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One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Can Change Our World
By Rodger Bailey
Uruguay is the first country in the world to implement the "One Laptop Per Child" (OLPC or "Plan Ceibal") program of giving one of the $100 laptops to every child in the country. Uruguay is a small country with about 3 million population, land mass similar to Spain, with a terrain like Iowa. It is in South America on the Atlantic coast between Brazil and Argentina. The economy has been based on agriculture (beef, dairy, sheep, wool, horses, rice, pulpwood) for almost two centuries. But with a free university system and all children growing up using computers, this is expected to change in the next decades. The first wave of the OLPC program gave out 400,000 of these computers to all of the public school children in elementary school throughout the country. The next phase involves the same computers to the private school children and a more advanced computer to the high school children. These computers are designed on a Linux platform with no hard disk or CDROM drive. The really interesting feature of these computers is their interconnectivity. When one student is in the range of another student, and their computers are on, they automatically make a network. If any of the computers in one of these nets has access to the Internet, the whole network has the access to the Internet. Uruguay has free WI-FI zones in all shopping centers, most hotels and restaurants, and now, because of the Plan Ceibal, in most public schools of the country. The public school curriculum is now being integrated to use these computers. The teachers were hesitant at first, but are now enthusiastic about the practical educational benefits which are showing up in most subjects. In the next couple of years, all of the children's school books and materials will be integrated into their computers. I have provided some links to show aspects of the computers and the program. The YouTube video is great and it has English subtitles.
Rodger Bailey, MS and his wife, Isabel, have started a distance learning doctoral program at a small christian university in Tennessee. They are in their mid-60s and chose a degree program which focuses on intensive academic research for social change.
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Contributor's Note
Imagine the technology breakthrough as children grow up using computers and later go through their free university system. Uruguay is going to become a technology based economy in the next 20 years.
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Ceibal project: One computer per child, Uruguay
| Plan Ceibal Uruguay (must see)
| NY Times Review of the Ceibal Computer
| OLPC (home site)
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PLEASE VISIT THE CONTRIBUTOR'S WEBSITE
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This is fantastic! Uruguay is poised to become a powerful, high-tech center of learning in a very short time. I'm happily surprised at how this is set up -- it's elegant. Nothing like that exists in the USA and yet I think this program would do a lot to alleviate some of the problems of generational poverty in places like the US and UK. It would also make personal key drives very popular among students for saving their work offline. Those are cheap though, so are external hard drives. I'm used to having a hard drive but I can see how these $100 computers would have great capability and be extremely frugal.
What a teriffic intel, Rodger.
This is something that really needs to be addressed all over the world. Americans should be encouraging this system throughout our entire country.
Thank you for sharing.
Keep up the good work.
Frederick
Earlier today I spent a full hour in town trying to check my email. It is so tempting to start packing right now and move to Uruguay.
What I find interesting here is that you have the potential of individuals communicating and interacting without the preconceived biases that can occur with face to face encounters. Very helpful information. I mentioned this Intel in my Twitter this morning.
The copyright for this content entitled "One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Can Change Our World" has been specified by the contributor as:
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0
Details 
This content may be copied and distributed (but not modified), as long as a) it's for non-commercial use and b) the original author is acknowledged with a link back to the content page.
If you use this content according to the license specified, you must link to the following URL:
http://rodgerbailey.qondio.com/
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