TED in the Field
Nicholas Negroponte: Taking OLPC to Colombia
Filmed:
Readability: 3.5
390,783 views
TED follows Nicholas Negroponte to Colombia as he delivers laptops inside territory once controlled by guerrillas. His partner? Colombia's Defense Department, who see One Laptop per Child as an investment in the region. (And you too can get involved.)
Nicholas Negroponte - Tech visionary
The founder of the MIT Media Lab, Nicholas Negroponte pushed the edge of the information revolution as an inventor, thinker and angel investor. He's the driving force behind One Laptop per Child, building computers for children in the developing world. Full bio
The founder of the MIT Media Lab, Nicholas Negroponte pushed the edge of the information revolution as an inventor, thinker and angel investor. He's the driving force behind One Laptop per Child, building computers for children in the developing world. Full bio
Double-click the English transcript below to play the video.
00:00
It's amazing, when you meet a head of state and you say,
0
0
2000
00:02
"What is your most precious natural resource?" --
1
2000
4000
00:06
they will not say children at first.
2
6000
2000
00:08
And then when you say children,
3
8000
2000
00:10
they will pretty quickly agree with you.
4
10000
2000
00:19
(Video): We're traveling today with
5
19000
2000
00:21
the Minister of Defense of Colombia,
6
21000
3000
00:24
head of the army and the head of the police,
7
24000
2000
00:26
and we're dropping off 650 laptops
8
26000
3000
00:29
today to children
9
29000
2000
00:31
who have no television, no telephone
10
31000
2000
00:33
and have been in a community
11
33000
2000
00:35
cut off from the rest of the world
12
35000
2000
00:37
for the past 40 years.
13
37000
3000
00:40
The importance of delivering laptops to this region
14
40000
3000
00:43
is connecting kids who have otherwise been unconnected
15
43000
3000
00:46
because of the FARC,
16
46000
2000
00:48
the guerrillas that started off 40 years ago
17
48000
3000
00:51
as a political movement and then became a drug movement.
18
51000
4000
00:56
There are one billion children in the world,
19
56000
2000
00:58
and 50 percent of them don't have electricity
20
58000
2000
01:00
at home or at school.
21
60000
3000
01:03
And in some countries -- let me pick Afghanistan --
22
63000
2000
01:05
75 percent of the little girls don't go to school.
23
65000
3000
01:08
And I don't mean that they drop out of school
24
68000
2000
01:10
in the third or fourth grade -- they don't go.
25
70000
2000
01:12
So in the three years
26
72000
2000
01:14
since I talked at TED and showed a prototype,
27
74000
3000
01:17
it's gone from an idea
28
77000
2000
01:19
to a real laptop.
29
79000
3000
01:22
We have half a million laptops today
30
82000
2000
01:24
in the hands of children.
31
84000
3000
01:27
We have about a quarter of a million in transit
32
87000
2000
01:29
to those and other children,
33
89000
2000
01:32
and then there are another quarter of a million more
34
92000
3000
01:36
that are being ordered at this moment.
35
96000
2000
01:38
So, in rough numbers, there are a million laptops.
36
98000
2000
01:40
That's smaller than I predicted --
37
100000
2000
01:42
I predicted three to 10 million --
38
102000
2000
01:44
but is still a very large number.
39
104000
2000
01:46
In Colombia, we have about 3,000 laptops.
40
106000
4000
01:50
It's the Minister of Defense with whom we're working,
41
110000
3000
01:53
not the Minister of Education, because it is seen as
42
113000
3000
01:56
a strategic defense issue
43
116000
2000
01:58
in the sense of liberating these zones
44
118000
5000
02:03
that had been completely closed off,
45
123000
2000
02:05
in which the people who had been causing, if you will,
46
125000
4000
02:09
40 years' worth of bombings and kidnappings
47
129000
4000
02:13
and assassinations lived.
48
133000
2000
02:15
And suddenly,
49
135000
2000
02:17
the kids have connected laptops.
50
137000
2000
02:19
They've leapfrogged.
51
139000
2000
02:21
The change is absolutely monumental,
52
141000
4000
02:25
because it's not just opening it up,
53
145000
2000
02:27
but it's opening it up to the rest of the world.
54
147000
3000
02:30
So yes, they're building roads, yes, they're putting in telephone,
55
150000
2000
02:32
yes, there will be television.
56
152000
2000
02:34
But the kids six to 12 years old
57
154000
2000
02:36
are surfing the Internet in Spanish and in local languages,
58
156000
4000
02:40
so the children grow up
59
160000
2000
02:42
with access to information,
60
162000
2000
02:44
with a window into the rest of the world.
61
164000
3000
02:47
Before, they were closed off.
62
167000
2000
02:49
Interestingly enough, in other countries,
63
169000
2000
02:51
it will be the Minister of Finance who sees it
64
171000
2000
02:53
as an engine of economic growth.
65
173000
4000
02:57
And that engine is going to see the results in 20 years.
66
177000
4000
03:01
It's not going to happen, you know, in one year,
67
181000
3000
03:04
but it's an important, deeply economic
68
184000
3000
03:07
and cultural change
69
187000
2000
03:09
that happens through children.
70
189000
2000
03:12
Thirty-one countries in total are involved,
71
192000
2000
03:14
and in the case of Uruguay,
72
194000
3000
03:17
half the children already have them,
73
197000
2000
03:19
and by the middle of 2009,
74
199000
3000
03:22
every single child in Uruguay will have a laptop --
75
202000
3000
03:25
a little green laptop.
76
205000
2000
03:27
Now what are some of the results?
77
207000
2000
03:29
Some of the results
78
209000
2000
03:31
that go across every single country
79
211000
3000
03:34
include teachers saying
80
214000
2000
03:36
they have never loved teaching so much,
81
216000
3000
03:39
and reading comprehension
82
219000
2000
03:41
measured by third parties -- not by us -- skyrockets.
83
221000
4000
03:45
Probably the most important thing we see
84
225000
3000
03:48
is children teaching parents.
85
228000
3000
03:51
They own the laptops. They take them home.
86
231000
3000
03:54
And so when I met with three children from the schools,
87
234000
3000
03:57
who had traveled all day to come to Bogota,
88
237000
4000
04:01
one of the three children brought her mother.
89
241000
3000
04:04
And the reason she brought her mother
90
244000
2000
04:06
is that this six-year-old child
91
246000
3000
04:09
had been teaching her mother
92
249000
2000
04:11
how to read and write.
93
251000
2000
04:13
Her mother had not gone to primary school.
94
253000
3000
04:16
And this is such an inversion,
95
256000
2000
04:18
and such a wonderful example
96
258000
3000
04:21
of children being the agents of change.
97
261000
3000
04:25
So now, in closing, people say,
98
265000
2000
04:27
now why laptops?
99
267000
2000
04:29
Laptops are a luxury; it's like giving them iPods. No.
100
269000
3000
04:32
The reason you want laptops
101
272000
2000
04:34
is that the word is education, not laptop.
102
274000
4000
04:38
This is an education project, not a laptop project.
103
278000
3000
04:41
They need to learn learning. And then, just think --
104
281000
2000
04:43
they can have, let's say, 100 books.
105
283000
2000
04:45
In a village, you have 100 laptops,
106
285000
3000
04:48
each with a different set of 100 books,
107
288000
3000
04:51
and so that village suddenly has 10,000 books.
108
291000
3000
04:54
You and I didn't have 10,000 books when we went to primary school.
109
294000
4000
04:58
Sometimes school is under a tree,
110
298000
2000
05:00
or in many cases, the teacher has only a fifth-grade education,
111
300000
4000
05:04
so you need a collaborative model of learning,
112
304000
3000
05:07
not just building more schools and training more teachers,
113
307000
2000
05:09
which you have to do anyway.
114
309000
2000
05:11
So we're once again doing "Give One, Get One."
115
311000
3000
05:14
Last year, we ran a "Give One, Get One" program,
116
314000
2000
05:16
and it generated over 100,000 laptops
117
316000
4000
05:20
that we were then able to give free.
118
320000
3000
05:23
And by being a zero-dollar laptop,
119
323000
2000
05:25
we can go to countries that can't afford it at all.
120
325000
3000
05:28
And that's what we did. We went to Haiti,
121
328000
3000
05:31
we went to Rwanda, Afghanistan,
122
331000
2000
05:33
Ethiopia, Mongolia.
123
333000
3000
05:36
Places that are not markets,
124
336000
2000
05:38
seeding it with the principles of
125
338000
3000
05:41
saturation, connectivity, low ages, etc.
126
341000
3000
05:44
And then we can actually roll out large numbers.
127
344000
4000
05:48
So think of it this way:
128
348000
2000
05:50
think of it as inoculating children
129
350000
3000
05:53
against ignorance.
130
353000
3000
05:56
And think of the laptop as a vaccine.
131
356000
2000
05:58
You don't vaccinate a few children.
132
358000
2000
06:00
You vaccinate all the children in an area.
133
360000
3000
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Nicholas Negroponte - Tech visionaryThe founder of the MIT Media Lab, Nicholas Negroponte pushed the edge of the information revolution as an inventor, thinker and angel investor. He's the driving force behind One Laptop per Child, building computers for children in the developing world.
Why you should listen
A pioneer in the field of computer-aided design, Negroponte founded (and was the first director of) MIT's Media Lab, which helped drive the multimedia revolution and now houses more than 500 researchers and staff across a broad range of disciplines. An original investor in Wired (and the magazine's "patron saint"), for five years he penned a column exploring the frontiers of technology -- ideas that he expanded into his 1995 best-selling book Being Digital. An angel investor extraordinaire, he's funded more than 40 startups, and served on the boards of companies such as Motorola and Ambient Devices.
But his latest effort, the One Laptop per Child project, may prove his most ambitious. The organization is designing, manufacturing and distributing low-cost, wireless Internet-enabled computers costing roughly $100 and aimed at children. Negroponte hopes to put millions of these devices in the hands of children in the developing world.
Nicholas Negroponte | Speaker | TED.com