On a rainy evening on January 17, 2007, Walter Bender, president for the software development at the non-profit One Laptop Per Child association (OLPC), arrives at the MIT Museum in Cambridge around 6:30 p.m. He parks his Peugeot mountain bike against the wall, on the left side of the Museum temporary door.

His yellow helmet in one hand, he climbs the stairs leading to the Soap Box event conference room, balancing his steps to the rhythm of his k-way trousers hiss. The atmosphere is convivial, less than fifty people, men, women and children joined the event, and sit in arc in front of the soapbox. While John Durant, director of the MIT Museum introduces him, Bender pulls two green and white plastic laptops out of his backpack. When he opens them, the two antennas give the laptops a frog silhouette.

Here they stand, on a tiny podium, the famous $100 laptops.

Under the Memorandum of Understanding, signed at the World Economic Forum by United Nation Development Program Administrator Kemal Dervis and OLPC Chairman Nicholas Negroponte, the UNDP said it would work with local and international partners to design and develop programs to deliver the $100 laptop technology and learning resources to schools in developing countries. In January 2006, Dervis announced he was delighted to be part of this venture, which has the potential “to break through the digital divide.”

But what is the digital divide? And is the OLPC really aiming at bridging a digital gap? What’s the group’s real mission goal?

“I don’t really understand what the digital divide is,” Bender says three months later over a phone interview.

Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger, professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in Cambridge defines the digital divide as the gap between people who have access to new technology and people who don’t have such access. Because the OLPC will be distributing laptops, the mission has raised several questions. The misunderstanding of the project is something it faces regularly. On the night in January, it happens again at the MIT Museum.

Bender continues his intervention describing the laptop features. “This is a new kind of laptop equipped with technology not even yet found in most computers,” he explains. The 7.5-inch diagonal super-high resolution color screen can be easily seen outside in daylight. It can swivel in all directions or fold flat to create a tablet computer for reading or playing games. It consumes about 2 watts in power, which is 1/10th the amount used by a typical laptop; in areas without reliable electrical supply, the laptop can be powered by a hand-held generator. “Pull the string for one minute, and it will operate for 10 minutes,” Bender says, mimicking the movement. The rugged water-and dirt-resistant rubberized keyboard perfectly fits a child’s hand size. Inside, the operating system is based on Linux open-source software. Instead of folders and windows on the screen, a circle of icons showing what activities are in use surrounds an X and a smaller O representing a child. According to Bender, the most powerful tool is the network the laptop can create. “Two built-in Wi-Fi antennas automatically create a mesh-network.” Bender means that every laptop can connect to each other within about one-third of a mile. The “mesh” also means that if any one of the linked computers has access to the Internet, all of them will. “That’s important in places where Internet connections can be few and far between,” he adds. But Bender insists on the fact that the network is not powerful only because of the Internet access. “It is strong because it gives the teachers and the children a constant connection with each other,” he adds.

In a video interview on the TechnologyReview web site, Nicholas Negroponte asked why a child in a developing country would need a laptop when he might not have food, probably no water, and when his parents would earn around $1 a day. “Take the word laptop, and substitute it with the word education,” he says.

The OLPC faces a harsh misconception of its project. It uses laptops, so people think they only want to bridge the digital divide. But Bender and his team have decided to target children because they are convinced they can bridge the divide between developed countries and developing countries through education.

“I know that beyond food and peace, learning is the next,” Bender explains. He thinks more about it in bridging an educational divide. The computers will only be means to solve other problems. They take more than an information dimension.

Learning “learning” is what the OLPC is about. The group uses a laptop as a vehicle to transform education. “We don’t try to take the information and stuff the children’s head with it, like we would stuff a goose to make “foie gras”, Negroponte added. The computers are designed to forgo rote-learning exercises and instead promote more creative methods like exploring through the Internet browser, and expressing through the video, text, and music programs. The machine is built to promote criticism, dialogue and collaboration between the children themselves, and between the children and their teachers.

This method, named Constructionist Learning appeared in the 1980s at the MIT under the supervision of Seymour Papert. “This project comes after a long history of working with technology and education,” Bender explains. He assumes they bring the children an environment where they can be engaged by ideas. “And that’s when learning happens,” he says. The laptops include a Wiki system: a system where every page can be created and transformed by the children. Either literature, mathematics, or any textbooks, lead to a discussion thread that each child will follow through the time.

The OLPC long-term goal is to transform schools. “We know it is not going to happen overnight,” Bender says. Education is also looked as an element of security (element of eliminating terrorism by eliminating poverty), and eliminating lack of communication. That’s mainly what the OLPC mission is about. But still, some people don’t understand it that way.

We’re back at the SoapBox event in Cambridge. As Bender asks the public for any questions, a hand rises in the last row. “Shouldn’t children in the US get the laptop before children in developing countries?” Cambridge Councilor Henrietta Davis asks. That night, Bender answered that the $100 laptop would not be available in the U.S. because the OLPC association perceives it to be a greater need in the underdeveloped world.

A week after, Davis explained what she had in mind when she asked that question. “If my kids didn’t have any computers at home, they wouldn’t have jobs today. The fact that they had it at home made them unafraid of the technology,” she explains, cracking a smile. Bridging the digital divide is on Davis’ program. She adds that according to Walter Bender, 85% of what children learn about the computer, they learn at home. She doesn’t want children in Cambridge to be disadvantaged because they don’t have any access to the Internet at home. Davis wants to give access to computers to every child from the 9th grade. She is convinced that otherwise they would be socially disadvantaged.

But some scholars mistrust her arguments and think that the expression “digital divide” is too often misused. “I hear this argument all the time, and this is the sad story the councilor plays with to justify the expansion of a municipal WiFi network. But I haven’t seen any data on the disadvantage yet,” Harvard’s professor Mayer-Schoenberger says.

He warns we have to be careful when using the expression digital divide. “I am getting a little agitated because the digital divide debate has been so boringly superficial,” he says, moving his hands.

He explains that the superficiality comes from two fundamental misunderstandings. First, it is assumed that everybody wants to be connected to the information on the Internet. “And that is not true. So [we] shouldn’t force those people to be connected,” he says. Mayer-Schoenberger adds that we should rather help those who want to be connected, but for some reasons cannot access the Internet. “We need to be aware of how many people really want to be connected,” he says. Second, a huge distinction has to be made. Two digital divides are described with the same expression. One divide exists between rich countries and poor countries. The other one separates young and old, rich and poor, educated and uneducated people within the same country. “The best predictors for connectivity are the income and education,” Mayer-Schoeberger says.

When scholars talk about the divide between developed countries and developing countries, they bring up a fundamental question. How should developing countries invest their limited amount of money? In water treatment or in computers?

“This is a fundamental issue. And the obvious answer to this is that we should only invest specifically in bridging the digital divide, if bridging the divide will fundamentally help and change the society. Otherwise we are much better of to providing water and basic energy and food,” Mayer-Schoeberger says. He doesn’t think that the OLPC is useful in all the developing countries; because human beings first have their basic needs cared for. “And they will need the tools to survive in their context rather than the tools to become a ‘dot com’ entrepreneur.” He adds that some people think that the world would be better by bridging the digital divide. “But I’m really pessimistic. I believe the world problems can best be overcome by better education and by lowering the income difference,” he says.

The OLPC $100 laptops will bring education to children at school, but also might be used as a means of development in the country. The association hasn’t worked on that yet, but Bender explains that the laptops will have a real impact on other siblings and the children’s parents because they will bring education at home. That brings up another question: Can the laptop have an impact on the economy of developing countries? To what extent does the digital divide influence the economy of those countries?

Today, it seems that the digital divide is in vogue. Everybody talks about it, but nobody has really done a lot about it. Mayer-Schoenberger says he is still waiting to see a compelling study that shows that the simple fact that you’re not connected to the Internet has the most negative impact on the economy of a country.

Nicholas Economides is a professor of economics at the Stern School of Business at New York University. He qualifies our society as an informational society. “The agricultural economy was led by the production of agricultural products; then you had the industrial era. Today, the post-industrial society is driven by the distribution or sale of knowledge,” he says. He is convinced that the new technologies have an impact on the development of a country.

In history, key infrastructures have played a strategic role in development. The telephone and electricity are crucial for the development of a country. The telegraph and fax have always been important for business. “If I’m producing something, I need to know how much I can sell it, and buy,” Economides explains.

With the Internet, millions of people can see the information you post at once. It has become an element of distribution and of electronic commerce. Economides also agrees that the Internet is crucial for learning and education. He draws an analogy to the role the libraries had in the Byzantine Empire. “All the information was stoked in the library. And if you decided to live a town you would take all the books with you,” he says. To his mind, one of the most urgent steps to take in developing countries to bridge the gap is to lower the prices of the connection. Lower the prices either by adding more concurrence or by sharing the same connection. “That’s what they are doing with the $100 laptop,” he says.

Since February 2007, children have been testing the machines in Nigeria and in Brazil. The OLPC is now waiting to get some feedback so that they could solve the problems children face with the machine. Another question the OLPC asked among the association members was the question of training. It is well known that if you give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a day. But if you teach him how to fish he’ll eat forever. Clearly to bridge the gag, you could to plug computers to the Internet, but this is not sufficient. You also need to teach people how to use the tool.

Mayer-Schoeberger assumes that both are needed: computers and training. But Bender has different thoughts on the question. “Children will be reactive, intuitive, curious and attracted to the tool,” he says. While some short training will support the computers, Bender is deeply convinced that children will teach themselves and each other, taking advantage of the mesh network technology that will allow them to constantly and easily communicate. “One of the misconceptions about computers and kids is that kids need training, they need to be taught how to use a computer,” he says. “There is overwhelming evidence over 40 years that this is not the case.”

Bender likes to tell the story of an experiment, one academic did in New Delhi, India. He installed a computer in a hole in a wall. “Kids started using it. There weren’t any classes, any trainers. They taught each other,” he says. Whether this method works or not is too early to determine. By the end of the summer of 2007, the $100 laptop should be distributed in eight developing countries: Argentina, Brazil, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Rwanda, Thailand, and Uruguay.

Bender lets the laptops circulate among people at the Soap Box event. Most of them are amazed by the size of the keyboard. Having the laptop in her hands, one young woman even admits that she realizes now the real goal of the OLPC mission. “It looks like a toy, they’re not doing it only for the technology,” she says. Not only for the technology, but also to bring education and tools for reflection in the developing world.

Video of the conference