Microsoft announced on May 16th, 2008 that it will be joining the One Laptop Per Child project as a software partner. This business decision came three years after Microsoft expressed interest in adding its internationally popular Windows platform to the project for global distribution. But until now, the OLPC project has held off on allying itself with an international technological giant like Microsoft. And in turn, the New York Times states that Microsoft has “long resisted joining the ambitious project because its laptops used the Linux operating system, a freely distributed alternative to Windows.”
While countries and communities around the globe are already placing orders and bringing the XO laptops (with the open source software) to classrooms in diverse regions of the world, some large potential clients, including India, have rejected participation in the project from the start. The Register reports that the Indian Ministry of Education cast off the OLPC as “pedagogically suspect” for reasons including the lack of Western industry-standard tools like the Windows operating system.
Why the stand off? As a communication tool, the OLPC project is fundamentally rooted in Papert’s constructionist educational theory, which emphasizes experiential learning, or learning through doing.” By keeping the OLPC’s XO laptop fundamentally open source, the project has ensured that students and communities learn through developing their own software and by adapting preinstalled programs and layout aesthetics to fit the customized needs of each individual community. What then, will the inclusion of Microsoft in the project, mean for future learners?
Switching the laptops from open source to industrial software changes the educational purposes of the project entirely. Instead of creating ways to create new learning, the Windows-loaded laptops will be teaching future generations how to become workers in the existing capitalist market. The potential here is for the technology to become a communicative tool of oppression, restricting educational goals to those that coincide with the immediate needs of the global market instead of becoming a tool of resistance to such a situation by distributing a means of creating indigenous digital software and community-based learning and communication systems.
Still, some members of the OLCP project remain hopeful that the original goals of the program will continue to shine through the Windows (pun intended). On OLPC’s news website, a member of the OLPC Indian Student chapter reminds readers that at its heart, this is “an eduation project, not a laptop project.” The student also hopefully declares that “I know OLPC will get worldwide acceptance if it sticks to its original vision [of being open source].”
For more information:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/16/technology/16laptop.html?ex=1211860800&en=5c6fe04817a45890&ei=5070&emc=eta1
http://www.olpcnews.com/software/operating_system/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/07/26/india_says_no_to_olpc/
http://www.informationweek.com/news/management/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=204701926
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