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OLPC 2.0 — One Laptop Foundation Reboots
Posted by
timothy
on Thu Jan 29, 2009 01:53 PM
from the mouse-keeps-roaring dept.
from the mouse-keeps-roaring dept.
Greg Huang writes "In early January, the One Laptop Per Child Foundation laid off half its staff and shed work on the Sugar graphical interface. Now, OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte and president Chuck Kane for the first time detail the foundation's new plans, describe how the XO laptop will do what netbooks can't do, and share their hope to keep working with Sugar developer Walter Bender, who left OLPC last year."
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Submission: OLPC 2.0: One Laptop Foundation Reboots by Anonymous Coward
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Walter Bender — Taking Sugar Beyond the XO Laptop 84 comments
waderoush writes "While the One Laptop Per Child Foundation tries to reboot after drastic staff cuts, Sugar, the original open-source graphical interface for OLPC's XO Laptop, is rapidly evolving into a stand-alone learning platform that can run on any PC. Walter Bender, who left OLPC last year to start the non-profit Sugar Labs, has given a detailed interview about 'Sugar on a Stick' — the USB drive that allows any machine to boot into the Sugar environment. Bender also describes the Sugar upgrades coming in March — including better tools for file management, portfolio presentations, and Python code hacking — and talks about his hopes for expanding Sugar Labs and getting Sugar into more classrooms than OLPC can reach through its hardware."
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Hardware: OLPC Spinoff Pixel Qi Merges E-ink With LCD 78 comments
MaryBethP writes with some tasty prototype photos and info about the new OLPC spin off "Pixel Qi" that is combining the best of e-ink and traditional LCD displays. "The screen can work as a traditional backlit LCD when indoors, can have that backlight disabled to be perfectly visible outdoors (shown after the break), and, as its pièce de résistance, can be toggled into an energy-efficient 'epaper' mode. How exactly the company is fitting these seemingly disparate slices of technology into a single 10.1-inch screen is something of a mystery, but we're guessing much will be answered next week ahead of a planned product launch by the end of the year. Color us intrigued."
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Dead horse vapour (Score:5, Interesting)
Stop vaporising this dead horse.
Now based on a discontined CPU, and renamed because they never hit the price target; hijacked by Microsoft's department of evil, I really think they need to give up.
Re:Dead horse vapour (Score:5, Informative)
They also sabotaged their own efforts by NOT offering these units to the general public. Their limited "Buy One Give One" program was too little, too late.
If they had allowed the sale of the units to the general public, or even domestic markets (which I think they eventually did let one school district in the USA buy them) they would not have had such difficulty securing the minimum orders to secure their price point. They would also have had a revenue stream to sustain themselves and subsidize units for distribution in poorer areas. And they could STILL have remained a non-profit business while doing so.
Instead, Negroponte decided that it wasn't enough to give learning computers to underprivileged children in third-world coutnries - he also had to ensure that anyone who could actually afford them would be denied.
But the window of opportunity is now closed: The Asus Eee PC and similar products are satisfying the market the XO only teased. Sure the XO has a few features that other netbooks don't, but the novelty that could have taken them "over the hump" has worn off and now they're screwed.
=Smidge=
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
...he also had to ensure that anyone who could actually afford them would be denied.
The conspiracist in me jumps to the conclusion that they were forced into this. Maybe some company they deal with didn't want their profitable markets taken away. It is hard to believe they would be this stupid out of principle.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Dead horse vapour (Score:5, Interesting)
Add in the fact they blew the chance to get the economies of scale on their side, they pissed away any help they were getting from the FLOSS guys by kissing up to MSFT, and putting Windows ANYTHING on a flash, much less WinXP on a machine with a lousy 256MB of RAM(what are you nuts?) means the swapping will kill it deader than Dixie, I could go on but why bother. The OLPC was a great idea that was completely destroyed by the arrogance of one man, and that was Negroponte. He had a good idea and a device that if it were sold to a company that had a brain could still move enough product to get the price down low enough every kid in the first AND third world could get one, but frankly he just pissed it all away.
I just hope when they shut the doors that someone else will come along and buy the designs. Because from what I have seen it is a rugged little laptop that with a good Linux optimized for the specs could still make a great learning tool for the children of ALL nations. Let us just hope they don't let the designs die along with their badly run charity. Although after seeing the arrogance with crap like "give one get one" I wouldn't be surprised if they just let it die.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Sending food is good, but it only addresses the symptoms of poverty and does not provide a solution. Education does.
Provide food and education. Sending only food guarantees they will never be self-sufficient. Education at least gives them a shot at it.
And if you really want to help, send them food, computer and guns.
sending food makes poverty worse (Score:3, Insightful)
Start with people who can barely support themselves off the land. Add food. The population grows like crazy, ensuring that it is impossible for the people to support themselves off the land.
Since the resulting population depends on food handouts for survival, it is obviously more in poverty than the prior population.
Plus the economy was even destroyed by the handouts. (called "dumping")
Re:MOD PARENT UP (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:MOD PARENT UP (Score:4, Funny)
.
What, like Ohio?
Parent
Re:MOD PARENT UP (Score:5, Funny)
They have clean water in Ohio now?
Parent
Re:MOD PARENT UP (Score:5, Insightful)
I The last thing we need to be sending to people who are starving to death and getting shot by wandering bands of "people's militias" is a damn computer.
Your frequently stated argument is bogus.
I have lived as an expatriate in rural Africa for many years, and have personally known both starvers and shootees. They are a tragic but small minority of the people of Africa. One of the biggest problems facing the education system in the country in which I lived (Ghana) is the expense and unavailability of teaching materials. Rare is the classroom where anyone other than the teacher has a textbook, and frequently even the teacher doesn't have one.
The OLPC project directly addresses this issue, making low cost (free) teaching materials available on the desks of the children.
Delivering education to people addresses many of the underlying issues that cause the starving and shooting.
Parent
Re:MOD PARENT UP (Score:4, Insightful)
I think they're both fairly weak though. Introductory levels of education haven't changed so radically in the past X (X being whatever the refresh cycle on XO laptops would be) years that buying books would leave them anymore out of date than buying them laptops would. I'm pretty sure there's enough math that hasn't changed in the last 70 years and wont change in the next 50 that it's pretty moot. We're all still reading "classic" literature and studying history that's by and large hundreds to thousands of years old.
As for subject matter, I know everyone here like the idea of thousands of little FOSS programmers running around the developed world, but how about we work on literacy, computation, and social service, establish a backbone of sustainable economy and expanding education, then worry about whether they're cracking their shit with homebrew distros.
Parent
Re:MOD PARENT UP (Score:4, Interesting)
The laptops are a one-time expense. New ebooks literally cost an SD card and postage.
Meanwhile, the kids with paper Pre-Algebra and Biology textbooks have read them cover-to-cover forwards and backwards because they don't have the the Algebra 1 or Chemistry books.
Parent
There was no hijacking (Score:3, Insightful)
OLPC was the product of the western media lab and the geek mind-set.
OLPC's market was the third world education minister - who was expected to sign the purchase order for 100,000 units --- but otherwise keep his big mouth shut.
Come hell or high water ---
OLPC would implement a constructivist philosophy of education.
It would run Linux, the Sugar GUI, open-source apps and only open source apps.
The Windows alternative was the Cl
I'll take Pandora, thanks. (Score:4, Informative)
I have preordered the Pandora console [openpandora.org] and I'm happy. It gives me about 10h of running Ubuntu on an ARM cpu in a mere 0.3 kg of weight.
Oh thre's also an unofficial blog [wordpress.com] and a video vault [kultpower.de]. You might like the forums [gp32x.com] too.
Re:I'll take Pandora, thanks. (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:I'll take Pandora, thanks. (Score:5, Informative)
The OpenPandora guys were wise enough to not take any loans from banks, and so they are safe now despite the worldwide financial crisis. Instead they let people to make preorders about three months ago. People who don't trust, were not required to preorder
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
That thing is not cheap at all. And while it's small, it's also quite bulky, due to the thickness of the device.
I can think of better ways of spending EUR 212/$330, if I want an ultraportable.
Same name; New Project (Score:5, Insightful)
This is significantly more than a simple reboot. The goals of 'OLPC' are entirely different than the plans of this new 'OLPC 2.0' as far as I'm concerned and I imagine it is this way for many others as well. We watched and applauded as OLPC began only to watch in dismay and tears as they project allowed itself to be taken over from within.
There are all kinds of points that could be made here, but I'll let the others bring those up. For me the complete 180 they've done has made me write them off completely as a useless relic of what happens when you completely lose sight of your goal to the point you start to believe the ends justify the means. RIP OLPC.
--bornagainpenguin
Re:Same name; New Project (Score:5, Interesting)
In the 2007 holiday season ... the [G1G1] program took in $37 million. This past season, the foundation partnered with Amazon to sell the laptops and increased its advertising and marketing efforts substantially--to two or three times what they were in 2007, or close to $20 million, virtually all of it pro bono. Yet, sales fell off a cliff, coming in at about $2.5 million. Negroponte attributes "almost all" of the falloff to the poor economy, though others have theorized that the computers themselves had lost their appeal.
The fact that the second G1G1 failed despite significant marketing to the public-at-large, whereas the first G1G1 succeeded using only word-of-mouth and grass-roots marketing is quite telling. I'm sure there are many reasons (including the economy), but I believe the shift in values of the OLPC organization was a significant effect. I was super-keen to participate in the first G1G1 program: both because I felt I was helping an organization aligned with my ideals (free distribution of knowledge; free software, etc.) and because I felt that I was buying-in to a vibrant community (because all kinds of hackers and kids would be programming fun stuff for the platform).
But then I felt let-down by the changes in OLPC. The switch in emphasis (including the shift to Windows) meant that many enthusiasts and volunteers lost interest. And this devalued the whole platform to many people, since it seemed like the community was disappearing (or least fracturing and changing). So I stopped 'spreading the word', advocating for them, and didn't participate in the second G1G1. I'm sure many others felt as I did.
Obviously 1st-world enthusiasts and hackers are not the target audience for the XO. And yet I believe they were quite important in building and supporting the platform ($37 million from the first G1G1 is quite impressive), and that by neglecting that community OLPC has lost some of its most useful supporters. (Then again, I could be totally wrong; wouldn't be the first time someone over-estimated the influence they had on a particular sequence of events.)
Parent
Did you read TFA? (Score:5, Insightful)
Silly of me to ask, I know.
They have collocated 1 million machines.
The bloody point of these machines is to require as little infrastructure as possible.
Where they failed is:
- Never trying to harness economies of scale.
- Internal political squabbling (mostly brought by Negroponte and his silly decision to use Windows, thus becoming a collaborator with the expansion of the Windows monopoly).
- The failure to harness the impetus of the FOSS community in order to obviate many of the production costs related to software. The bare minimum to achieve this would be to ensure a free OS is at the core of the project.
Sort out these issues and you will have many takers, even in the poorest countries there are children with access to some infrastructure that would benefit enormously with such a device.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem is this - only your first point of failure is a failure of their own goals. The remaining two are only failures by the lights of a community that projected their politics and biases onto the OLPC project.
Re:Same name; New Project (Score:5, Insightful)
And thats where some of us argue.
I believe that tow things are keeping these countries of people back.
1. Bad government.
2. Us "donating" goods, hereby destroying what commerce they had before said dumping.
Any country run by corrupt and/or bad government is going to stay bad and corrupt until the people rise up and stop it. Before that, you'll have pockets of people who do make a living, albeit barely, until the government demands tax. Then its the beginning all over again.
And about the donation of goods: I saw a few documentaries on local TV and GoogleVids proclaiming that donation is also hurting them severely. When you dump 100 ton of clothes, you ruin any chance of making money in textiles. Same in any other industry, except this monopoly is done in good faith. Honestly, buying African made goods would bring them out of poverty rather fast. But their government wouldnt let them do that.
Parent
Re:Same name; New Project (Score:4, Insightful)
"Defective behavior choices" hey.
First world arrogance is fascinating to observe. Which group of people is wantonly engaging in a reckless, profligate, short-sighted, wasteful and totally unsustainable cultural lifestyle that will ultimately have a negative impact on every living creature on the world?
Certainly not those "defective" third worlders. Think about that next time you buy your first world products with their excessive packaging and drive your car a short distance that could and should be walked or biked.
Parent
Outcome not hard to predict... (Score:5, Funny)
and share their hope to keep working with Sugar developer Walter Bender, who left OLPC last year
I anticipate Bender will tell them to bite his shiny metal ass.
OLPW?? (Score:5, Funny)
too late (Score:3, Insightful)
You can already buy eee PC 900A laptops for $200 at BestBuy. Those suckers have 9 inch screens, Atom processors, and a gig of RAM. So who needs this OLPC stuff?
Re:too late (Score:5, Insightful)
You can already buy eee PC 900A laptops for $200 at BestBuy. Those suckers have 9 inch screens, Atom processors, and a gig of RAM. So who needs this OLPC stuff?
I wonder what effect the OLPC had on the eee PC. If because of the OLPC businesses like Asus start making low cost, and portable, computers then I think OLPC will have done a lot. Now if only Asus would include a similar power supply, pull a cord to generate power.
Falcon
Parent
Re:too late (Score:4, Insightful)
I think it had a lot of effect. I think it told Asus where people were looking, and Asus followed the money.
And good on them. Thanks to OLPC and Asus' following them, we now have many companies competing to bring low-priced laptops to the market, instead of hovering comfortably in the $1500 range like before.
Parent
Re:too late (Score:5, Informative)
My comparision: eeePC is notably more powerful, no question. It also feels more like a "real" computer, probably because of the hard top, rather than rubber, keyboard(also the color, obviously). The screen, though, is something else entirely. With the backlight off, or in bright sunlight, you get a 1200x900, very sharp, very readable, 200dpi, reflective LCD screen. With backlight on, or in lower light, you get color at somewhat lower, though still adequate, effective resolution. The screen is the big deal. In color mode, it is as good or better than a standard netbook screen. In greyscale, it is by far the best electronic reading device I've ever used(e-ink might be better; I've not seen it). The mesh stuff is cute; but not something I've had a chance to play with much. Sugar is interesting; but other linuxes work as well.
I can certainly see why netbooks would be largely preferable in many situations; but they cannot touch the OLPC screen, for my purposes, nor do they have any of the cute collaborative stuff(whose utility I cannot comment on).
Parent
Re:too late (Score:5, Insightful)
It often seems to me that the engineering was the only thing that OLPC got right. Everything else was like a lesson in how NOT to do it.
Parent
Re:too late (Score:5, Insightful)
You can already buy eee PC 900A laptops for $200 at BestBuy. Those suckers have 9 inch screens, Atom processors, and a gig of RAM. So who needs this OLPC stuff?
I think Negroponte said it best:
In the case of netbooks, he says, "You could arguably say we really created the netbook market. But if you look at the netbooks, they really copied the easy part. They didn't copy low power, they didn't copy mesh networks, they didn't copy sunlight-readable displays. All three things are absent from every single netbook."
I've personally used an OLPC before. While I'm not ready to buy one, I'm impressed with just how fine the design and build quality is for its intended purpose.
Seems like Slashdotters get regularly stuck in a mindset of "geez, it wouldn't work for me, therefore it must be crap." There are several billion other people on this planet, a sizeable number of whom might like it just fine.
Parent
Re:too late (Score:5, Interesting)
You're right to point out that netbook owners can power their own netbook with a crank or whatever the OLPC ended up using, but the interesting part of the quote is "we really created the netbook market." Hilarious how they'll say that now, when they refused to sell the OLPC to anyone that actually wanted one in the US or Europe. Now that they can buy EEE's, there's (basically) no reason for someone in a developed country to even consider the OLPC.
If they had marketed the OLPC to everyone, they not only would have created the netbook market they would have owned it, while subsidizing their efforts in Africa. Instead, Asus jumped in where OLPC wouldn't... and here we are where we're at today. Asus is making a killing while OLPC has essentially folded.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You can already buy eee PC 900A laptops for $200 at BestBuy.
Can you provide a link to that? I can't seem to find it. The cheapest one on BestBuy.com [bestbuy.com] is $329.99.
Re:too late (Score:5, Interesting)
So who needs this OLPC stuff?
Off the top of my head:
The cheap eee PC laptops still don't serve those purposes. They probably never will, since it is a very specialized and likely unprofitable market.
Parent
Re:too late (Score:5, Insightful)
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From TFA (Score:5, Insightful)
The most vivid example of this philosophy, to me, was Negroponteâ(TM)s comparison of the XO and netbooks. XOs cost about $225 apiece. Netbooks, which are produced by companies like Acer and Lenovo, among others, run about $300 to $450 but offer more memory and graphics power and larger screens. So, one could ask, wonâ(TM)t the normal, cost-curve-squashing evolution of computers obviate what OLPC is trying to do, and more efficiently than a non-profit? Negroponte replies that OLPC is not trying to compete with commercial computer makers but instead asking, "What are the things the normal commercial market wonâ(TM)t be pushing?"
What won't the "normal, cost-curve-squashing evolution of computers" include? Well, I don't see a huge rush by Acer, Dell, Lenovo, and others to include cranks, solar panels, and other alternative charging options to their units. I don't think the "normal commercial market" has decided to go that direction yet. Also, I doubt highly that these same companies will ever make their equipment repairable by children [com.com] as this would cut into their profit margins too much if they had to stop making computer equipment with proprietary and hard-to-replace components.
The underlying, subconscious goal (in other words, whether they realize it or not) of the OLPC project is to prove that reliable, hardy products don't have to cost a fortune. It's the mentality of the business world today to produce cheap crap that is then sold at a premium in order to finance yacht parties and private jets for the upper echelon of their employee-base. the OLPC is just one of the few outfits out there trying their best to disprove that particular business model.
FUD in the article... (Score:4, Insightful)
The XO is more rugged, but its not really lower power than netbooks. Most Netbooks are using things like the Atom, which is very low power and with sub-ms sleep states. The XO's only real power-advantage is the non-backlight mode on the screen.
Does the mesh networking actually work in the XO? And the mesh networking, how useful is it anyway?
And the XO's G1G1 is hardly "poor economy", its that the XO early adopter-types got them the first go-round (and realized how useless they are: the keyboard is abysmal, the trackpad flakey, and teh software an abomination in the sight of God and Man), so there was no one LEFT in the second.
power-advantage (Score:3, Interesting)
The OLPC screen really rocks. Only device I can comfortably surf on sun bathing on the deck.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
The OLPC screen really rocks. Only device I can comfortably surf on sun bathing on the deck.
I have to admit I have a bit prejudiced view of who the average Slashdotter is and what they likely look like...
And that vision just turns my stomach! ;-)
Re:FUD in the article... (Score:5, Interesting)
but its not really lower power than netbooks.
Fully agree on that, the thing last 3 hours on normal use, thats nothing special, far from it. They still haven't even enabled the power saving stuff in the default configuration and the checkbox for that only made it their in the last release and of course it doesn't exactly work great, since the switching between sleep mode and normal one is very noticable. At least normal standby is now working, but even that took a long long while to implement.
Does the mesh networking actually work in the XO? And the mesh networking, how useful is it anyway?
In the type of setting for which the OLPC was designed for (i.e. school with plenty of OLPCs around), very useful I guess. In the western world on the other side: rather useless, since you have a hard time finding anybody with a OLPC to mesh network and instead just connect to the next best WLAN access point.
And the XO's G1G1 is hardly "poor economy", its that the XO early adopter-types got them the first go-round, so there was no one LEFT in the second.
I think the failure was a simple matter of price, you can today buy a better machine for less money. The $400 was never a competitive price to begin with (for refernce: thats the same one as Sonys PS3 has), but in the first round they didn't have competition, in the second they had plenty. By making the offer time limited and the price twice as high as needed they certainly ruined their chances and gave the competition plenty of room to get solid offerings on the ground.
All that said, ruggedness and sunlight readable screen are great and still something that no other laptop has. But slow development on the software side and complete failure to properly sell the thing to consumers just couldn't lead to a happy ending.
Parent
Re:FUD in the article... (Score:5, Interesting)
the thing last 3 hours on normal use
That's just not true. In full backlight mode and WiFi you might get 3 hours on the OLPC, but in black and white outdoor sunlight readable mode, in ebook mode without WiFi, you get 12 hours on the OLPC while netbooks get below 2 hours with a similar sized battery.
Fact is OLPC chose a lower capacity battery using a new type of technology which, doesn't pollute, doesn't explode (like netbook batteries potentially do), and most importantly the OLPC battery lifetime is much longer. A normal netbook Lithium-Ion battery lowers it's capacity already afte 500 recharge cycles, after about 1500 charge cycles, a normal netbook lithium-ion battery usually is totally dead. While the OLPC battery keeps its charge capacity for moe than 5000 recharge cycles. Which means the same OLPC can last more than 5 years with the same battery capacity while netbook batteries last only about 1-2 years.
Parent
Re:FUD in the article... (Score:4, Informative)
Of course, others have pointed out that it's rugged. (If you haven't handled one, it's easy to fail to appreciate this fully.)
The keyboard is fine. Not great, but fine. And certainly tough. If you're a kid, it's great. No, you're not going to break any world records for typing speeds, but that's not what it's for.
But all this ignores the software. I'm not a fan of Sugar, but I do see just how much it buys you from an educational perspective. If you wanted to get a kid to start learning to program, this computer is *ideal*. The programming activities are just begging for you to tinker, and the fact that it's all Python means that as you learn, you can start modifying the interface.
The basic activities draw in even very young children very quickly. My daughter at 2 liked hitting keys on the keyboard of the mac and the linux Thinkpad. She *loved* playing with the music activities, or even the simple text-to-speech program, on the XO. Sure, you could replicate the functionality on a netbook with linux. Unless you installed Sugar, however, you would have a *lot* of work to do to make it as inviting.
Again, I say this despite the fact that I don't like Sugar. IceWM and no journal trying to index 8 gig flash drives suits me fine. But to get kids seriously involved in computing, the software is as impressively put together as the hardware.
It's easy to say they should have sold them at $250 each. They thought they were going to get millions of orders from developing countries, and they didn't want to get distracted trying to serve the developed world. They didn't realize that Microsoft/Intel would undermine their efforts in the ways that they did. They were idealistic and focused and didn't foresee certain things. I'll cut them some slack, since their focus did result in something so beautifully engineered.
Bummer if they don't ship many millions of XOs, great that they showed what is possible in the neighborhood of $200-$300.
Even with the dropping prices of netbooks, I'd still say that an XO is worth $400. If your child would otherwise get a PS3, no question.
Parent
OLPC is 10x to 20x lower power than netbooks (Score:3, Informative)
OLPC runs at below 2W all included, even below 1W in ebook reading mode, Netbooks need at least 20W all included.
Help the poor by helping everyone (Score:5, Insightful)
Who invented netbooks? (Score:5, Interesting)
It can be argued that OLPC started the netbook category, when ASUS and Intel saw the outpouring of support.
This is the only article I could find [cnet.co.uk] cited by Wikipedia supporting the widely-repeated claim that OLPC inspired the "netbook" market, and this is just speculation by one UK blogger. Yet it's cited as a source for a factual statement in Wikipedia article about the XO-1 [wikipedia.org] filled with "citation needed" tags.
I'm not saying it isn't true, but it's kind of a broad and evangelistic claim and requires a little more research.
Thankfully, Gizmodo did an excellent series [gizmodo.com] on the trials and triumphs of OLPC, including the "who invented the netbook" question. There's no clear answer, but it definitely appears that the OLPC woke up computer manufacturers to the fact that there was a large, untapped market out there for cheap "netbooks."
Parent
Overbudget? (Score:4, Insightful)
I thought this quote from the article was quite scary:
"The Rwandan leader initially ordered 10,000 XOs, then upped it to 100,000. The program now makes up a large fraction of the countryâ(TM)s education budget, according to Negroponte."
I'm all up for the use of computers in a developed world, including the OLPC initiative but considering most of these countries don't have a basic deployment of schools, teachers, books, etc isn't it unwise to spend a "large fraction" of your budget on OLPCs?
Horse not so dead (Score:5, Interesting)
OLPC has shipped (IIRC) 1 million machines, a number of pilot programs have gone well and will soon probably turn into larger purchases, the number of volunteers doing support, local training and infrastructure continues to increase geometrically.
OLPC doesn't have a bunch of market droids making sure that the PR is out there, but IMHO they have done, and are continuing to do, great things.
I don't think OLPC is over yet - quite the contrary.
And in answer to the 'poor folks don't need computers' - that is just stupid. The OLPC is one of the _answers_ to the problems of not enough books, schools, teachers, etc. For my own part, if I had had an XO when I was a kid, I could have taught myself at more than twice the rate that the schools worked at.
For real students, the net is the key to breaking out of the straitjacket of public education, which (like a team of horses) can only go as fast as the slowest person in the room. A networked laptop has the potential to provide a kind and level of freedom most people could not have dreamed of a few decades ago - the freedom to learn, to understand, to communicate and to compete.
Many developing nations are foregoing the expense of wired telecomms, using cellular instead - it's cheaper to do unless you already have wires in place. By adding a simple Wi-Fi hook at appropriate places, these countries could support the XO's networking at minimal extra cost.
Think of it this way - a developing nation with a computer-savvy young cohort, that is used to living on dirt, could become the biggest competitive nightmare that the developed world has seen yet. In ten years, we could have budding computer and bio-tech gurus coming out of Rwanda, like Steve Jobs and the other Silicon Valley geeks came out of the SF Bay Area in the 1970's.
Those kids will have the potential and the tools to break the cycle of cultural suppression that Africa has long suffered, to break the traditions of tribal conflict and to join together in creating new 'Black Tiger' national economic engines, like the 'Asian Tiger' nations of the 1980's.
And that will be something to see. I look forward to it.
Re:Horse not so dead (Score:4, Interesting)
I'll just reply to myself, to add a couple of video links. watch 10 year old kids in Uruguay discuss the advantages of asynchronous vs. synchronous communications, about email. Also mplayer, PDF, etc.
How many geeks on /. could discuss synchronous vs. asynchronous when they were 10?
Audio is bad, subtitles help.
http://www.overstream.net/view.php?oid=i2ueryser0rz [overstream.net]
http://www.overstream.net/view.php?oid=i4m7lvmniztl [overstream.net]
"There are amazing things in here...how the students and teacher keep in constant communication, how the teacher keeps track of what the students are doing, how and what they are learning from TurtleArt, how they use email, how they figured out how to convert and play YouTube videos, and how the teacher uses them as part of the curriculum." - from one of the OLPC mail lists.
Parent