Category — olpc

Thailand Nixes One Laptop Per Child:
A September coup effectively ended the career of Thaksin Shinawatra, the Thai prime minister whose cabinet had pledged to buy 250,000 of Mr. Negroponte’s $100 laptops, according to The Nation, a Bangkok newspaper. Thailand’s new administration now says it has no interest in the project, which would have provided all of the nation’s primary-school students with the low-cost machines.

“We will not focus too much on technology and materials,” said Wijit Srisaarn, Thailand’s education minister, this week. “We will focus on substance.”

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Personally, I think they need some technology and materials too. Substance is a problem because it is almost always political. Access to knowledge, at least cosmopolitan knowledge, requires some infrastructure and materials. It does not require OLPC though.

Doom on the $100 Laptop:
Who needs textbooks when it’ll run Doom? Engineers from the One Laptop Per Child Project have posted videos of themselves playing the videogame Doom on the new children’s laptop.

Up next: the Darfur game?
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had to see this coming…. from education project to edutainment project to…..

I made a new category and re-categorized my one laptop per child posts so that people can find them. In general, I am against the principles of OLPC on many grounds, mostly to do with lack of technical support, educational purpose, and the general lack of awareness or outright willful dismissing of prior work in regards to projects like this.

A $100 laptop prototype for $150 | CNET News.com:

The One Laptop per Child project on Thursday showed off the latest prototype of what’s widely known as the $100 laptop for school children in developing nations. The only hitch is that the computer costs $150 to make.

Walter Bender, president of software for the Massachusetts-based nonprofit OLPC, said that higher-than-expected costs for the laptop’s display and battery (made of nickel-metal hydride) hiked up the price.

“The goal is to get it to $100 by 2008,” Bender said at the Silicon Valley Challenge Summit, being held at Santa Clara University.

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It is partly to the right price point…

The $100 laptop: What went wrong – MSN Money:

Anyway, in general a free computer to everyone on the planet it interesting. The tool is cool. And there are many massively problematic issues involved. But that’s interesting is that this article is publishe din MSN Money. MSN isn’t part of this. I’ve read the M$ does not like open source. I wonder how much big computing, like big oil and big tobacco is willing to thumb the nose at doing something good (Gate’s work on aids in africa is not part of this debate of course) useful when it might get in the way of a little well planned out hegemony. But that’s just my personal opinion on it.

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This is one place where i disagree with Jason. The ‘cool tool’ is not a solution, it is a distraction from more serious infrastructural and educational issues and the ‘leapfrog’ of those infrastructures that it ‘represents’ actually will be impossible. I don’t think big computing is actually against this, in fact, most of them have bought in. You see, you don’t sell these things to people… You sell them to governments and the money that comes from governments will be be backed by other governments, so there is no real possibility of profit/loss . The economics of this project looks great, I think, for companies. The future of these objects as computers… is not great. The design is completely wrong for any use outside of a clean, classroom environment. It has too many moving parts and it is ‘american cool’ instead of globally useful. If you look at army troop laptops, designs that actually work in diverse environments…. they do not look like this and there is a good reason for that….. Design is one issue with OLPC, but there are certainly major socio-political implications… I’ve written on that before here. I think… OLPC is a bad program and mainly exists as a promotional tool. Putting the same money into the Million-book project’s bookmobiles would be far more productive.

India rejects One Laptop Per Child | The Register :

issed the laptop as “pedagogically suspect”. Education Secretary Sudeep Banerjee said: “We cannot visualise a situation for decades when we can go beyone the pilot stage. We need classrooms and teachers more urgently than fancy tools.”

Banerjee said if money were available it would be better spent on existing education plans.

Banerjee told the Hindu: “We do not think that the idea of Prof Negroponte is mature enough to be taken seriously at this stage and no major country is presently following this. Even inside America, there is not much enthusiasm about this.”

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first healthcare, then primary education, then secondary education, then computers in secondary education, then perhaps one laptop per child… if and only if, you manage to show some benefit of computers in secondary education that implies that the sole purpose of one-laptop-per-child is colonialism via technical means, by which i mean… making people dependent on foreign capital for jobs and equipment.

I’ll take a million please:

The $100 laptop, aka the One Laptop Per Child project just got its first major order – 1 million for Nigeria.

I would love to own one, if its internals were swapped with a MacBook. These things will be a serious nerd fetish item when they become available, and a serious nerd retro-fetish item in 20 years. –MM

Originally posted by Cameron Sinclair from WorldChanging: To Understand and Protect Our Home Planet, ReBlogged by migurski on Jul 26, 2006 at 09:01 PM

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interesting. i wonder how this will actually work, we’ll see. i don’t believe that the 100 laptop will change anything on a national level other than revealing a huge hidden set of costs for the program, but i could be wrong.

One Laptop Per Child Project Abandons Hand Crank:

One Laptop Per Child Project Abandons Hand Crank
One Laptop Per Child project abandons hand crank in favor of a foot pedal attached to the AC adaptor. Negroponte also says Linux is too “fat” for the 500 MHz AMD processors they plan to use. -dj

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interesting…. a foot pedal and a cord…. give a kid a solid object on the end of a string and what do they tend to do with it?

MIT Media Lab Guru Says No Computers in Schools:

Michael Schrage of the MIT Media Lab wrote a piece for The Financial Times saying that there should be no computers in schools. He argues that billions could be saved by keeping useless technologies out of schools. As an educational technologist, I felt that I needed to address his critique.

 
I think his main argument is with educational software companies, but he fails to differentiate between them and between teachers using technology in the classroom. His article cites nothing other than his own opinions, but it is an interesting read nonetheless.

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No to computers in schools… but…. having the underfunded developing world pay for laptops from their national budget to the tune of ten’s of millions of dollars… that’s a great idea… Isn’t it? I’m not sure computers should be ubiquitous in education at all. I think that students need to experience diverse informational experiences, not just computer based, not just book based, but also oral traditons, etc.

More dialogue with TMTTLT: Push back…:

We seem to be more in agreement than not.I’ll resist the slide from “computing devices” to “technology,” but probably nothing turns on that anyway. The laptops are valuable at least as much for their interactive, networking potential as for their other computing possibilities, maybe more. Plenty of people in the developed world benefit from Net access, and not because they’re becoming better prospects to attend MIT. That brain-drain argument seems to be a red herring.

Do you give fish or teach to fish? Of course, you teach to fish given the live option, but not while at the same time denying your students fishing tools.

What’s wrong with those other two positions is that they deliberately exclude the developing world.

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yes, generally we are in agreement. my concern with the brain drain is one of dependence economies, they create less opportunities for the less able and immense opportunities for the most talented. the question becomes again ‘who benefits’ but i’m thinking at the state scale in that framework.

it might be best to exclude the developing world from objects like laptops though. that’s the idea, perhaps there are better informational tools and it is better for them to develop the appropriate technologies for their own use than to follow the paradigm of one laptop per child. no?

aristotle argued that potential good is not real good. we’ll only know if this is real good if it is studied and there is no plan in place for that.

why is bill gates right in this case, in my opinion? because he has been to africa and most of the rest of the developing world and has put in place a solid development regime based on healthcare, nutrition, libraries and education. In short, he is building real social infrastructure. he isn’t dropping 2million laptops in, which he could, because he has consulted with development specialists and has seen what becomes of western technics in the places that might not value them similar to us. laptops aren’t sustainable in most environments, and this laptop is not that different in the end. my problem is that this laptop is actually taking money away from other infrastructures (because the nations) and that it will be a short lived object at best. I think Gates sees this too and that is why he chose to go a different way.