News On Laptops For Education

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday October 30, 2007 @07:59AM from the battle-of-the-cheap-and-rugged dept.

AdamWill notes a Mandriva press release with the news that the government of Nigeria has selected Intel-powered classmate PCs running Mandriva Linux for educational use in a nationwide pilot. About 17,000 machines will be involved at first. We can only wonder at the maneuvering and negotiations that went on with the OLPC project. The latter had its first announced order for 100,000 XO machines, from Uruguay, with a potential for 400,000 over time. The bigger news out of OLPC is that Microsoft is porting XP to the platform, and chairman Nicholas Negroponte says that's fine with him: "It would be hard for OLPC to say it was 'open' and then be closed to Microsoft. Open means open."

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Open for everybody by xzvf · 2007-10-30 08:56 · Score: 4, Insightful

XO is an innovation in software as well as hardware. What I would like to see is the laptop in the hands of "rich" nation's school children. Yes, we can afford normal computers, and some school districts have deployed them, but not in an innovative way like the XO project proposition. With a truely open distribution model and relatively rich customers we might find the economies of scale that allow the laptop to cost $100.