Having problems with message search?
You are correct about the steps needed, but we have much to discuss on the costs. Comments below.
On 10/14/06, shahidul shuvera <s_shuvera@...> wrote:
More, yes. Double, I doubt it.
The initial training is a one-time cost which will pay off over and over with each new group of first-graders. New teachers will learn Linux in their own education. Many of the teachers have never used a computer, so they won't have to unlearn Windows.
Teaching people to use Linux after they have learned Windows is an effort, but not a large one. For a teacher getting a free computer, the effort is well worth it. It is harder to teach people to use a computer from scratch.
We will need some training literature in local languages. It has to make the point that with Linux, you can download ten thousand applications for free, and you can get someone to change them to suit your needs. Probably a 13-year old student who is self-taught in programming. There's always one. (Well, there will be after the first year or two.) Remember, all the programming tools and libraries are free: Smalltalk/Squeak, Logo, C, C++, Java, Python, LISP/Scheme, Ruby, Perl, awk, APL, FORTH,
OpenOffice is quite comparable to Microsoft Office, although its functions are arranged somewhat differently. There is currently no fully-compatible replacement for Outlook and Microsoft Exchange Server, but there are multiple projects (including one in the US Department of Defense) to create them. Although Kontact, for example, is not the same as Outlook in its operation, it is quite competent, and offers most of the same functions: mail, contacts, calendar (with meeting organizer), to-do, journal, notes. There are few other Windows applications that most teachers will be dependent on.
More regularly than now, you mean? You can't call that a cost of the Laptop program.
In fact, you don't. Laptops come with a crank on the power supply so that students can charge them wherever they are. Sitting under a tree, for example. (I have wished for such a feature whenever I have taken my laptop on an airplane.) A small generator will be needed to keep the school server and Internet connection available 24/7, but it won't have to power whole classrooms.
Bengalinux is already available from http://www.bengalinux.org/.
Volunteers are already creating content. Governments can put out RFQs for electronic rather than paper textbooks. E-books have essentially zero production costs, so all the textbook development money can go to content instead of to printing. This is a large net saving.
Not engineers, techs. Much cheaper. Locally trained techs. Cheaper yet. 12-year-old students learning a trade in school. Free!!
The laptops are quite rugged. They do not contain any moving parts, such as hard drives. Laptops that fail are cheap enough to replace whole, rather than opening them up to fix them. To the extent that local labor can be used to repair Laptops at less than the cost of news ones, that will be a savings.
No, the Laptops are designed to be used independently. They contain built-in wireless networking. The school needs a server. Suitable systems sell in the US for about US$300 at retail, with more than 100 GB of hard disk capacity and a DVD-ROM drive. Manufacturing cost is much less. Servers don't compute, so they don't need maximum performance.
SES-Global has offered satellite capacity for Asia and Africa at world rates, rather than the piratical cartel rates that one usually sees.
Clif Cox of SFLAN has installed a wireless network across all of Bhutan (in the ruggedest terrain in the world--multiple Himalayan mountain valleys) on a contract with the government. It is being made available to citizens at no charge. Any other government in the world is welcome to do likewise. It costs less than $1000 each for network transceivers, and about $100 each for the local transceiver and WiFi link at a school to connect to a system. WiMax transceivers are coming on the market, at comparable cost but four times the range, or 16 times the coverage area. It will be possible to provide 85-90% coverage of a province for under a million US dollars. Those that cannot be reached economically by wireless will have to use satellite connections.
What for?
Governments have to arrange this. The laptops will come to the country in lots of 10,000 or more (one shipping container), eventually in lots of millions at a time. After the initial rollout, they will have to be trucked to towns once a year, and if necessary hand-carried to villages that lack roads. Make it a celebration, a parade. Let the children carry their own, if the distance isn't too great. This is a tiny part of the cost.
The cost of 100 dollar laptop will be more than double in implementing its project. After paying one hundred dollar by a government for each laptop, the government has to spend more money for its project.
More, yes. Double, I doubt it.
There are many questions on the laptop are unknown. I am discussing point by point:
1- Government has to train teachers on open source software to reduce influence of Microsoft software.
The initial training is a one-time cost which will pay off over and over with each new group of first-graders. New teachers will learn Linux in their own education. Many of the teachers have never used a computer, so they won't have to unlearn Windows.
Teaching people to use Linux after they have learned Windows is an effort, but not a large one. For a teacher getting a free computer, the effort is well worth it. It is harder to teach people to use a computer from scratch.
We will need some training literature in local languages. It has to make the point that with Linux, you can download ten thousand applications for free, and you can get someone to change them to suit your needs. Probably a 13-year old student who is self-taught in programming. There's always one. (Well, there will be after the first year or two.) Remember, all the programming tools and libraries are free: Smalltalk/Squeak, Logo, C, C++, Java, Python, LISP/Scheme, Ruby, Perl, awk, APL, FORTH,
OpenOffice is quite comparable to Microsoft Office, although its functions are arranged somewhat differently. There is currently no fully-compatible replacement for Outlook and Microsoft Exchange Server, but there are multiple projects (including one in the US Department of Defense) to create them. Although Kontact, for example, is not the same as Outlook in its operation, it is quite competent, and offers most of the same functions: mail, contacts, calendar (with meeting organizer), to-do, journal, notes. There are few other Windows applications that most teachers will be dependent on.
The government will have to pay them salary regularly.
More regularly than now, you mean? You can't call that a cost of the Laptop program.
2- At village lever no electricity, they may get it for only 4 to 5 hours. So you have to give students a generator.
In fact, you don't. Laptops come with a crank on the power supply so that students can charge them wherever they are. Sitting under a tree, for example. (I have wished for such a feature whenever I have taken my laptop on an airplane.) A small generator will be needed to keep the school server and Internet connection available 24/7, but it won't have to power whole classrooms.
3- They do not know English language. Even adult educated people in village do not know English. Bangla online information is not available. So you have to spend for making Bangla information available as well as teaching English language.
Bengalinux is already available from http://www.bengalinux.org/.
Volunteers are already creating content. Governments can put out RFQs for electronic rather than paper textbooks. E-books have essentially zero production costs, so all the textbook development money can go to content instead of to printing. This is a large net saving.
4- You have to spend for hardware Engineer for maintaining the laptop.
Not engineers, techs. Much cheaper. Locally trained techs. Cheaper yet. 12-year-old students learning a trade in school. Free!!
The laptops are quite rugged. They do not contain any moving parts, such as hard drives. Laptops that fail are cheap enough to replace whole, rather than opening them up to fix them. To the extent that local labor can be used to repair Laptops at less than the cost of news ones, that will be a savings.
5- You have to spend money for making a lab for the laptop computer.
No, the Laptops are designed to be used independently. They contain built-in wireless networking. The school needs a server. Suitable systems sell in the US for about US$300 at retail, with more than 100 GB of hard disk capacity and a DVD-ROM drive. Manufacturing cost is much less. Servers don't compute, so they don't need maximum performance.
6- You have to spend for Internet bill. Almost city people do not have internet access. Internet bill is so big for them.
SES-Global has offered satellite capacity for Asia and Africa at world rates, rather than the piratical cartel rates that one usually sees.
Clif Cox of SFLAN has installed a wireless network across all of Bhutan (in the ruggedest terrain in the world--multiple Himalayan mountain valleys) on a contract with the government. It is being made available to citizens at no charge. Any other government in the world is welcome to do likewise. It costs less than $1000 each for network transceivers, and about $100 each for the local transceiver and WiFi link at a school to connect to a system. WiMax transceivers are coming on the market, at comparable cost but four times the range, or 16 times the coverage area. It will be possible to provide 85-90% coverage of a province for under a million US dollars. Those that cannot be reached economically by wireless will have to use satellite connections.
7- You have to employ monitoring people.
What for?
8- Who will pay fare for bring laptop and send these to the villages?
Governments have to arrange this. The laptops will come to the country in lots of 10,000 or more (one shipping container), eventually in lots of millions at a time. After the initial rollout, they will have to be trucked to towns once a year, and if necessary hand-carried to villages that lack roads. Make it a celebration, a parade. Let the children carry their own, if the distance isn't too great. This is a tiny part of the cost.
There are many points to discuss….So the 100 dollar laptop is not only 100 dollars. Its price is more………
Right. This is well understood at OLPC, and they aren't hiding it from the governments they are negotiating with, or pretending otherwise to the public. We don't have any precise figures for these additional costs, in part because they depend on local circumstances.
Let's consider Nigeria. UNICEF puts the school-age population (6-18) in Nigeria at 45 million. One-year age cohorts (children born in a year, less deaths before reaching school age) are currently 4 million. $100 laptops for all starts at $4.5 billion, with annual expense of computers for first-graders at $400 million. Presumably students will get new computers at some regular intervals, say in four years, so that they have new computers again when starting fifth grade and ninth grade. So that's $1.2 billion a year. This is Nigeria, so that can come out of oil income. (Whether it will is a political question that I will not attempt to deal with here.)
Suppose we take your estimate, that the government should spend the same amount again on books, teacher training, and infrastructure. That's $9 billion to cover everybody all at once, and $2.4 billion annually to give computers to every first-grade, fifth-grade, and ninth-grade student. How much training, materials, and infrastructure will that buy?
For a start, Nigeria could have its own educational satellite (something like $300 million, including launch costs, and a few million a year to run it [http://www.satsig.net/ivsatcos.htm] ). So even the remotest schools wouldn't have to pay fees for Internet connections, although somebody would have to pay for the satellite receivers (VSAT currently, about $900 each). Well, let's have the government do it again. We need satelliite connections only for areas that cannot be reached by wireless from the cities and towns. But each satellite link can be shared among multiple villages, again using wireless.We can be generous and say that we need 10,000 satellite links for $9 million (plus installation--We'll train locals again.) to gain 99% coverage. (The remaining 1% will have to use Sneakernet for a while yet, that is, they will have to hand carry CDs or DVDs from place to place in order to get data in and out.)
The wireless network could cost something in the tens of millions of dollars. I can't estimate it any closer without getting someone to go over the maps and laying out the routes.
OK, we've spent something like half a billion so far. The rest can go to teacher training, electronic textbooks, software development, school buildings, and physical infrastructure, particularly better roads and lots of optical fiber.
If I were doing this as a proposal, I would have clearly separated one-time costs and ongoing costs, and put in many other refinements. But I think I have made the point that Nigeria could afford to do this.
Now let's try Ethiopia, which is pretty much at the opposite end of the scale. 2.5 million school-age children a year, Gross National Income per capita, $110. No way the government is going to come up with $25 per child per year for a Laptop every four years. They only have 31% of their children in school at all. Well, suppose they only hand out Laptops every six years, and suppose somebody donates satellite capacity. They still need millions of dollars of wireless infrastructure, and they need training and textbooks.
Now we are talking about $500 million annually for Laptops, and we have to get the rest of the costs way down. There is an alternative way to do this, of course. Put laptops only in schools where Internet connections are already available, rig up an Each One Teach Two program for the teachers, get some of the already-literate children to type in existing textbooks, and then expand gradually as graduates start getting real jobs and paying more taxes. Bootstrapping, in other words. Unless Gates, or Soros, or somebody feels like making up the difference. No IMF or World Bank loans, under any circumstances. Or maybe we could get e-commerce in Ethiopian art or something going and put a percentage of that into the programe. If we get together on this, we should think of something.
Anyway, you wanted to know about Bangladesh. The issues are quite similar, except that Bangladesh has a lot of unemployed ICT people who would love to get jobs in this program, and Bengalinux is the place to volunteer. But maybe Grameen will have to do it, if the government won't step up. I was excited to see that Muhammad Yunus got the Nobel Peace Prize, but I thought he should have gotten the Economics prize as well.
Offline 
Send Email