"Out of context"--what a very useful idea. Solar home lighting, foot-driven water pumps for crop irrigation, bicycles for transport of products to market: all these seem to fit comfortably into the context of village life in Ghana.
OLPC, not so much. Here are schoolchildren whose mothers can't afford to buy them the required notebook ($1.00)and uniform ($4.00), so they're not going to school. Those who do go to school don't have any books of their own, and the school doesn't have many either. Often the school does not have electricity, reliably or at all. Almost certainly it doesn't have, and can't afford, connection to the Internet. Trying to envision OLPC in this context is pretty challenging, don't you think? Less difficult is the notion of a community centre that has shared computers as well as other services (health, literacy, job skills, craft workshop, bike conversion and repair, etc.). The problem of "context" has dogged Western-driven "development" since t5he 1950s, and brought the demise of many expensive projects. I guess that's why the World Bank finally started hiring anthropologists in the 1980s--to get some folks with the ability to see and understand "context." Sarah Blackmun The narratives of the world are numberless. . . . there nowhere is nor has been a people without narrative.--Roland Barthes Sarah Blackmun-Eskow President, The Pangaea Network 290 North Fairview Avenue Goleta CA 93117 805-692-6998 [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.pangaeanetwork.org -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Joel Sent: Sunday, September 21, 2008 8:56 PM To: The Digital Divide Network discussion group Subject: Re: [DDN] PhD research on OLPC On Mon, Sep 22, 2008 at 5:09 AM, Cindy Lemcke-Hoong <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > what is the different between telecenters and 'community computers'? If they are the same, for search purpose, perhaps we could keep to the same terms? > Cindy In the 3rd world countries, a PC is generally too expensive for individual ownership (hence the relevance of the OLPC). The cost is not just the purchase price of the HW, but must include the SW costs, and the user's time to learn and use the technology. It is simply that an OLPC is so "out-of-context" in the lives of the average citizen. It is our belief that this is because too little effort is placed in providing appropriate applications / solutions at the 3rd world point-of-view. The telecenter OTOH MUST contextualize at the community level. Can the same be said for the OLPC? J Galgana BayangPinoy Organization, Inc. _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list DIGITALDIVIDE@digitaldivide.net http://digitaldivide.net/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message. _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list DIGITALDIVIDE@digitaldivide.net http://digitaldivide.net/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
