XO laptops between 2007 and 2009. According to the Interpeople in the country, and Elcho Island is more than 300 miles American Development Bank, a series of difficulties beset from Darwin, the territorial capital. “We caught a flight to Darwin, the program—including a lack of electricity, a lack of Internet then a plane to Elcho Island,” Srikhanta recalls. “The school was access, and a limited supply of technical and pedagogical support. very well resourced. But once you stepped out of that school, life What’s more, the use of XO devices in Peruvian schools failed to got a lot tougher.” The challenges that OLPCA faced in a remote result in significant improvements in national test scores.2 Five community like Elcho Island were significant: On average, teachyears after the start of the deployment, the Peruvian education ers in such areas last nine months; principals last two years. official who now runs the program admitted that its approach Children in these communities rarely attend school more than had been seriously flawed. “In essence, what we did was deliver three days a week. Aboriginal children, moreover, are 50 percent the computers without preparing the teachers,” he said.3 less likely than other Australian children to stay in school to the Another closely followed program occurred in Birmingham, highest completion level. In many of these communities, English Ala., a high-poverty community that became the site of the largis rarely spoken, and often it’s spoken only at school. est deployment of XO laptops in the United States. From 2008 Srikhanta and his team saturated Elcho Island with 250 XOs to 2010, the Birmingham school district distributed 15,000 XO during two visits in mid-2009. Although they provided basic computers to students in grades 1 through 5. A review of that training to help teachers understand how to use the devices in the program indicated that it suffered from the same kinds of probclassroom, they didn’t take into account another problem. “Even lems that have afflicted OLPC programs in Peru and elsewhere. during this short period of a few months, teachers had moved, or Teachers received only two hours of training, they were unable they simply didn’t have enough time to comprehend how the to connect the XO devices to printers or projectors (which meant technology could enhance their practice,” Srikhanta recalls. that they could not share students’ work), and neither they nor “When we went back in July, a lot of those teachers weren’t there. their students had the ability to repair the machines. As a result, It was a bit of a shock for us. It was like [the movie] Groundhog many of the XOs lay broken and unused.4 Day. I began to wonder: Are we going to do this every year?” In recent years, Negroponte has admitted that the original The lesson, as he saw it, was clear: The practice of flying to scope and ambition of the OLPC project were too far-reaching in remote villages and towns was not sustainable. It was expensive some respects. “A great deal of OLPC was, especially at the begin- (the average cost of distributing a laptop rose to $695) and ning, naive and unrealistic,” he wrote in an online comment in extremely time consuming. It was also not very effective. late 2012. All the same, the poor track record of XO deployment has not undermined Negroponte’s commitment to the Late adopters and non-adopters constitute a weakness original OLPC ideal. His comment continued: “I look back at those [early stumbles] in the OLPC model, since they don’t have an intrinsic motivation to use the technology in a meaningful way. as features not bugs. 2.5 million laptops later we did learn some things, in parallel with many of those kids (not all) benefitting. One of those things Srikhanta and his colleagues realized that the “saturation in one was the degree of self-learning and child-to-child teaching, when day” model lacked the kind of “stickiness” that would encourage allowed to happen.”5 Srikhanta, over in Australia, would derive a meaningful engagement with the XO devices. “When you force different set of lessons from the early history of OLPC. the adoption of technology, when the technology is so easy to disseminate, you can forget about the human aspect. We forgot learning from mistakes about the teacher turnover aspect,” Srikhanta says. Compounding In setting up OLPCA, Srikhanta drew on the support of influential that problem were technical challenges that he and his team figures within the OLPC movement. Charles Kane, then the CEO couldn’t overcome at that point. “That’s when the program died,” of OLPC, became a supportive member of the OLPCA board. he says. “That forced us to innovate and pushed us to expand the Barry Vercoe, one of the founders of the MIT Media Lab (and, reach of the program to engage more stakeholders.” incidentally, a native of New Zealand), came out to Australia to serve as codirector of OLPCA. With help from Vercoe and others, recruiting “champions” After the second visit to Elcho Island, Srikhanta asked the school Srikhanta was able to convince the parent organization that principal there to tell him what OLPCA should do differently. Australia was worth including in the OLPC initiative. After all, the main goal of OLPC was to assist developing countries. “Barry “You should charge people for what you do,” the principal said. really became our broker in putting a case forward for seeding the That reply surprised Srikhanta, yet it also triggered an idea that fundamentally challenged the OLPC distribution model. “That’s project in Australia,” says Srikhanta. when we started changing our approach,” Srikhanta says. For their initial deployment of XO laptops, Srikhanta and From 2009 to 2012, through a process of trial and error, Vercoe selected target areas that would closely replicate Third OLPCA developed a new model that focuses on scarcity rather World locations. One such area was Elcho Island, a remote town than saturation. Srikhanta began to think in terms of creating a in the Northern Territory (NT). The NT, located in north-central “pull” model that would differ from the OLPC movement’s existAustralia, is home to one of the largest populations of Aboriginal 68
Stanford Social Innovation Review • Fall 2013
Photograph courtesy of One laptop per child australia
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