Apple iPad Versus OLPC XO Laptop
Anyone interested in technology world-wide would have become aware of the announcement of the iPad tablet device this week. Coverage of it has been hard to ignore, and I know many many educators including myself have of course been very interested in its implications for education because of the success many have had in adapting the iPod touch for use in schools. But in this post I’d like to reflect a little on the other great mobile education movement of the last three years – that of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) ‘children’s machine’
Last night, everyone who participated in the Give One Get One donation program from One Laptop Per Child received an email from Nicholas Negroponte asking for broken or unused XO laptops for Haiti. Now I’m not sure what OLPC intends to do with our old XO’s, but unless they’re gonna donate all their collected XO’s to Waveplace Foundation , it will be a waste.
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Waveplace Foundation: OLPC Haiti Rebuilding Done Right
How is this for a creative use of XO laptops: the featured technology in an educational music video sponsored by USAID. Delivered to Jamaica as part of a program with Charles Nesson of Harvard University, the XO laptops are nominally in Ascot High School to provide a creative outlet for 25 students in the ninth grade Students Expressing Truth (SET) programme. But in this music video they take on a life of their own: Now if only that were the norm for OLPC related videos! Boogie down with OLPC News via RSS Feed , Email or Twitter
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Defend the Truth with OLPC Jamaica’s Music Video
My name is Jonah Bossewitch and I am a lapsed OLPCNews contributor who has strayed from the flock, but still has (a shaken) faith in OLPC miracles . I was a bit startled by the suggestion that OLPCs could help Haiti relief efforts right now. I am struggling to imagine how the OLPC could help in a country that has very limited power, Internet, and resources.
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Humane Communications over Human Networks
The earthquake in Haiti is a stunning disaster in a country already in crisis from decades of disastrous governments and natural calamities. The poorest nation in the Western hemisphere, this new devastation we see every night on TV makes you want to do something – anything – to help the Haitian people. XO hope, but not right now But OLPC is not the right solution for Haiti right now
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Don’t Go with XO’s: OLPC Isn’t Right Haiti Earthquake Response
Share My XO OLPC is not collecting dust any more after I suddenly realized that its reflective screen mode would allow me to read safaribooksonline.com while outside. Firefox is an option , but I went for Opera.
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XO Laptop eBook Reading O’Reilly’s Safari Books Online
One Laptop per Child is a great concept, but I thought I’d try a similar project. I am Karel Kosman and I’m proposing One Laptop Per Village for the following reasons: First of all, from my understanding, OLPC is not a full computer and cannot install standard Windows programs, so the computer may be better served as an educational tool for children.
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We Need One Laptop Per Village
One Laptop per Child Association will be gathering 300 MBA, graduate and undergraduate business students to develop innovative business cases for XO laptop deployment under the auspices of the Global Case Challenge . But I wonder why
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OLPC Doesn’t Need a Global Business Case Challenge
Back in early October a tweet by someone I follow alerted me to the fact that the deadline for submissions to the 26th Chaos Communication Congress (26C3) was less than 48 hours away. In a lunch break I whipped up a quick proposal for a lecture called ” After the Hype – The current state of One Laptop per Child and Sugar Labs “. A couple of weeks later I learned that my submission had been accepted.
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After the Hype: The current state of OLPC and Sugar Labs
Share In The Tragedy of One Laptop Per Child , Michael Gartenberg at Slashgear just called a million and a half computers in the hands of children, radically transforming education and social structures in dozens of countries, a tragedy. With another million on order. Well, that’s not what he said, because he is apparently unaware of these and many other facts
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What Tragedy of One Laptop Per Child?
The LISP (LISt Processing) programming language is relevant to OLPC’s XO laptop because, like an iPhone or smart phone, it has very limited resources and is not a full sized computer. The LISP community came up with software for biology called BioBike . It is 3 things: An environment where people can learn about the genome of different plants and animals and at an advanced level conduct their own research in a contructionist like way
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OLPC Should Look Past Hardware to LISP and FPGA
I think is time that Sugar Labs and Sugar developers to realize that the success or failure of Sugar does not depend on its ability to play YouTube videos . Not because is not important but because there is very little chance to penetrate this market dominated by Microsoft and Apple. Like it or not Sugar Learning Platform’s success or failure lays on its 1 million users with XO-1 (and hopefully XO-1+).
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Sugar Learning Platform Will Succeed In Virgin Markets
What has OLPC taught us? Over on the Educational Technology Debate , we’ve spent the month of December analyzing what we’ve learned from OLPC after four years of deployments. With input from a cross-section of interested parties – learned academics to experienced educators to volunteer implementers – here is the One Laptop Per Child impact we’ve found: What We Learned From OLPC Deployments OLPC Is Not Revolutionalizing Education OLPC Showed Children’s Computer Security is Possible OLPC: How Not to Run a Laptop Program For Real OLPC Impact, We Need Infrastructure Reflections on the Success of OLPC in Education The debate continues, so please add your voice to our conversation.
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What We Are Learning From One Laptop Per Child
If there ever was proof that Nicholas Negroponte wants a laptop project, not an education project, its the slick XO-3 images that Yves Behar and Nicholas Negroponte strutted out in Andy Greenberg’s fluff piece ” The $75 Future Computer “. A waste of OLPC resources How can One Laptop Per Child be an education project, when all we see from it is ever more fantastical laptop designs? We’ve been wow’ed with their XO-2 and now XO-3 vaporware for the past year while Negroponte crows that: “We don’t necessarily need to build it,” Negroponte told Forbes
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XO-3 Laptop Fantasy Distraction from Education Reality
CherryPal just announced it’s Africa Netbook available for sale today through it’s website for a retail price of just $99, something that OLPC had promised years earlier and failed to deliver upon. While it is certainly not developed to live up to the specifications of the XO, the Africa Netbook does boast: 7-inch display 400MHz processor 256MB memory 2GB flash storage Linux or Windows CE 4 hour battery Their laptop is nothing groundbreaking here, but I feel that if somebody wanted to run an implementation today this would be a seriously be worth considering or at least using for a small test implementation. The price is certainly worth taking note of as this could easily be twice as many laptops for a developing nation or even for use in traditional classrooms.
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CherryPal beats OLPC to a $99 Africa Netbook
Back when One Laptop Per Child started, they made an interesting point around evaluations of computer usage in schools. Their core belief was that all evaluations were flawed because we don’t have the right tools to assess the impact of ICT in education, and therefore talking about testing the efficacy of 1:1 computing was wasted effort. Nicholas Negroponte holding electricity I’ve heard this refrain repeated often since then, and not just by those promoting technology in schools.
My neighbors and friends on Bainbridge Island remember my active campaigning in December 2007 to get as many people as possible to order a One Laptop Per Child device for their children. Now it’s being started up again at Amazon.com but so far you can only buy them for other children in poor countries – not yet for our own children. I hope this changes, but whatever happens am curious to see if folks in the Pacific Northwest are interested in connecting around the topic of OLPC
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Re-Starting Pacific Northwest OLPC User Groups
One Laptop Per Child has helped another person improve a career. Anne Gentle has used her experience in Book Sprints for OLPC to create Conversation and Community: The Social Web of Documentation . It features last August’s pioneering OLPC/Sugar Austin book sprint to create Sugar and XO manuals, that we covered here: OLPC / Sugar – Book Sprint, part I: Preparations OLPC / Sugar – Book Sprint, Part II: Action The printed OLPC Laptop and Sugar manuals have arrived! And as Web Worker Daily says , the book has lessons for all web workers, whether they are technical writers or not: The book’s coverage of wikis built upon the author’s real-life experience with the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Project and working as a senior technical writer inside a major technology corporation
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Conversation and Community in One Laptop Per Child
In the New York Times article Nonprofit Laptops: A Dream Not Yet Over , we are teased with the suggestion that next month we’ll have the OLPC 1.5 in production, with double the speed and four times more memory than the XO-1. Before we get geek lust for OLPC hardware, I’d like to congratulate Sugar Labs on its software – the ever demure Walter Bender let it slip this week that his team has passed a very important psychological milestone: 1. I had been meaning to mention that already several weeks ago we exceeded one-million downloads from activities.sugarlabs.org
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Over 1.1 Million Sugar Activities in the Wild!
Yesterday I had an interesting talk with Satish Jha of OLPC India. Overall he had an compelling theme – India has the ability to finance One Laptop Per Child for all 25 million children in India, and it should do this now – for if children are not studying on a screen today, they (and India) will not reach full potential in the future. Satish Jha of OLPC India OLPC is affordable to state governments Education in India is a province of the state governments, not the national one, and Satish has visited many of them to bring the one laptop per child to their attention
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OLPC: The Best ROI for Indian Children