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A Child's View of the OLPC
Finallyjoined!!! sends us a BBC account of a dad who traveled to Nigeria and brought back an XO laptop for his 9-year-old, Rufus. Here is Rufus's review, a child's view of OLPC. "Because it looks rather like a simple plastic toy, I had thought it might suffer the same fate as the radio-controlled dinosaur or the roller-skates he got last Christmas - enjoyed for a day or two, then ignored. Instead, it seems to provide enduring fascination... With no help from his Dad, he has learned far more about computers than he knew a couple of weeks ago, and the XO appears to be a more creative tool than the games consoles which occupy rather too much of his time."
America scams Nigeria!
I returned from Nigeria with a sample of the XO laptop
I did RTFA, and no mention of HOW he got the laptop... I know everyone was talking about these things ending up all over the world in the black market, don't tell me it's ALREADY there.
I thought the XO laptops had a kill switch to disable them if they leaked out from their target demographic (african schools), into secondary markets?
Isn't the article's premise the exact situation which the OLPC designers feared?
Of course, the article mentions "a sample of the XO laptop", so I hope this this specific laptop wasn't obtained through such a secondary market...
Misleading titles? Inflammatory blurbs? Keep in mind that Slashdot is a tabloid.
The XO laptops connect through a school Jabber server, so if his laptop was set to use the same Jabber server, then he could see all of the people at that school, even if he's not on their local wireless network.
ttuttle is a rankmaniac
The one thing that struck me the most was the part where the kid asked about what his "friends" were saying to him, and how hes learned hola. This is more than enough of a learning tool to master a language. I personally know from first hand experience how this can work from a game I used to play that people from all over the world played. From starting the game at age 10ish one of my friends had learned english, finish, german and a little french. The ability to talk to other kids from different areas with language barriers is a great way for people to learn a language. Also for all the people who are talking about how food would be a better choice than education etc you are missing the point. There are plenty of charities and other donations to help starving kids. Not every kid out there is starving, but even some that are not starving are education deprived. I think this program could help alot of these countries get more education for thier children which in the long run will help them with money and food issues hopefully.
The Dad is Rory Cellan-Jones, a seasoned BBC reporter on technology. A better link (with pictures) is here BBC News
"With no help from his Dad, he has learned far more about computers than he knew a couple of weeks ago."
The kid has made such a fast advancement that he has already been offered a job by Chris Hansen.
But what about a child's view of the $200 laptop?
Also, somebody might have pointed this out already, but this guy took a laptop from Nigeria to bring to the UK? That seems to defeat the point (from how it's stated in the article, it doesn't seem that it was from the buy one/give one program).
-Daniel
I don't doubt for a moment that this thread will be filled with the usual /. grousing about the usefulness of the entire project, but let's give credit where credit is due: it looks like they have made a product that appeals to children. Perhaps they know what they are doing?
From http://wiki.laptop.org/go/News
Wolfgang Rohrmoser and Kurt Gramlich are proud to announce the initial version of their OLPC XO-LiveCD. This new project targets these goals:
give children, students, teachers and parents the opportunity to participate and use the Sugar educational software on a common PC;
support demonstration of OLPC software to non-developers;
provide an easy maintainable Live-System for developers to test activities on the sugar desktop, this could be regarded as an alternative to existing OLPC virtualbox and qemu images.
The technology they choose embeds an unmodified official Redhat build into a framework (LiveBackup), which provides everything needed to run a live system. Going this way we are able to minimize the work for updates as new OLPC builds get released.
The ISO image are available at:
ftp://rohrmoser-engineering.de/pub/XO-LiveCD/
as: XO-LiveCD_.iso
Images will be mirrored to:
http://skolelinux.de/XO-LiveCD/
Wolfgang and Kurt encourage everybody to try it out and give them feedback for improvements; please send mail to:
XO-LiveCD@skolelinux.de. Further information is available in the XO-LiveCD.pdf document at:
http://skolelinux.de/XO-LiveCD/XO-LiveCD.pdf
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OS_images_for_emulation
Enjoy. It's a modified RedHat distro with a special WM called Sugar.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
Something smells...and it aint my pants
It's your pants. Totally.
I found int intriguing reading the part of the article about the chat system. He suddenly found himself able to chat with Spanish speaking kids. I wonder exactly how the whole OLPC chat system works and if this is truly a "feature" or a fluke. I say fluke because the article says the chat system identified itself as chatting with others in Nigeria. Will the OLPC's be "region encoded" so kids can only chat with other local kids? Or will kids be able to easily chat with kids from the other side of the world as well? I can see the second alternative, purposeful or not, as a way to help foster a knowledge of other cultures that these kids would otherwise be entirely unaware of. True, language differences would probably minimize the impact of this sort of thing, but as the article demonstrates even a language barrier isn't enough to keep curious kids from making friends half way around the world.
"a BBC account of a dad who traveled to Nigeria and brought back an XO laptop"
So...did he scam a Nigerian?
Name...That...Autocomplete!
So Rufus is using his laptop to write, paint, make music, explore the internet, and talk to children from other countries.
Sounds like Rufus is a lot smarter than your kid. Figuring out all this stuff on his own. Before you know it, he'll be like his Dad, buying goods off the black market.
On his blog, Freedom to Tinker , Prof. Ed Felten at Princeton has two more reviews of early versions of the XO laptop, the B2 and the B4, both (very well) written by a 12-year-old neighbor.
So your 3-year old kid already plays Counter Strike: Source?
That's some pretty good parenting, right there.
"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams [...]."
The OLPC is just an amazing machine, not only is it able to connect with any Wi-Fi network (no matter how far away or how secured), instantly make your child a programming virtuoso, make them a math whiz it can also make them instantly fluent in any language. Merely possessing the machine enables them to read and speak the language of the person they're chatting with. Not even Apple is so insanely cool.
I even tried to entice my son by talking a bit about encryption, thinking he would make the connection of "aha! I can hide stuff from the old man!" but even that lure failed to get him to open the Missing Manual book. I keep hoping to find an encrypted container indicating that he's learned something, but alas he lacks my secretiveness. Kids today!
Not really.
My son learned how to do most of that (not counting playing CS. Although he does play some Web-based games at Noggin.com) at about 3 - 3/12. Now before you go saying "Well your son is just a genius." Please be aware, my son has Autism. He's not "normal" in any sense of the word, other than being physically healthy.
His learning is definitely behind that of his peers, requiring him to need a special in-school tutor to help him along. He's 5 now, and struggling along in 1st grade. Still, we're impressed with his progress so far, and are now looking for ways we can use his affinity for computers to help educate him.
The truth is, if parents would take just 5-15 minutes to sit down with their child at a computer and begin to use it with them, they would find that most kids would very quickly latch onto it, and soon be doing things with it themselves. I suspect that this will begin to happen more and more and the generation that was born into a world with computers and the internet as a common thing have kids of their own. Heck, it's ALREADY happening, if my son is any indication.
Don't sell your kids short. Get them in front of a computer and learning today. Their peers have already started.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
Everyone says education is empowerment to the people, I think this is the first step to empower most people around the world. This is a step to help people/children easily communicate and play over large distances, talk and share ideas. You should take a million of these laptops and drop them on Lima, Peru, and see what happens. Imagine one million people using the computer to do new stuff, just producing new creative material, sharing, critizing.
This is actually a tool that would allow these counties to get ahead of EU & US. Because this will empower children when they are most active at learning, at 9 years old you can learn alot, that will get us alot of creative people, writers, programmers and artist in a 4-9 years.
The question is will these children need to learn english, or can they just create local economies, based on heir own language?
Why do I get the feeling that I'm living not just Science Fiction, but in "The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" (Neal Stephenson)? True education is subversion, because true education will give you the tools to challenge the status quo.
First George Orwell, now this. Where does it end?
"If god did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him" --Voltaire
Not to take away from the article but I would like to read a review from a kid who has not been exposed to technology/computers as much as Rufus. It would be interesting to read about their reaction to this technology and how it affects their daily lives. I grew up in Peru and was not exposed to technology to the degree that I am now, I know a laptop like that would have made a world of a difference to me.
[alk]
No surprises in the article - in fact it sounds like a typical experience of a small child given any computer and allowed to just play with it. (Especially a child, like Rufus, who already has some experience around computers.) Jim Lileks has reported much the same thing with his daughter and the Mac she was given. I've heard similiar reports from friends who've let a child loose on a machine prepared for them.
So far as the length of his fascination - let's hear back in another week or two, or another month, or next year. From late November to now is a matter of three weeks, tops. Even for a nine year old this isn't particularly long.
The program was extended to Dec 31, according to the web site.
http://www.laptopgiving.org/
Malcolm solves his problems with a chainsaw,
And he never has the same problem twice.
South Africa, The Iraq, and the Asian countries still need a lot of help from our education over here before they're ready to get XOs and build up our future.
Actually, I think they just need more maps.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
As they themselves say, and as I have repeated ad nauseum here myself, the OLPC is justified on a pure financial basis. It replaces print textbooks with digital textbooks. The print textbooks are usually hand me downs from foreign countries in foreign languages, out of date, expensive to acquire and distribute on a per-copy basis. The digital textbooks have only the upfront cost, either in translation or original material, no distribution cost or delay, up to date, and the OLPC can carry all of them on the long walk to school and back without any extra weight or bulk penalty.
The acquisition and distribution costs alone pay for the OLPC. The other benefits are pure gravy.
It is also pathetically patronizing to tell these people to stop growing their own food and rely on handouts from foreigners for such basic necessities. "We're foreigners and we're here to help because you are too dumb to grow your own food" just doesn't cut it. Far better to grow their own food and rely on OLPC handouts that they *can't* make themselves; at least that is the beginning of a way up the ladder to a better life. Begging for food isn't.
Infuriate left and right
I think the OLPC project is indeed about education as Negroponte keeps insisting. The magic isn't in the laptop hardware (ok, some of it is revolutionary, such as the display) but more in the potential for collaboration and learning. It's a laptop designed to be an education tool and designed for learning. The paradigm behind it is very different than what microsoft, intel and asus are in it for, and that changes the results significantly.
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