Great sounding idea: One Laptop Per Child ✅
Charismatic leader: Nicholas Negroponte ✅
Famous University: MIT ✅
Press adoration: NYT, Time & others ✅
Lauded designer: Yves Béhar ✅
Hit TED talk ✅
Millions in funding ✅

UN Secretary General does your demo: Priceless 🤩

— Gaurav Singh (@gauravsingh961) September 16, 2021

An innovative feature of this laptop is its power crank.
Turn it for 1 min. & the laptop runs for 40 mins.

The audience begs Annan to give it a turn.
Annan rotates the crank &…

The laptop does nothing but the crank immediately falls off.
A metaphor if there ever was one.

— Gaurav Singh (@gauravsingh961) September 16, 2021

In the end the OLPC’s XO-1 laptop which shipped in 2007, was a far-cry from those early pitches.

And by then PC makers had introduced their own version of cheaper laptops: netbooks.
They worked much better than OLPC’s laptop & made OLPC look like an outdated toy in comparison.

— Gaurav Singh (@gauravsingh961) September 16, 2021

Countries said yes then said no.
There were long delays & endless meetings.
Orders were placed & then cancelled.

Negroponte finally admitted: “I have to some degree underestimated the difference between shaking the hand of a head of state and having a check written.”

— Gaurav Singh (@gauravsingh961) September 16, 2021

Negroponte had predicted initial sales of 5 to 15 million & then 100s of millions.
But Year 1 was only 600k & in the end only 3M laptops were made.

What followed were huge funding & staff cuts, many re-orgs & then Negroponte left.

OLPC now exists as a shadow of its past self.

— Gaurav Singh (@gauravsingh961) September 16, 2021

Negroponte was so convinced in his vision that he dismissed all evaluations as a waste of time.
So all OLPC shared were anecdotes & distribution numbers.

But this has changed in recent years with some independent evaluations & @morgangames brilliant book: The Charisma Machine

— Gaurav Singh (@gauravsingh961) September 16, 2021

In Paraguay there was a lot of enthusiasm.
There was a committed local NGO managing the project and schools-teachers-parents were excited for it.

Yet within a few years only ~ 40% of children had working laptops.
Even from them, more than half barely used them.

— Gaurav Singh (@gauravsingh961) September 16, 2021

Others had similar findings:

From a 2012 controlled study in Peru: “there is no evidence that the program increased learning in Math or Language…. The program did not affect attendance or time allocated to homework.”

Studies in Uruguay also found no impact.

— Gaurav Singh (@gauravsingh961) September 16, 2021

It was a shockingly poor understanding of the problems they were solving.

Their solution was a generalisation of their own unique experiences (hacking a computer as a child)

It ignored the varied interests that children have & the challenges children from poor backgrounds face.

— Gaurav Singh (@gauravsingh961) September 16, 2021

‘Enthusiastic Teachers & care-givers who gave support & encouragement to the children to use their laptops for creation & not just for consumption.’

Caring mentors & supporting environment are important.
Who knew!

Experienced educators must be pulling their hair by now.

— Gaurav Singh (@gauravsingh961) September 16, 2021

There is no re-visiting the utopian & untested educational ideas behind OLPC.

No stopping to check if they have actually understood the challenges students-teachers-schools face.

No pondering over this:
Why was there no impact even in places where the project worked well ?

— Gaurav Singh (@gauravsingh961) September 16, 2021

The part that is constantly ignored is the 9/10th part of the iceberg.
The part which is hidden from view: The ED of EdTech

This is why it seems like we are stuck in an endless loop with EdTech.

Every decade we try the same ideas that failed in the past.
Why ?

— Gaurav Singh (@gauravsingh961) September 16, 2021

Because the tech is now better.
And when the ideas fail again, we conclude:
‘too early, lets wait for the tech to get better.’

Maybe the issue is NOT with how well the Tech works.

Maybe the issue is with how well we know what works in Ed & how well we apply it.

— Gaurav Singh (@gauravsingh961) September 16, 2021