USD600. With
the USD100 laptop, however, the programme makes compelling
economic sense. We can reduce costs in six major ways:
• Reducing the usual profit margin to nearly zero, together with
sales, marketing and distribution costs. These typically
account for over 50 per cent of a laptop’s price
• Innovation in the machine’s display. The display accounts
for 50 per cent or more of the machine’s remaining cost. We
have devised several strategies for reducing these to about
USD30 per machine
• Putting the laptops on an ‘operational diet.’ Up to 75 per
cent of the residual expense is cut by deploying a scaled-
down processor and needing less memory, using a
significantly lighter-weight operating system, or a skinny
Linux
• Designing and building our machines to be rugged and
durable, thus reducing the annual cost of using them
• Moving to an open-source model for software, both operat-
ing systems and applications
• Making each laptop perform as a router in a collaborative,
ad hoc mesh network so children operate the telecommuni-
cations infrastructure. As a result, very few connections to
the Internet will serve hundreds of users.
We commit to restricting costs in the future as well. The enor-
mous potential volume of these machines should enable unique
scale economies in manufacture. Also, OLPC is a non-profit asso-
ciation, so our mission of providing high-quality laptops at the
lowest possible price does not conflict with the more typical,
profit-making responsibility of increasing shareholder values.
From the government-customer point of view, moving from
paper to bits will also help to offset costs. Under OLPC, govern-
ments can distribute texts digitally and update them at a fraction
of the cost of printing and shipping hard copies. Plus there will
be even greater private savings because students will gain access
to important books that only comparatively rich families can
afford. These include encyclopedias, full dictionaries and profes-
sional-quality atlases, as well as personal subscriptions to
periodicals.
Throughout the world, computing and communications tech-
nologies are sparking a new entrepreneurial spirit; the creation
of innovative services and increased productivity. The importance
and value of a well-educated, creative citizenry has never been
greater. At the same time, the very meaning of ‘well-educated’ is
fundamentally changing. It is no longer sufficient to know as
much as your teacher knows, and it is unrealistic to expect teach-
ers to know everything that their pupils – not to mention the
rest of us – need to learn.
The USD100 laptop makes a new learning equation possible,
one in which every child and adult is both learner and teacher.
We are talking about transforming society. And this, of course, is
what education should be about.