Digital Literacy Project

Digital Literacy Project (DigiLit), a non-profit and official Harvard student organization, aims to promote digital literacy for teachers and children in the developing world. In parts of the developing world, less than one in every 1,000 people have access to a computer, compared to 600 in every 1,000 people in the developed world. Further, in developing countries, there are between 5,000 and 1,400,000 people per personal computer . This serious socioeconomic concern, known as the “digital divide,” refers to the growing gap between those who have access to technology and those who do not. About four years ago One Laptop per Child, a non-profit founded at the Media Lab at MIT, started to develop an distribute cheap, durable laptops designed specifically for children in 3rd world countries. While OLPC aims to tackle the growing digital divide by distributing inexpensive, child-friendly laptops, it has too ambitiously overestimated the resources available, both monetary and informational, and underestimated the training required to make this project more than just a “technology dump”. OLPC does not provide training workshops or laptop-based curricula that integrate the XO into the classroom. Thus, DigiLit, having identified this growing need, promotes 1-to-1 computing by initiating XO laptop pilot programs and by developing training materials and customized curricula for both domestic and international classroom environments. The lack of academic research has also prompted the team to conduct formal research studies on the effects of the XO and related software on classroom dynamics. With appropriate support for teachers and students, we believe that the XO is a realistic way to bridge the digital divide because of its low cost and potential as an educational and creative tool.