I have spent this past week in freezing cold Boston. Sunday evening I was about to head out to JFK to catch a flight from New York up to Boston, but an unexpected snow storm hitting the north east region meant that all flights had been canceled. Not wanting to risk my life on the infamous $15 Chinatown buses that ply the New York – Boston route at ridiculous high speed, I made it to Penn Station just in time to get on the last train up to Boston.

I was invited to Boston by the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organization. Together with about 20 other political lobbyists, educationalists and representatives from countries, cities and organizations all considering to initialize large scale OLPC supported educational programs, we had been given an opportunity to gain a first hand understanding of the constructionist approach to learning, which is centrally rooted in the OLPC initiative.

The participants at the seminar were from all over the world. Two participants came from the Provincial Reconstruction Team working with education in the Muthanna Province in southern Iraq, where they hope to establish a number of OLPC supported elementary schools. Another delegation was from Birmingham in Alabama the first city in the US moving forward with a laptop roll out program for all school children. The municipality of Florence had also sent a consultant working on an interesting project twining Florence schools with schools in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia as a part educational part developmental assistance initiative.

Walter Bender the president of OLPC welcomes us all to the OLPC headquarters, and starts of by noting that OLPC is real. The project has moved from a bold vision presented in 2005 to a number of live projects. In regards to implementation Uruguay leads the way. This small Latin American country will be the first country offering laptops to all school children by the first quarter of 2009. Walter Bender, is proud of this achievement and you do understand him. The journey has had it’s ups and downs but the team of about 16 full time employees + a large group of volunteers have kept the vision alive and seen it become reality.

One of the areas that have caused some confusion is the connection between OLPC as a laptop maker and OLPC as an educational effort. Walter takes this up and explains: OLPC as a non-profit is in a somewhat unusual position compared to the traditional laptop makers in the technology industry. The difference is however quite clear. Where the traditional laptop makers develop new technology to increase their profit, OLPC develops new technology to improve learning. A well-defined “learning centric design approach” ensures that all decisions taken are of direct relevance to creating the most optimal learning experience for children. No other laptop maker has yet to show such an initiative.

However the noble goals of OLPC do not stop here. OLPC has set out on a mission to show the world that the cost of technology can be brought down. When technology is expensive it ends up only amongst the elite, Walter explains. We here at OLPC have pushed the industry to lower margins proving to the world that a laptop can be produced for less than 200 dollars.

And the result – known as the XO, isn’t just a regular downscaled laptop. It’s a complete redesign from the mother board to the escape button. It’s a n ultra low-powered laptop with a power consumption of only about 1/10 of that of a Dell laptop.

And not just does it consume less power, the XO is built in such a way that children themselves can repair it should something fail. Replacing a faulty screen only requires the loosening of ten screws and a $2 spare part. Try asking the maker of your laptop how much it costs to replace a faulty screen, Walter jokingly adds.

But backing the technology is the constructionist learning approach. The XO comes with a full set of activities (programs) that support learning. The se activities enable children to express themselves in fundamentally new and powerful ways. All activities can be shared and collaboration is a key aspect of all activities. All activities enable children to create something, be it drawings, text, or other more rich media content. The story of a 9 year old girl in Uruguay who shot a video of a cow giving birth and published this to youtube, proves exactly what this project is all about – learning by doing. Nobody taught her how to shoot video, and nobody taught her about youtube. But providing her with the tools (a laptop with a built in video camera) she found out just how to do this all by herself and shared her story with the world:

Warning! This video shows an everyday phenomenon (a calving cow) filmed by a 9 year old XO user from Uruguay. For sensitive urbanites these images may be challenging.