Peruvian Teachers Begin OLPC Training 56
eldavojohn writes "Today was the first day that Peruvian teachers from remote villages began training to use the OLPC in their day-to-day activities. From the article: 'Success of OLPC now depends largely on frontline teachers and, of course, parents and kids. Peru's effort, if successful, would be a model for other nations. In the training now under way, teachers must become versed not only in how to operate and maintain the laptops, but also in how to do their jobs within a newly laptop-centric educational model. The laptops will contain some 115 books, including textbooks, novels, and poetry, as well as art and music programs, cameras, and other goodies. What many of these kids won't get is Internet access: about 90 percent of the villages lack it, and may not get it anytime soon.'"
Wow, new term: "sneaker net" (Score:4, Funny)
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I love how you think it was coined because of thumb drives.
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Said, "There is one thing I do know.
A woman is fine,
and a sheep is divine,
but a LLAMA is Numero Uno !"
Baaa!
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Peru has no gauchos. The Inca people live in Peru. Different origins, different looks, different culture, different jokes.
Gauchos don't get to meet llamas, and where gauchos live, women are more beautiful than sheep. In Peru, it's a different deal.
Maybe they can... (Score:2)
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/26/0118237 [slashdot.org]
Think of the children (Score:1)
Check out this video on TED... (Score:3, Insightful)
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/41 [ted.com]
Ooops, I meant this one: (Score:5, Interesting)
Wrong video (g), I meant this one: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/228 [ted.com]
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Since then he's been screwed so many times that you talk to him now and he's not at all enthusiastic.
Internet would help (Score:4, Insightful)
From the summary:
This is a serious drawback as the internet is a great source of information as well as a way to commercialize the computing efforts of these kids and (potentially) give them some good old capitalist reasons to study hard. Even so, while the lack of internet access is not as big of a drawback as it might be. These laptops will presumably still form their own mesh networks and connect to the school's XO server. I bet a lot of Windows using American kids wish their computers would allow them to network with friends nearly as easily.
Best of luck to these teachers. It is always hard being the guinea pig for a new technology and it will probably take a lot of dedication to alter their teaching methods to really take advantage of this new tool.
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The American kid with a Windows PC or a cell phone doesn't seem to having much trouble networking with anyone.
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If only that were true. Do you know how much work it is to start a group chat with everyone in say, the coffee shop? Windows auto-discovery of local services/users sucks badly, especially compared to the XO laptop.
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By the way, I thought coffee shops only existed here in NL. And though they do sell coffe it's not the most sold product there.
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I didn't say "talk" I said "chat." On Slashdot I should think most people would understand the difference. Reading aloud the characters in a URL you want everyone to visit is a lot less efficient than just sending a link to everyone via IM. Ditto for sending a file to everyone, or really any other local networking.
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I received my XO about a week ago, live in the US, and I can't connect it to the internet reliably. Googling around, I found a lot of discussion about how poorly the XO laptops work with wireless access points.
The XO was designed and tested to work in conjunction with other XO laptops and with the XO server. Connecting to generic wireless in the states is nice, but you must admit not at all what it was designed for.
This problem certainly took some shine off an otherwise cool little computer for kids.
I've heard a lot of stories about people buying XO laptops for their own kid or to play with. I certainly don't have a problem with that, but I do worry that a lot of opinions about the XO will be formed from this type of use, which is not the use for which it was designed. If all the kids in a gr
fingers crossed (Score:3, Interesting)
of course, while we all greatly enjoyed following the speccing out and design of these machines, the tech was the easy part. I sincerely hope there's the right follow-thru in training, and not one-shot "here's your crash course in the 21st century g'luck buhbye," but ongoing support and training.
I worked at a "high tech" charter school for a while; from laying the cable in the new building, to several months after it opened and class started. It was a mess. All too typical "let's throw technology at a problem and it will Magically Solve Everything By Itself!" Good intentions, poor execution. Hardly anyone on the *staff* had any technical ability. Infrastructure and purchasing decisions were made from political standpoint and funder's/administrations ego trip, not what might be best to introduce people to a completely new world for them. You've seen it all before...
I'm privileged to be teaching nowadays in a similar mission; un- or underemployed adults trying to retrain, at-risk youth, most with little or no technical background or even experience beyond webmail and IM. We take so much of our know-how for granted, it's easy to forget how arcane this is to most people. I guess i'm just saying, i hope the approach doesn't fall into "teach the same stuff the same way but we're reading off a screen instead of paper," y'know?
But here's hoping. And pretty darn cool. That pic of those two kids on those funky green plastic laptops gave me a sudden image of A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer [wikipedia.org] [wikipedia.org] :D
After seeing Fujimori "fall sleep" (Score:4, Interesting)
I know there's pros and cons VAV the OLPC, but overall it's a win-win if this can get kids access to tech that they otherwise wouldn't, and be (eventually) able to communicate with other kids at the other side of the globe and be able to learn to use a computer much in the same way as kids in the "developed" world do, and it likely gives them an economical advantage in the long run, but certainly and immediately the advantage of having broaded their horizon, which is always a treat to a young mind I think.
Intranets? (Score:3, Interesting)
The XO can be very educational.... (Score:5, Interesting)
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OLPC lookin' good (Score:4, Informative)
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Out of curiosity, how long does it take you to charge it manually? What about AC?
Are you aware that the OLPC does not have a hand-crank?
That was dropped during early prototypes, as it's just asking too much of a laptop casing.
You can charge one on any input ranging between 5-20volts, so hand charging is possible, but not standard. It'll charge off a car battery, and those are bought and sold as commodities (sans car) all over Africa. You pay to have your battery charged, carry it home and run your lights and radio off of it. Now you'll run a laptop off of it as well.
You can ch
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Out of curiosity, how long does it take you to charge it manually? What about AC?
Are you aware that the OLPC does not have a hand-crank?
That was dropped during early prototypes, as it's just asking too much of a laptop casing.
They're still working on making hand-chargers.
I think the latest design was the "yo-yo".
But that always makes me think of a project I heard of in the 90s, a guy from Canada or somethig was making gravity-powered radios for the developing world (the same principle as a cuckoo clock, you lift a weight and it turns the gears for hours as it goes down, generating power as it goes).
That sounds like tech that *should* exist and be widely available, but isn't.
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But that always makes me think of a project I heard of in the 90s, a guy from Canada or somewhere was making gravity-powered radios for the developing world (the same principle as a cuckoo clock, you lift a weight and it turns the gears for hours as it goes down, generating power as it goes).
That sounds like tech that *should* exist and be widely available, but isn't.
That definitely is tech that should exist if it doesn't. A 25Kg weight, raised one meter, dropping slowly and spinning a fly wheel for, say, 10 hours...
How much voltage could it generate at 10cm an hour? How many serial setups like that would it take to charge an olpc? I could personally see lifting 5 of those in order to charge my laptop and feel good about it, although probably I'd rather lift twenty 15kg weight 0.5meters... A very clean use of human power, because humans are better at bursts of ene
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Seriously, this sounds like such a great project, I just hope that they do a good job of implementation and make it work.
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What a coincidence... I'm reading this on the XO I just received today.
I'm piggybacking on a neighbour's WiFi.
I got mine yesterday and I spent hours trying to get on wi-fi networks I had passwords to (oh. my. GODS the WAP implementation sucks!), I finally had to make my own, without a password, to get access.
I'm frustrated, disappointed, and kinda worried about the security-less wireless access into my machine. I only activate it when I need, and I granted only the basic rights I could to get on the web, but still.
Aside from that, it's a cool machine. I hope my anonymous kiddy recipient uses it well.
Re:OLPC lookin' good (Score:5, Informative)
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It was a bug on build G1G1s shipped with.
I wish it told me what port it considers to be "the internet".
OLPC: The "sink or swim" way to learn computing!
Re:OLPC lookin' good (Score:5, Informative)
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http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Olpc-update [laptop.org]
It uses rsync, but you can do it other ways. With OLPC, everyone has had the same set of problems, so they are all very well documented on the wiki. Read up before complaining.
I'd been there, thanks for the "rsync" tip though, I went and opened up port 873.
;-)
But don't be mean, I've been scouring the wiki since yesterday trying to find the bits of info I need. Things are documented, but "very well" is not something I'd say about it.
Now... to test this out before I hit [Submit]
W00t! Thanks!
Now, see, if it had said "port 873" instead of "the internet", I'd say it was "very well" documented
But, thanks again, you do slashdot proud, Mr Informative, you.
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20 hours? I only get about four. (Score:3, Interesting)
There were great plans for power management that were intended to give a twenty-hour battery life, but apparently they haven't been implemented yet.
So, are you describing the real XO you actually have, or the XO o
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Have you tried seeing how long it'll go in "ebook" mode, without back lighting?
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Arahuay (Score:3, Informative)