Time to ponder

The best part about holidays back home must be the absence of any possible work-related meetings, practices and rehearsals which are quite impossible given the fact that everyone's scattered around the globe.

A true holiday is indeed one where there is time aplenty to read books that there never seemed to be the time for, to think about issues that always seemed to be displaced lower down the priority list by other seemingly more urgent issues.

Or perhaps it's just poor time management that has prevented me from thoughts for a long while.

The One Laptop Project was something that caught my attention in the DigiLife section of the Straits Times. Without a hard drive and various other functions that add frills and cost to the conventional laptop, the One Laptop laptops currently cost $188 a piece.

Simple yet enough.

In the pilot project, these laptops were distributed to elementary school children in Arahuay, Peru, many of whom come from families that subsist on this same amount each month.

Although teething problems are and have been a given, the benefits of this programme seem plentiful. The biggest perhaps would be the fact that information and sources on the internet and endless and free.

Wikipedia alone, save for the occasional bias and inaccuracy, provides a strong foundation for the education of a child in a society where textbooks,up-to-date ones at that, and underqualified or simply-too-busy teachers are a luxury.

With the proliferation of online teaching materials, one can learn everything from matrices to mitosis to medieval history to modern Malaysia, giving rise to a well-educated and informed society.

And yet, the setbacks are substantial. Energy sources, internet access, internet safety, technical support... More importantly, will this change the lifestyles of people for the worst?

Just as the internet stands for educational information at one's fingertips, it can also mean various forms of undesirable information such as pornography. Who, if not the teachers and parents(many of whom themselves are learning), is trained to deal with this?

Indeed, this could be well complemented with an essay on whether the internet has been a boon or bane to society.

But for now, the plan to bring easily accessible information to children around the world especially in nations with a poor education infrastructure through a common medium that is relatively well established and certainly extensive sounds like a promising one.