SOLS: One Laptop Per Child pilot scheme being set up
Updated
A project which aims to eventually provide every child in the Pacific islands with a laptop computer linked to the internet is launching a trial of the idea in Solomon islands. A group of internet activists from New Zealand, Australia the Solomon Islands and the Secretariat of the Pacific Community want to see how the worldwide One Laptop Per Child initiative might work in our region.
Presenter: Bruce Hill
Speakers: Ian Thomson, from the One Laptop Per Child project
THOMSON: Yes, we've been studying how we might deploy these right round the Pacific Islands and we really need some practical experience, so a pilot is the best way to start there. And the Solomon Islands is very good, because they've had some very successful projects. They're already with the PF Net and the business learning centres, so they're quite experienced in getting out into the remote islands and working with the villages, so that experience is very useful to pilot a new concept here.
HILL: How easy is it to connect to the internet from a place like the Solomon Islands, which doesn't have a tremendous communications infrastructure to start with?
THOMSON: Yes, I think that's going to be a bit of an issue for us, but there are already nine satellite stations that are deployed are each of the regions of the Solomon Islands and what we're going to do is link this pilot to one of those that's already in place. So they've got satellite internet connection already and we're just extending that out into a new village area with the use of Wire Fire technology, so it's a very cheap and affordable way of getting more people to have access to the limited resource of the satellite.
HILL: Now, what's the affect going to be of in the end you hope to give a laptop to every child in the Solomon Islands. That's going to have a tremendous impact if every kid in the Solomons has connection to the internet. It opens up the entire planet to them. It could be quite a social revolution?
THOMSON: I think it's certainly going to be an educational revolution. The idea is that given access to the right information, these people will be able to make better decisions about their futures and their directions and so it's really just about empowering people I think. And it's now affordable to do that through the internet and through this $100 laptops.
HILL: How do you stop kids accessing pornography, because that's what most people associate the internet with these days?
THOMSON; Yeah, well of course the best thing to do is to have some parental control and guidelines and things like that. There are technical ways of doing that and yes the pilot will have content silvers on there so that they can't access those sites. But I think people find ways around that anywhere. I think the best thing to do is to work with the community to say how do we encourage people to learn about inappropriate things on the internet and how do they manage that themselves.
HILL: Are there any opposition to this? I mean how do teachers feel about the whole idea of equipping kids with laptops? I mean that might take a bit of power away from the teachers if the kids are going out finding information for themselves?
THOMSON: Well, I think you'll find in every country where the internet's been introduced into education, there's an initial resistance by the teachers. They're a little bit frightened about it. They don't quite know what that means to teaching and education. But what we've seen in just about every country round the world is that the students are hungry for this. They really jump on board quite quickly and often they end up teaching teachers.
HIILL: While it obviously sounds like a good idea from an educational point of view to open up the whole world of the internet to every child in the Solomon Islands, don't you also run the risk of getting into the law of unintended consequences? Don't you run the risk perhaps of getting a bit of a generation gap between children who are more internet savvy and know a lot more about the rest of the world than say their parents who had a much more traditional village upbringing?
THOMSON: Yeah, it's one of my reservations about doing this is, particularly from a cultural point of view is flooding the Solomon Islands with Western culture on the internet. And one of the things that we are building into the project is to develop appropriate local content as well, so the program will include activities for both the children and the teachers and anybody whose interested to tell their own story on the internet, to develop their own local content, their local information and that's very important to give future generations a choice of what content they do access. At the moment, there's very little Solomon Islands content available, but we want to generate as much of that as we can.
