By Jim Wyss | McClatchy Newspapers
MARACAIBO, Venezuela — As Hender Reverol heads to
third grade this year, he will have Venezuela's newest educational tool tucked
beneath his arm: a government-issued laptop.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has vowed to give
every elementary school student - more than 5 million of them - a free personal
computer. If the government meets that target, Venezuela would join Uruguay as
the only countries in the world to fully embrace the goals of the so-called one
laptop per child program.
Since inaugurating the initiative in 2009,
Venezuela has issued more than 750,000 of the rugged, blue-and-white laptops
called Canaimas. During the current school year the government expects to
deliver at least 900,000 more machines and plans to deploy 3 million by 2012 -
putting it at the vanguard of a worldwide educational movement.
"The Canaimas will keep coming," Chavez
told a group of cheering students last month. "There will not be a single
child without a Canaima."
The computers have 8.9-inch screens, built-in
cameras, wireless cards and one gigabyte of memory. They also come loaded with
open-source, Venezuela-produced educational software. While most of the laptops
are imported from Portugal, Venezuela is ramping up a factory that will churn
out 500,000 Canaimas per year.
"One day we may even export them," Chavez
mused on television.
Venezuela's Ministry of Science and Technology,
which runs the program, did not respond to multiple interview requests. But
it's clear that Venezuela is buying into an educational philosophy that is
catching on globally.
By encouraging children to take their
Internet-enabled laptops home, the theory is that their natural curiosity will
spur learning in an increasingly connected world.
"With a computer lab, you might be able to
teach a child how to use a computer, but the child will never get to the point
where the computer is facilitating learning," said Robert Hacker, the
chief financial officer of the One Laptop Per Child Association, or OLPC, which
helped spark the movement.
Started in Boston by MIT professor Nicholas
Negroponte, OLPC recently moved their commercial operations to Miami. The
nonprofit organization makes solid laptops designed to be massively deployed in
the developing world. Their XO laptops cost $209 and some 2 million machines
have been distributed in more than 40 countries. The organization's biggest
success has been in Uruguay, where 98 percent of all elementary school students
have XO laptops.
While the organization is not involved in the
Canaima project, there has been some informal communication with the Venezuelan
government, Hacker said. OLPC also provides consulting services to countries
even when they are not using XO laptops.
"One of the most significant realizations that
we've made is that the key to a good one-to-one deployment is teacher
training," Hacker said. Without supervision and constant updates, the
laptop programs can sometimes go adrift. "All of the one-to-one
deployments that have been done without OLPC struggle with trying to realize
the educational and learning benefits that they hoped for," he said.
While Venezuelan authorities in charge of the
program would not talk to The Miami Herald, anecdotal evidence suggests it
might be facing some growing pains.
Eight-year-old Hender received his Canaima last
year in the second grade. His mother, Carmen Reverol, said he often gets math
and Spanish homework he's expected to do on the computer. But Hender seemed to
struggle with the machine.
Asked what he could do with the computer, the boy
said he could take pictures with it. Pressed about other ways he uses the
computer, he said, "I like to look at pictures, too."
Deomira Rosales is the secretary of education for
Venezuela's most populous state, Zulia, where Hender is a student.
She said that while the central government has been
handing out Canaima laptops in Zulia, local education officials have been cut
out of the process. The computers have only been given to national schools -
run by the central government - while state schools have been excluded, she
said. And many of Zulia's teachers aren't familiar with the machines.
"What sense does it make to hand out computers
if the teachers don't even know what's on them or how to use them?" she
asked. "We haven't even been allowed to evaluate them to see if the
software is appropriate for our students."
The government does have a website dedicated to the
computers and the educational software with a special section for teachers.
Rosales is also the sister of Zulia's former
opposition governor Manuel Rosales, who fled the country in 2009 amid
corruption charges. He and his followers claim those charges were trumped-up by
Chavez to sideline him before the 2012 presidential election. Deomira Rosales
suggested the laptops were being used as political gifts to try to woo the
state's poorest families in the run-up to the vote.
Rosales said her office remains focused on creating
school-based computer labs - that are also open to non-students - where trained
staff can guide users.
Other families contacted by The Miami Herald in
Maracaibo admitted that they had sold their Canaima laptops.
Hacker, of OLPC, said his organization cracked that
problem by requiring XO users to log into their school network every 48 hours.
If they don't, the computers go dark.
"If you're not in school for two days, your
laptop is just a piece of plastic," he said. As a result, less than half a
percent of all the laptops issued by OLPC have been stolen or gone missing over
the last four years, he said.
While many Latin American nations have embraced the
one laptop per child concept, there are some notable holdouts.
Mexico and Colombia, in particular, do not have
national programs, Hacker said.
Hernando Jose Gomez, director of Colombia's
National Planning Department, said the private sector is already producing
cheap and powerful computers, and financing for the machines means that even
the most humble families can afford them.
The chokepoint, as the government sees it, is
access to the Internet. That's why the administration is focused on expanding
its fiber-optic network from 200 to 700 municipalities over the next few years.
It's also rolling out a plan that would subsidize the Internet for the nation's
poorest, he said.
"We think that computer labs are still the
best way to use computers as tools for research and learning," he said.
"But we would never rule out a one laptop per child approach."
The Canaima project has yet to reach its full
potential, but it's clear that it has been a hit with the families that have benefited
from the program.
"I like the changes that Chavez is making to
the educational system," said Hender's mother, who has put five other
children through school. "This is the first time anyone in the family has
had a computer."
©2011 The Miami Herald
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