Steve Ryan is Director of LSE's Centre for Learning Technology.
Resisting the urge to respond "Blackboard" to his question I sat back and enjoyed a brief history of personal computing and some very serious debating of future directions presented by Jonathan Zittrain, who is Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford University, and Co-Founder & Faculty Co-Director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Zittrain gave a highly entertaining and informative lecture and discussion at the London School of Economics on 13 October 2006. The lecture ranged far more widely than the question posed in the title would suggest and indeed neither Zittrain nor the audience actually considered specific software.
Jonathan commenced by offering a brief history of the PC, skipping all the technical stuff but concentrating on the tremendous power it gave to the individual to write and develop programs that would actually work. From this perspective, whether the PC is running Linux or Windows is of secondary importance. In both cases you can write and execute programs and particularly when combined with the Internet, all sorts of possibilities however apparently unlikely or even downright crazy emerge. Some of these would flourish and change significantly the way we work and interact. Wikipedia and Skype are just two examples.
But this apparently ideal state was threatened, challenged by those who recognise that the "channels of communication are also the channels of control" and that the individual PC through viruses and all sorts of malware can be taken over and manipulated.
While he did not doubt the seriousness of the problem, Zittrain suggested that in some respects the responses to this issue are as bad if not worse than the problem itself. In attempting to make our computing safer we have lost control. Others now automatically update and patch our systems and limit what we can and cannot do. Perhaps we are moving towards the end of the ".exe" era where anyone could develop and execute a program to the era where only approved and rights managed software will run on our machines.
In a parallel development we are seeing the emergence of specialised closed boxes, ipods, games consoles and even the "Internet box". They may be excellent at performing their specialised functions but they are closed, designed so that the individual user cannot write programs or modify them. The future then is of the increasingly sophisticated but specialised systems that lockout or limit individual creativity and control and that only do the things the system designers intend them to do.
The one laptop per child or "$100 laptop" programme is seen by Zittrain as having the potential to challenge this trend of specialism and lockout. Zittrain can best be described as critical friend of the initiative. He is certainly not starry eyed nor in the slightest bit naive about its potential and its dangers but he does see huge possibilities if many millions gain access to a laptop that combines the "traditional" flexibility and freedom to program of the PC with the sophistication and power of the latest developments in mesh networking. The former may allow continuing exciting software developments of the kind that our closed boxes will limit, The latter will offer the potential for new and extended forms of communication and collaboration that are perhaps outside the reach of current control agencies, offering new possibilities for individual and community development. So from this perspective, the one laptop per child initiative will not only impact positively on the developing world but may also reinvigorate computing and innovation in the developed.
Very refreshingly, Jonathan left half an hour for questioning and comment. The audience, comprising I would guess, heavily of students involved in Development Studies rather than Information Systems or Media pointed to some of the potential dangers, cultural assumptions, issues of control and ownership, environmental impact and sustainability embodied in such a project. Jonathan whilst accepting many of the points raised, generally took the view that the initiative was worth attempting even if it was only "half a loaf" rather than everything we might wish.
All in all, a thought provoking session, leaving me more optimistic about the potential of the initiative and recognising that it would really be up to “you”, what you install on the $100 laptop and not solely the decision of some Agency, Government or even Blackboard.
Steve Ryan - s.ryan@lse.ac.uk
Previous OLPC posting from August 2006, which includes a video of a prototype $100 laptop.
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