Thailand plans 1 free laptop per child
Bangkok, Thailand — Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra has announced that an ambitious project to provide low-cost laptop computers to all of Thailand’s millions of elementary school students will begin in October. The U.S.-based “One Laptop per Child” project aims to deliver up to 30 computers to Thailand in October and 500 more in November, Thaksin said in a nationwide radio broadcast on Saturday. “Each elementary school child will receive a computer that the government will buy for them, free of charge, instead of books, because books will be found and can be read on computers,” he said.
He said the first batch of laptops — costing around USD $100 (€79) each — will be distributed to children in rural areas where access to technology is limited. Those children will test the computers before the government proceeds with the project nationwide. The laptops are not yet in production.
The Thai government adopted the project a year ago after meeting the “One Laptop Per Child” project’s founder, Nicholas Negroponte. Some critics say the project misallocates resources and that governments in developing countries would do better to invest in providing for more basic needs. Other countries that have shown interest in the project — which has been endorsed by the United Nations — include China and Brazil, Thaksin said.
The machines are being designed to be cheap and sturdy, and have minimum running costs. They will use the free Red Hat Fedora distribution of Linux for the operating system, flash memory instead of a hard drive, and according to Thaksin will be able to run on an outboard electricity generator that is pumped by hand. More specs, info and images are available at here.
Red Hat engineer and Mozilla Corporation board member Christopher Blizzard was kind enough to give a private demonstration of the laptop prototype, which was shown at the Red Hat Summit.
Watch the video below.
Subscribe
But will it hurt those school kids who, instead of getting at least $140 in books and teachers’ salaries, get a laptop sans tech support, teacher training etc for the laptop?
Have you seen what happnes when schools get computers without the required tech support?
I think Thailand’s Prime Minister is crazy!
http://www.olpcnews.com/commentary/olpc_news/olpc_to_replace_book.htm
August 14th, 2006 at 1:57 pm
[…] Each CM1 machine, from the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project features a video/still camera, three external USB-2.0 ports, plus an SD slot. CM1 is VOIP-enabled, creating another link among users (both locally and globally). It features Csound, an incredibly powerful and versatile music synthesis software that takes advantage of a full-featured audio codec (and the mesh network for collaborative musical performances). There are internal stereo speakers, as well as a stereo line-out jack. The microphone is built in, with a mic-in jack, which offers another unique feature: “sensor input†mode. The children can plug in any of a number of home-made data sensor, enabling them, for example, to turn their machines into thermometers or oscilloscopes. Read the previous entry about OLPC for more information and video of the working prototype. […]
August 25th, 2006 at 5:12 pm
[…] B1 laptops run Linux and use an AMD Geode processor, and feature 128MB of memory with 500MB of flash memory for storage. Watch video of the first working OLPC prototype. Technorati Tags: Computers,mobile […]
November 17th, 2006 at 12:37 am
[…] Walter Bender of OLPC stated, “The only way the price is going to continue to go down is competition in the marketplace.” OLPC expects to sell several million devices to governments in developing countries, beginning with Brazil, Nigeria, Libya, Argentina and Thailand. […]
December 7th, 2006 at 1:35 am
I am glad to know of your magnificent offers worldwide.
please send me a laptop, any used one. It will help alot in life. I live in Nigeria.
My address is IDSL 36 Ogba Road, Oko-Benin, Edo State, Nigeria, West Africa
April 12th, 2007 at 9:59 am