one laptop per child

today i finally went to see a doctor about my flu and was put on a four day course of antibiotics, but that's not the point of this post. after seeing the doctor we (meaning my mum, dad and me) went to get some lunch for everyone. so my mum went to get the food, and my dad and I had one of our pleasant and insightful talks, which i love, because we just have so much in common and i love hearing my dad's opinions. so we chatted a bit about yoga and ayurveda for a while, and then he mentioned this designer guy, yves behar, because he knows i plan to be a designer myself one day.

dude, this yves behar guy is awesome. he designed this laptop which costs like a 100 US dollars, and that would come up to about RM300+ i think. and it's absolutely amazing. he designed the laptop for this program called OLPC (one laptop per child); go key in "OLPC" or "one laptop per child" into wikipedia or google and you'll find what you're looking for. i really like the idea of it. their mission is

"to create educational opportunities for the world's poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning."
-- OLPC mission statement

i really like the idea. it's sort of like something i was pondering a few weeks ago, and when my dad mentioned this OLPC thing and i read about it, i'm really starting to believe that we should carry out this idea: to use laptops instead of books in schools.

i understand completely that this sounds outrageous (think of the cost, dear child!), but think about it! here are the arguments to back up this theory:

a) in the long run, we save money. instead of buying nearly twenty textbooks and goodness knows how many exercise books for thousands, millions of students per year, we could just get ONE laptop (only about RM300+ if we use the model i was talking about) per child that could last them through all of their schooling years.
no need for reference books either, since we can just store information in the laptops.

b) save paper, save trees! think how many trees are being killed just to give us books to write our notes and exercises in. we could save the environment here, people! and if you're thinking, "oh, charging the batteries for the laptops won't do much good either", hoho, think again. yves behar's laptop uses wireless charging (i still dunno how that works, though) and the battery lasts up to a few days. PLUS, not using so many trees to provide us with paper means those trees will help us offset our carbon footprint, don't you agree?

c) more convenient, and lighter, too. i blame the fact that i walked with hunched shoulders for about two or three years of my life on the fact that schoolbags are just so heavy. we students feel like slaves, walking around with such heavy loads on our backs. it can't be good for our health. isn't it far more practical to just carry ONE laptop and maybe a notebook and some pens/pencils around than to carry about thirty books to school everyday? (plus pencilcases and personal notebooks and everything else)

d) saves time, as in we don't need to copy out all our exercises into our little paper notebooks or spend time packing our bags everyday to make sure our spines don't crack. we just flick open our laptop, turn it on, and type away. homework's done! plus since we use the internet to do research for most of our homework anyway, wouldn't it be easier to just do our homework on the laptop? oh, oh, and we don't have to attend those lame ictl classes, because we'd be using laptops everyday and it would just be second nature!

e) speaking of research and things, wouldn't it be so much easier to do research for projects and things at school on our laptops? saves so much time, and we can use the time we spend at home for homework and not to do even more research that could have been done at school.

f) since someone has to acknowledge it, everyone who can't afford even the USD100 laptop can seek government help. i mean, if they can buy about 200 textbooks for every student in the country to last them through at least eleven years of school, why not buy just one laptop that can last them through all those years?

g) handing in homework would be SO convenient.
teacher: alright, class, this is my email, i want all your homework emailed to me by wednesday.
students: sure thing!
do you see what i mean? we can just email our homework to our teachers as soon as we're done, even if it's at midnight, and the teacher could just use spellcheck to check our spelling and... oh, you get the idea.

h) i know that the rampant concern about using laptops in school is that students would want to facebook and play games when they're supposed to be doing their work. teachers, you can be vigilant here and avoid this. if anyone's tapping away on their keyboards before you even give them work, then you can stop them and check on what they're doing. or you could just turn off the wifi (awesome, wifi in schools) and the facebook problem would be solved. easy as pie. or you could also have the prefects check everyone's laptops once in a while to make sure there's nothing on there that shouldn't be there. it's nothing that can't be prevented or punished.

i) presentations in class would be so much easier. instead of the traditional "write some notes on mahjong paper and stick it on the board and present it" we could just use powerpoint and projectors and ta-dah...

i think i'll stop here for now. that's nine reasons already, and if you have anything else you'd like to add or ask that i might have missed out on, just leave a comment, eh? see ya, ciao.