OLPC Project Disappoints In Peru 274
00_NOP writes "The One Laptop Per Child project has disappointed in Peru, reports the Economist, apparently because in general teachers did not make creative use of the technology. As in other cases the computers seem to have been regarded as ends in themselves rather than tools to help change the ways kids are taught. Quite disappointing for those of us looking for Linux-Global-Domination but not really much of a surprise given the experience in richer countries either."
Ha, here's problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
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I don't know if you're serious or not, but in Portugal that was considered one of the main failures (Linux). Most teachers had no idea on how to use their heavily modified linux distro ( custom flavor of http://www.caixamagica.pt/ [caixamagica.pt] ) so they simply ignored the computers, that in turn became more of a plaything than a teaching tool.
It's not enough to get Linux to computers, laymen need to be educated or an intuitive shell needs to be developed (like OS X did with unix).
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Honestly, I don't really think that merely teachers ignoring the computers is going to be much of a problem. A lot of teachers don't care about new teaching methods, and many aren't keen on learning new skills to use new tools.
But as long as the computers aren't just tossed in the trash and the children receive them, they'll still help. How better to encourage children's curiosity than to give them a computer to play with and no adults telling them how they should or shouldn't use it?
I still maintain, howev
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OS doesn't matter in failure (Score:5, Insightful)
Computers and education (Score:5, Insightful)
We should instead focus on teaching children how to solve problems by writing programs. We should have a completely different approach to computers in education, because computers are different sorts of tools than what we had previously. Let students hack, and moreover create an environment that is friendly toward programming. We live in a computerized world; programming should be considered a matter of basic literacy at this point.
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It's easier than that. First, you need software that can educate. My kid is learning the names of animals, to do basic math (additions, substractions, etc) with games. There are many different "learn games". He is two years old. The key? Only the best games, which means: 1) has educational value 2) kids find interesting/rewarding. When that happens, they learn a lot and very fast.
Computers are meaningless. The real challenge are the applications, how to make them educational but awesomely interesting. The p
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First, the project couldn't have even been done financially using any other OS/hardware combination.
What is better, to have five useless computers or one that is useful?
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Which, given the current unpolished state of linux desktop apps, might just put the kids off computers altogether.
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In some circles the project seems to be more about pushing Linux-Global-Domination as opposed to helping educate people.
"Plus ca change, ..."
It's a tool. It's not "The Enlightenment" in a box. A screwdriver manipulates screws. It doesn't build buildings. What you choose to do with it says more about you than it does about it. It's just a tool!
Stupid users do stupid things ("film at 2300h"). If they wanted it done right, they should have asked me how, damnit. When will users learn?
It's not magic! Stop thinking it is. You don't expect a car to drive itself, or a plane to fly itself. Why do you expect a computer to dr
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Next time they should install a proprietry and closed OS on these laptops, thereby increasing their price and enforcing minimum hardware requirements.
Re:Works 4 MS & kids too (Score:5, Insightful)
Since once they're out in the working world, they'll find what they're used to already: Windows!
By the time any of them are out in the working world, Microsoft will have gone through several generations of Ribbons and Metro and whatnot other changes. What kids need is to learn to write and structure documents, not the finer points of style and formatting. They need to be able to use their math in spreadsheets, making formulas and chaining them together, not making pretty management reports. That's not to say it won't be important in the future, but that's it's mostly pointless to learn it now to know how it'll be in Word and Excel 2022.
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Microsoft'll still be there as it's been 4 decades: Ur point's what? The kids'll grow w\ changes as we all did on MS or anyone's wares. Change is a fact of life in the field of computing, get used to it.
U fail to note that there are radically differing versions of *NIX desktops too, ala KDE vs. GNOME (& others like xfce & more and changes in them as well over time), plus the changes that occur on its attendant softwares that ride on it too (that aren't used 1/100th as much as Windows & its wares are).
Thus, Your very argument is defeated on its very basis, albeit, turned around on Linux, ala "reverse-psychology" and the numbers prove the rest for me in terms of usership/mindshare (as well as marketshare).
Wait, what?
The argument was basically "Microsoft software will have a different interface by the time these kids leave school, so the important thing is teaching the kids to use computers, not about teaching them about using a particular flavour of computers."
So whose argument has been defeated? I'd say it's yours. We don't need to teach kids Microsoft software, just software. I started learning word processing on BBC Masters and Acorn Archimedeses, and I'm better with Microsoft Word than many of my colle
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But you can't just drop it out of an airplan
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paper products do not last in the rural humid environments the OLPC devices are designed for.
Well, that's just untrue. I live in a steamy tropical area, where it's 97% humidity for several months of the year. And I have shelves of books and have for 20 years. I rarely use aircon, just a fan mostly. A school textbook rarely is useful more than a year later anyway.
Not to say that OLPCs couldn't find uses in small villages with no libraries and one-room schools, the main one being you could fit a huge library of ebooks on one, I think.
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The kind of teachers and administrators who can't adapt their polices to get good use out of an OLPC are also the kind who make up bizarre and illogical polices for textbooks, such as requiring every child to run with a 35 pound load of them between classes, or cutting out the world maps and text that refers favorably to a rival country from the geography books. Before you just say "It didn't work!", ask yourself, "Would anything else have worked any better with these people in charge?"
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Did you ever hear that the reason companies hire college grads is not so much because of what the learned in school be the fact that they could be taught something new? And if kids are being taught what pictures to click on and not the concepts of word processing, spreadsheets... oh wait, you were talking about the user interface(UI)... I guess by default all Windows users know Micro
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If your going to try to sound like two separate people, at least vary your style. Or are we to believe that a horde of uneducated eight year-olds have invaded /., all of whom are members of some strange Microsoft sponsored cult.
Further, if "either" of you want to be taken seriously, please stop ditching your primary school English lessons.
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If Linux is "so great", how come it's in last place in terms of marketshare & user mindshare on PC's + Servers combined then???
Um, "users" are users? They don't want what's "better." They just want to "get stuff done," at their limited level of ability.
Please, just go out and play in the traffic. You'll be much more productive there. Trolls these days! Bring some facts with you next time.
BTW, ca. 80% of the web runs on FLOSS. ExxonMobil uses it, FFS!
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See subject above, & when's that supposed to happen?
It's been the "Year of Linux" for me since '93.
Are you just slow, or what?
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If you are going to pick an OS that they are likely to encounter in the real world, perhaps the next generation should run iOS (yeah, I know that will never happen).
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Give up Penguins: U've tried it & failed 4 decades since "the year of Linux" is never going to happen on PC's + Servers combined @ both home user & corporate environs levels. U FAILED.
May I remind you Android is Linux?
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It's as much Linux as an Xbox is a Windows platform.
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It's as much Linux as an Xbox is a Windows platform.
You can develop software on Windows that will run on both Windows and Xbox 360 with little more than a recompilation if you develop with that intent. That makes Xbox a Windows platform.
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There is a lot of software that can be compiled with the Wine library to run on Linux. Does that make Linux a Windows platform?
No, but Linux didn't use Windows 2000 as a codebase, either. The Xbox OS did, and clearly they didn't strip it down to the bare minimum that would run on the Xbox because they were able to port to 360 which is using PowerPC, which is a classic target for Windows including Windows 2000. It's Windows.
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It's as much Linux as an Xbox is a Windows platform.
Just for the challenge... one of this days I'm going to write a simple application (I don't know, maybe involving some fork/exec and file I/O to hit some syscalls as old as UNIX), cross-compile it on my lubuntu for the ARM in my recently bought tablet, put it on a SD-card and attempt to execute it on the tablet...
Good chances it will work. If it will, would it be proof enough for you that Android is a Linux?
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Doesn't the existence of Android prove that Linux is more than a "component" of some "GNU OS"?
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Doesn't the existence of Android prove that Linux is more than a "component" of some "GNU OS"?
Yup. It shows why we need to make a distinction between GNU/Linux and Android/Linux.
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But you prove his point...
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But you prove his point...
I admit, I'm dumb, I fail to get it... exactly what his point would be?
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That Linux won't be adopted on the PC.
Altough, I disagree with that point because of the simple fact that MS won't last forever, but Linux may last for a looong time.
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That Linux won't be adopted on the PC.
Nahhh... it turned out that we were discussing maketdrone stuff [slashdot.org]. Feeding the troll, that's what it was.
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Android's a Linux that's being "torn up" 4 security. See subject-line & what you quoted also: What you quote specifically notes PC's & Servers combined
You mean the already irrelevant niche for the home user - in which the mobile devices outnumbers the PC-es?
Also, I think you shouldn't shout that loud about the failure of Linux on the server, you may cause a market crash if some of the following decide to enter voluntary administration when they hear you qualifying as failures the followings: Google internal infrastructure [wikipedia.org], NASA and the other major users of OpenStack [wikipedia.org], IBM [wikipedia.org] and other [wikipedia.org] modern supercomputer [wikipedia.org] builders, VMWare baremetal virtualization products [wikipedia.org],
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Now for most of these I read "Managing X customers using Active Directory" And you are right, since most companies use Microsoft for personal computers, most use Active Directory to manage authentication. However, Troll is Troll, and because they have one server that has to make them windows dominate
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U get "insta-downmodded" due to facts penguins cannot handle!
All I said: you cannot call linux on server a failure... and I said nothing about your beloved Windows. Keep it, be excited with it, but don't ask me to consider the list above as relevant for the discussion about the merit or failure of linux on its own.
Now mate, go back under the bridge you popped up and... handle something more relevant than the already stale "Get the facts campaign" (I'd suggest a wanking type of move for your handling)!
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Where'd I call Linux a failure on Servers?
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2772023&cid=39606101 [slashdot.org]
U've tried it & failed 4 decades since "the year of Linux" is never going to happen on PC's + Servers combined @ both home user & corporate environs levels. U FAILED.
Bye!
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You mean like microsoft does when, for example, Argentina was going to move it's schools to Free Software, the local GLUGS where going to donate the work, RMS traveled to Buenos Aires and had a meeting with the ministry of education, and the next day microsoft pushed a few buttons, greased some politicians, and managed to sell a shitload of licenses at a discounted price, forcing the ministry of education to stop the project so the money invested in "discount licenses" wouldn't go to waste? That's what I ca
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Oh, and, BTW: The GNU project started in '83, the Linux kernel started in '91, and usable distributions of GNU/Linux didn't became available until '93. It didn't became feasible to use it on the Desktop massively until 2000. So GNU/Linux on the desktop is at most just a bit over a decade old.
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He, uh, meant Internet years. Or something.
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Give up Penguins: U've tried it & failed 4 decades since "the year of Linux" is never going to happen on PC's + Servers combined @ both home user & corporate environs levels. U FAILED.
FOAD, dork. Approx. 80% of the net runs on FLOSS. Android scares the crap out of Apple.
Suck it.
OVdGGPC (Score:5, Insightful)
What if we made sure that every classroom in the world was supplied with a solar-powered, fully recyclable, free-trade produced Van De Graaff generator? We've seen how such devices can spark the interest of physics students in western classrooms over the years. Surely it will have the same effect in classrooms throughout the world! Just present one to the teacher and . . . science!
Sound like related to the SW crisis (Score:3)
Independent learning (Score:4, Interesting)
Or maybe that guy was just a unique case, I don't know. That video made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside however.
(If you can't be bothered to watch the video, shame on you! But also, it's about a child in Peru who works cleaning people's shoes on the streets. He has an OLPC laptop, though, and he uses it to educate himself with wikipedia.)
Re:Independent learning (Score:5, Interesting)
I feel this is really the type of thing OLPC is aiming for.
Probably more importantly though, I suspect OLPC was always going to disappoint - after all, it's goal wasn't an integrated software and hardware package that would do everything right (although they have put a decent amount of thought into the software) - the goal was to get the price of the laptops to a point where we could conceivably offer them to every child on the planet.
It's things like the Kahn Academy which are ultimately going to drive the very important software aspect of this - and in that respect OLPC is good since it will be able to define the minimum hardware standard we should aim for.
Teacher's perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a difference in how you need to teach the students, depending on their equipment. But there's no absolute need for laptops, or technology beyond a calculator. For business concepts or for accounting, it's actually better to run things via pen and paper because the students are less tempted to copy and paste, and because it slows down the pace so they have time to think about what they're doing. There is a time and place for internet research, use of spreadsheets for complex accounting or finance calculations, and for plenty of other areas. Get them computer literate, definitely, because a lot of our students end up working in offices and they need the knowledge to use the tools available. But there's no need to get them addicted/dependent on technology to a point where they can't perform simple calculations without Excel anymore, or use their brains without prompting from Google.
The OLPC project is worthy, that's for sure. But I can't say that the results surprise me, they mirror the experiences we're making in a completely different environment. You can run lessons without laptops, and depending on the subject, it's often the more effective way of teaching.
Re:Teacher's perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
That's all well and good, but the OLPC project was always aimed at trying to short-circuit the endemic problems of many poorer nations. The point has never been "technology enables learning" the point has always been along the lines of "what would happen if we could make sure everyone had access to wikipedia?"
You're dealing with environments where it may not even be possible to maintain a regular structured classroom environment for all sorts of reasons. But if you can get the price of the technology to the right level, then we can in fact begin to think about good software-based solutions for things - remembering that in many cases the goal is less "gets a business masters" and more "can read and write proficiently".
Re:Teacher's perspective (Score:5, Informative)
It all needs balance. Show them that the information is out there, and give them the means to get to that info. But right now, there are a lot of areas where you simply can't use laptops consistently because it takes more time to get things running than to sit students down and simply run them through the matter the old-fashioned way.
Also, I'll commit murder if I ever meet the designers of some of the educational software platforms out there. The software aspect is absolutely lacking at the moment when it comes to educational stuff. If the software doesn't exist, then good luck at getting it down to a reasonable price. I'm still stunned that Moodle currently gets promoted as the best solution.
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Also, I'll commit murder if I ever meet the designers of some of the educational software platforms out there. The software aspect is absolutely lacking at the moment when it comes to educational stuff. If the software doesn't exist, then good luck at getting it down to a reasonable price. I'm still stunned that Moodle currently gets promoted as the best solution.
++Agree.
I've been teaching English as a foreign language, and I kept looking for technology to build useful exercises for my classes. The facilities in Moodle etc are abysmal. Rather than freeing the teacher, they box us in to a small selection of very limited exercise types. As a trade-off, you'd want some sort of flexibility, some sort of adaptability... but it's not there, or if it is, it's well hidden. Even the simple stuff is hard to put together, so you end up writing pretty uninspired exercises t
Re:Teacher's perspective (Score:4, Interesting)
The point has never been "technology enables learning" the point has always been along the lines of "what would happen if we could make sure everyone had access to wikipedia?"
What you say is true; someone assumed that giving each child their own computer would enable them to do something. But the assumption that the "something" would be educational doesn't appear to be correct. I saw it in the computer lab at my own kids' school; most of the effort by the students was listening to music or trying to find a way around the Net Nanny so they could view porn. They didn't know how to use it as an educational tool, and the teachers had no clue what to do with it.
The big problem now is that every child learns differently, has different interests, and (what many don't want to acknowledge) many students are just plain dumb. A good teacher can adjust to each student in real time, but how do you write software that will help all of them learn?
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Re:Teacher's perspective (Score:4, Insightful)
And right there, is why this project is failing. The kids of the world need education, and you (like the project's leaders) are more interested in subjecting them to political indoctrination.
Followed by a CSB (Score:4, Insightful)
The concept of needing anything/em> for a good education is questionable. The computer is a tool which is capable of good (through assisting the teaching of subjects), evil (distracting the students or supplanting the teacher), or pointlessness.
First, the tool has to be assessed, to see if it's suitable to assist in the teaching of a subject. The computer can be mighty flexible, and beside running Excel to actually do the accounting, it can present information, quiz students on topics being learned, and even make corrections based on incorrect answers. (And yes, I include properly done Powerpoint under the heading "present information." LibreOffice's Presentation tool qualifies too.)
Second, the tool may need to be tweaked to work for a specific purpose. The last two, quizzing and correcting, ride on the assumption that somewhere behind the scenes, someone in the school's employ is using a relatively simple scripting tool (LiveCode comes to mind) to create the lessons, and to further present on correct techniques when wrong answers are given.
Third, the tool has to be accepted and understood by the teacher. A tool unused is meaningless, but a tool misapplied can do more harm than good.
And fourth, the tool has to be accepted and used correctly by the students. Same principle as above: if they don't know how to get the information out of it, they won't larn nuffin'. A sweet UI and finely honed educational software stand no chance against a blithering idiot.
My mother taught learning disabled preschoolers. I watched with some horror as she sent one student after another back for "computer time" unattended, and they kind of puttered around with it. The worst was what I dub a "click-monster"—he might as well have been blindfolded and firing a machine-gun the way he was clicking. It was like recess, but nothing was being exercised except index finger and wrist.
With a little time, expense, and staff education, the computer can be a fantastic tool for teaching and learning. I can appreciate that without that time and expense, the tool isn't nearly as useful.
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Unfortunately, a lot of educational managers/rule makers don't understand that point. Every few months or so, we get a missive to use computers more in class, and to try out this and that wonderful toy.Usually those toys turn out to be incredibly buggy and don't do much beyond frustrate students because they
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For business concepts or for accounting, it's actually better to run things via pen and paper
See that instinctively sounds wrong. We shouldn't have to write down something if it's just copying too.
Perhaps they can rephrase so the teacher can check they really understand it, or maybe read over very slowly to imitate the typical 'writing' speed. But not just a copy pasta that involves using a few more wrist muscles.
The problem is the education level of the teachers (Score:5, Insightful)
Almost ALL teachers from the richest of schools to the poorest of schools have a horrible education level in computer technology operation and use. I have met multiple PHD holding professors that cant operate a projector to save their life. Even ones that have been dumbed down with a control system that have an ON and OFF button that will do everything. IF the ON button did not work they freak out and never use it again.
WE need to start with all education degrees being REQUIRED to have several computer operation classes. Something a lot more than "how to type letters in word 101" and "internet for idiots 102" They whould be requlred to go through a couple of more advanced classes like "education systems troubleshooting and use 204"
Once you get the teachers comfortable with the technology, they will start using it. Did the OLPC people give the devices to the teachers a YEAR before the kids? Because the teachers should have been given them AND classes on their use in the classroom.
I will bet you the OLPC people simply dropped a shipment in the schools and said "we givith! use this wisely" and walked away.
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A lot of people say this, and I'm extremely skeptical of the sentiment, since it very much mirrors "you can't give students calculators!" and has many of the same fallacies, since anyone who has done basic algebra or calculus knows a calculator won't help you at all - and neither will me getting stuck on a sample problem for 16 hours, until I can ask for help from a teacher...who may not be interested or available or even particularly knowledgeable on how to solve it.
Re:The problem is the education level of the teach (Score:4, Insightful)
It may depend on student age, but the amount of times I run into teenage students who blindly trust their calculators and don't pause to think whether 4% of 200 really can be 500 is startling. I'm not a fan of deprieving them of the technology, but they need to realise that they'd better do a rough mental double-check as well.
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I don't know if giving them to the teachers a year in advance would help anything. With no impetus to use it, and no students who have it, they could just as easily ignore it completely. I'd wager more that we're dealing with the very serious issue of how you write good educational software - which has been at a horrific standstill for a very long time.
Re:The problem is the education level of the teach (Score:4, Informative)
WE need to start with all education degrees being REQUIRED to have several computer operation classes. Something a lot more than "how to type letters in word 101" and "internet for idiots 102" They whould be requlred to go through a couple of more advanced classes like "education systems troubleshooting and use 204"
Well, if this is what you're trying to accomplish, just print out this handy graphic [xkcd.com] and you're done.
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WE need to start with all education degrees being REQUIRED to have several computer operation classes. Something a lot more than "how to type letters in word 101" and "internet for idiots 102" They whould be requlred to go through a couple of more advanced classes like "education systems troubleshooting and use 204"
I think that part of getting a degree in instruction ought to involve an A+ cert class and maybe a N+ too, and certainly some type of programming class but it can be a really conceptual kind of thing, psuedocode for all I care. Computing and networking are fundamental building blocks of learning in the same way that mathematics or history are. Having a computer and not being a programmer is like having a swiss army knife and only knowing how to use the corkscrew. I did have some pretty pedestrian programmin
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On the other hand, I can see why teachers might avoid technology in the classroom. In my experience, schools seem to
Love the idea; poor execution (Score:5, Informative)
No. A computer is whatever the user wants it to be. If you try to make that difficult, it'll fail sooner or later. The less money behind it, the sooner.
The educational philosophy they were pushing works for some subjects, some of the time. But they should have made it easy to use the OLPCs any way people wanted much earlier. It was only some time last year that a simple desktop switcher (sugar - gnome) was included with the basic OS. For me, at least, not having an ordinary filesystem available was a showstopper. I'd been dualbooting debian since the beginning, but all the trial and error to accomplish that isn't something a lot of teachers would do. But initially, for the first four years!, there was a lot of resistance to just giving people a familiar interface.
Then there were the hardware limitations. Even for Linux, at least the Fedora they're using, 256MB is barely enough to breathe. The keyboard takes a lot of getting used to. I'm not sure they ever got the expanded touchpad working.
So, like I said, nice idea, but they should have put more effort into improving hardware, providing the software people want, better distribution so they had a larger community of enthusiasts to write code for the project and help on (better organized!) forums, and kept their goofy educational philosophy for the people who wanted it.
Re:Love the idea; poor execution (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the surface layer - but the real problem lies deeper. The real problem is that it was designed to be a [computer|education tool|portal to information|flavor of the week] (I.E. somewhat confused goals) that adhered to the (idiosyncratic) design theories of people with little to no actual experience in developing such tools*, and to support the political agenda and social theories of Nicolas Negroponte. And it's last item that's the real killer, because everything else was subordinated to that agenda and those theories.
Not helping much was the decision to set the price to a politically attractive level long before they had sufficient experience with the software and hardware to know whether or not that price was a reasonable goal for their laundry list of features. When it turned out not to be, they slashed performance to target those political goals.
And that's not even touching on the myriad of other things they fouled up on...
* to be fair, nobody really has such experience - everything in the developed world to date has been somewhat ad hoc.
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For me, at least, not having an ordinary filesystem available was a showstopper.
But one of the core ideas behind OLPC is incompatible with having an ordinary file system available -- and not an idea meant to limit the utility to education, but one intended to hugely improve the ease and safety with which random code could be exchanged between machines. The Bitfrost security model is really interesting and has huge possibilities for making "promiscuous computing" safe, but it requires making the whole user-visible system run within the model. One of the key components is that all code
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Negroponte and IT fundamentalists are the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
If your project is led by somebody who believes that the way forward is to drop OLPC laptops out of helicopters into villages [olpcnews.com] and completely bypass locally respected educators, because of the belief that outsiders giving people technology will educate them, what hope have you got?
If the project doesn't seem to respect local teachers, then claims that the reason the project has failed is because of the teachers, well I am suspicious of the findings, or maybe at least suspect a bias.
Is the project too technology led rather than built on sound pedagogical frameworks to support children's education?
Providing teacher training to enable teachers to better employ the technology in their teaching practice (what The Economist article suggests) before dropping all the laptops into classrooms would have been less media friendly but perhaps a more successful strategy.
It does feel like the old story of rusting high tech white elephants in developing countries: well meaning, lots of money spent, not much time understanding local grassroots needs, working with the local educators on the ground. Stuff just gets dropped in with no support and surprise surprise doesn't get used well or technically maintained.
The technology is the easy bit. Engaging with local communities to understand their needs is time consuming and more difficult.
The summary sounds weird to me (Score:2)
You can't teach what you don't know (Score:5, Insightful)
Before educating the students, they should have taught the teachers how to use the tehnology.
The result will always be the same (Score:4, Insightful)
Somehow we have developed this absurd idea that you simply have to place a computer in front of a child and ~POOF~ they are magically educated, with no thought or work required by a teacher or anyone else. As a result, many billions of dollars have been spent putting computers in every classroom, and it has been a gigantic waste of money, because computers are completely unneccesary in education. Maybe in the last couple of years of highschool it makes sense, but in the early years, a computer serves no useful purpose in school and actually hinders important learning.
Computers are fantastic, powerful and useful tools. but so is a bulldozer, and we don't insist that young children must learn to operate a bulldozer or else they will not get a proper education.
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I do like that your argument centers on how computers can't magically help children learn, but then you invoke the same fallacy to declare that they'll definitely hinder children from learning.
It's got nothing to do with computers, and almost everything to do with software and discipline (to some degree). Being the black box that they are, computers are simply a big source of students goofing off in the common experience (usually because we the students are way more knowledgeable and effective in the first
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That's how the school at which I work ended up with a piece of crap called a Spykee. Little more than a toy ROV, but someone thought having a cool-looking robot would help stimulate student inter
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Man, I would have just loved a bulldozer in high school.
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Maybe in the last couple of years of highschool it makes sense, but in the early years, a computer serves no useful purpose in school and actually hinders important learning.
It is not the computer that matters, it is the software. The problem with computers in school is the software that we use -- software that is designed to be impossible to hack and which encourages students to pull out pencils and paper to solve their problems. Students are given computers with more restrictions than China's firewall, and if they dare to defeat those restrictions they are punished more severely than students who start fistfights.
Is it any surprise that the computers are not helping?
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It is not the computer that matters, it is the software. The problem with computers in school is the software that we use -- software that is designed to be impossible to hack and which encourages students to pull out pencils and paper to solve their problems.
If that's the only problem, then the OLPC should have been a huge success, since it was designed from the ground up to be a hackable, tweakable system, with a "Show Source" button on the keyboard that allowed you to display and modify the source of whatever you were using and a Python interpreter as one of the main "activities".
I'll admit that I thought the hackability of the OLPC would make it successful, at least at educating kids on computing. It appears I was wrong.
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You do understand that we are talking about little children and not kids in middle or high school right? These primary school age kids were supposed to use the applications pre-loaded and the teachers, assistants and/or school IT people would be the ones who might use the source listing/hacking features.
I understand very well what the target audience was; I contributed for a while, writing math ed activities (stuff targeted to 3rd & 4th grade students). The target audience was not just "little kids", it was basically K-8. I don't know about you, but I was experimenting with programming in 5th grade, and probably would have started younger if I had access to a machine. There is plenty of opportunity within the target age range for the programming experience -- and for the younger kids, making the com
Re:The result will always be the same. teach histo (Score:2, Interesting)
This idea is nothing new. In the sixties it was typewriter skills which led to a lot of schools using IBM selectrics for typing class. In the seventies, it was ten key calculators which led to 6 to 8 week courses in using a calculator to add and subtract. In the late seventies, it was programming on cards in a high school lab and then led into Apple IIs in a dedicated computer lab. In all of these cases, the idea was that the technology was so earthshaking, that you just drop these machines in front of
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I disagree that the idea of teaching typing and calculator use was because the technology was earthshaking. They were taught (usually as part of a 'business' curriculum) because with those skills you could actually get a useful job (typist or bookkeeper) right out of high school. Same with keypunching. The Apples are where the wheels started falling off. Using an Apple II was not a useful skill, no business was using them. That was the point where an attempt was made to use the computer as an educati
I taught in schools in Ecuador for a few months... (Score:3, Informative)
Also I worked a bit in an Internet cafe, what you consider a power (or even normal user) in Western Europe would be an admin there...
Ecuador and Perú are quite similar. I was in the jungle region, which is probably the least "developed" one.
Wasn't this anticipated in design? (Score:3)
I mean, of course most adults, anywhere, won't know how to take advantage of a computing engine or how it can help their child (even if they had explicit instructions). I kind of thought half the idea was to open a path for some of the children to find something special after tinkering with that little box.
The idea that you can automate something isn't something that just occurs to everyone. The young are most able to see something repetitive or annoying, and decide to figure out how to use a tool in a new way to make their lives less lame.
Those young people grow up, and start to see how they can do that to a lot more around them. They start to use resources in ways that would be seen as completely impractical just to automate more things... and change the country completely.
Yeah - the teachers and other adults aren't going to be 'creatively' using these things for much - because they're busy providing minimal resources however they can. Creativity takes time, something they almost never have anymore.
The adults teach the children by showing them the wrong ways to do things.
Ryan Fenton
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The XO and the Sug
Just Returned from Peru Visit of Electronics Shops (Score:4, Interesting)
Seriously, I just returned six days ago from a week in Lima, where I visited partners who buy used computers (for repair, refurbishing, recycling business). At one of the shops (which had 22 repair employees) they showed me one of the One Laptop Per Child laptops they'd gotten their hands on. They were absolutely ridiculing it compared to the price of used Pentium III laptops they buy in bulk from off-lease. I just wrote about the trip a few days ago. http://preview.tinyurl.com/peruewaste [tinyurl.com]
The refurbishing business itself is falling off in Lima, however. (No joke, I saw used CHINESE CRT televisions - the Chinese cities are upgrading and selling their own used goods to South America and Africa). But the cheap white box models from China show the most growth in the market.
In short it's a mature market and the whole charity command-and-control, of "e-waste" and white box laptop sales, is rife with at best piss poor market research, and at worst just making things up out of thin air. Read Harvard Business Review Article, http://tinyurl.com/chinagoodnuff [tinyurl.com] The Battle for China's Good Enough Market (2007, written by Bain & Co consultants), to see how the changing consumer demand is being mis-marketed to. Lima had 9M residents, I had no problem finding wifi, and the geeks of color in the used electronics markets all had smartphones.
How is this better than a Trapper Keeper? (Score:2, Interesting)
I remember getting an F in "computer class" (elementary school in the early 90s) because when we were supposed to be learning to use a drawing program, I instead wrote a BASIC script to draw the image we were supposed to draw. It didn't matter in the slightest to the teacher that I was able to attain the result in a far more efficient way or that I was able to actually write my own program, nope, I didn't do it exactly the way she said to (and thus exactly as the book said).
This always annoyed me in school
So technology is not a silver bullet?!?!?!?!???!!! (Score:3)
And in other news, the sky is blue, water is wet, and gravity sucks.
Seriously, let's stop looking for magic cures and start focusing on fundamentals, such as better teacher recruitment, selection, training, and retention. The add a layer of technology and facilities on top of that. Not sexy and a lot of hard work, but this approach will probably get the best results.
Like "Bibles for Haiti" (Score:4, Interesting)
The OLPC project was always one step near the infamous "Bibles for Haiti" project [imgur.com] - a condescending view that an "easy answer", one which is easily mass-manufactured will miraculously solve a hard social problem. That the OLPC-ers are technocratic instead of theocratic makes little difference with regards to the efficiency of the approach. What *should* have been sent are *teachers*, but it's much, much harder to send teachers into the wilderness when they are already so lowly regarded in the western world.
Primary school students do not need computers (Score:3)
Kids that young do not need computers to learn. They need to be taught the same 3 simple basics that have been taught in every primary school for decades: Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic. You do not need computers to learn or teach any of those. Introduce them to music and art to round out their education. Then in high school start introducing them to computers. And no, contrary to what some people like to think, these students will not fall behind the other kids that had access to computers. Using a computer is a skill. A very easily obtained skill. And high school is early enough to start teaching kids this skill.
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Wholeheartedly agree. There is zero educational value in teaching a kid how to format a doc or use a spreadsheet. They can learn that much later. On the other hand, there is some value putting laptops in the hands of educators, where they can be used to make their lessons more efficient.
No kidding (Score:3)
We should know by now (Score:2)
The obvious answer is (Score:2)
To provide online and written help targeted specifically at teachers. Everyone seems so busy selling product, whether it be computers, testing, software, etc. they tend to forget that there are humans, who must actually use this stuff to make it work.
They are widely deployed in Uruguay too (Score:3)
I live in one of Peru's OLPC communities (Score:5, Informative)
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There are many ways to build a little 12V generator and probably dozens here on
The Real Problem (Score:3, Insightful)
I was born in 1986, and at that time personal computers were on the rise. Yes, personal computers existed long before that, but back then many people still did not have them. At the time computers were more expensive and not as interesting to intellectually challenged people. It wasn't for several years that every member of society absolutely had to have a computer and an e-mail address. I know people who held out for a decade after it became ubiquitous.
Ever since I was in kindergarten, the prevailing [ignorant] viewpoint in society was that computers just magically made people smarter and improved your child's education a billion percent. Every school that I attended had to have computers, and they always bragged about how many computers they had. Idiots in the administration talked about how technology was revolutionizing education and how the students were being prepared for the future by being taught computer skills. By the time I was in high school, they made sure that every single classroom had at least one computer in them, sometimes two or three or five. Nothing relevant about computers was actually taught.
Ultimately, it was pointless. We didn't use the computers in effective or creative ways; both teachers and students ignored the computers and studied our textbooks. All we used the computers for was to browse the web in our free time and play Counterstrike. Some kids utilized the school's network infrastructure to upload porn and warez. I went to college with a bunch of computer illiterate people who grew up with computers, and now I work with a bunch of computer illiterate people. My mom went adult education classes to become "computer literate," and they taught her that computer expertise meant knowing how to use Google search and Microsoft Office.
As someone who is very into computer technology and software, it has been a hobby that I pursued since a young age, and it ended up becoming my trade. I think I'm qualified to speak a little bit about computing technology, and I've said this many times in the past: computers don't improve education. They just don't. The money that schools waste on computer equipment could be put to use in so many much better ways. Throwing computers at education is just a mutated form of our cultural tendency to throw money at problems--it's stupid and doesn't work.
Can computers be used in education? Sure, they can, but if and only if it makes sense. Right now in my studies I have to use a computer constantly to look up reference material--it's a huge time saver and makes my field of study dramatically easier than it once was. The reason why computing helps is because the computer is a tool that provides a function necessary for the completion of my work. It's not because I learn better with computers than without them, or that computers solve all of my problems in school; rather, sometimes you have a particular need for them, and in many cases you don't.
I support OLPC because it connects people to the Internet who weren't connected before, which basically gives them access to limitless reading material should they choose to utilize it. 99% of people do not take advantage of the knowledge that can be read on the Internet. That's fine. If even a small group of intelligent children can find a way to benefit from having access to a computer, then those people might learn something that they can use to improve their own lives and the lives of people around them.