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OLPC To Be Distributed To US Students
eldavojohn writes "The One Laptop Per Child Project plans to launch OLPC America in 2008 , to distribute the low-cost laptop computers originally intended for developing nations to needy students here in the United States. Nicholas Negroponte is quoted as saying, 'We are doing something patriotic, if you will, after all we are and there are poor children in America. The second thing we're doing is building a critical mass. The numbers are going to go up, people will make more software, it will steer a larger development community.'"
A patriotic thing would be to offer OLPC in US before elsewhere in the world. I am not saying it would be the most practical thing to do, but turning home only after selling everywhere else and some may say after failing to realize the volume is certainly not patriotic.
Hurray for OLPC team!
Maybe we might begin to develop a generation of students who haven't been mesmerized by the MICROSOFT logo. Tweaking around with the OS for fun will sprout a new generation of "garage" hackers. I'll never forget my first erector set. Now it will be virtual. Go kiddies GO !
It actually is a good strategy, US State/municipal/national governments are notorious for wasting money. There is a chance they will actually be able to push their laptops over commercial products which give a better cost/value ratio. They could never sell it to a commercial enterprise because they actually have to answer to investors/shareholders who dont like to see money being wasted unnecessarily. As long as he hires some good lobbyists he has a shot.
Wouldn't it have made sense for him to have started in America, seeing as the education system is similar to that in quality of the systems in the developing nations? :p
That's one fact I did not know about America and specifically the USA. I thought America was a place where everybody was rich. Its government was always funding a significant portion of my country's budget and building schools and hospitals.
That's what I believed till I came here. I saw what capitalism can be. The rich get richer and the poor have almost no chance of escaping poverty's grip! All in America.
I also saw something: America is rich in what I call material prosperity...that is, infrastructure and all supporting services; but beyond that, people (most of them) are really hurting and living from hand to mouth. Sadly, our politicians are doing us no good at all. Corruption is rife in America and incompetence is reaching terrible levels.
The other sad fact is that the situation will get worse before it gets better.
...is with the messed up tag: "onelaptopperblackchild"? Am I the only one who thinks that's slightly wrong?
I kinda got the impression from my reading about the OLPC project and it's drivers that it was a multinational project. So this news is a bit of a surprise to me.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Someone will have to explain how artificially limiting your market to those least able to pay makes ANY sense whatsoever.
Sell them in the US for $250, and let that drive your product for the first year. Asus shipped hundreds of thousands of the eee pc last quarter, so the market is there. Buy one get one was just a little more altruism than the market could bear.
OLPC is a terrific idea, but the implementation is an unmitigated mess.
ceci n'est pas un sig.
How else are we going to teach our children to use L O L and trendy emoticons in their academic papers?
Version 1.0 is never the best, but you have to start somewhere. The OLPC has already driven development for a number of other ultra-cheap computers, which is not a bad thing. And perhaps the next version of it really will be $100. As far as people not using it in the way it's promoted, it'll take time to find the best uses to put it to.
Someone hasn't been paying attention
http://www.xkcd.com/354/
If the project had offered these laptops for sale to the general public from day 1, they would have sold quite a few (look at how the EEE did at twice the price). This would have helped get towards the production economies of scale they wanted and they'd be able to sell these things to their target market.
Now I think it's too little, too late.
501 Not Implemented
...said about my first computer. Complaining that I only seemed to play games on it. Which was true at first. Too bad she never lived to see where it would eventually take me professionally.
Patriot - A fan of expanding government power and spending while not wanting to pay higher taxes.
Well, now I feel like an idiot... ...for buying one for my 2nd grader last November with the Give One Get One program.
So wait-- you spend $400 for one computer given to a kid in Afghanistan and one for your 2nd grader- who up until this announcement would have had almost no chance of finding anyone in his school to communicate/collaborate/share with (a major feature of the Sugar UI).
Now that some OTHER American kids will also have the opportunity to use an XO... how do you lose out exactly? How does your kid?
I don't get it. What are you complaining about?
W
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This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
The problem with constructivism is that it's based on looking at how very clever, curious, talented children learn, and then assuming other children can learn in the same way.
The constructivist approach to learning doesn't work well for teaching the fundamental skills: basic literacy, spelling, and arithmetic. These are most of what actually sticks with people into their adult lives from school.
Now, smart kids with educated parents learn these things quickly at home. A lot of academics started out like this. They went to grade school and resented being trained along with all of the dull-minded average kids who actually needed the lessons. They grow up thinking everybody else's time was wasted, they think about how they themselves learned without being taught, and then they become constructivists.
The ideas of constructivism are not all bad. Constructivism describes how children learn easy or interesting things by playing. However, it is a dangerous philosophy of education in that it neglects the need for disciplined classrooms in achieving societal goals like universal literacy.
We had our first meeting of the San Francisco Bay Area OLPC user group. Not sure if we even have a name. At any rate, a bunch of us got together at the Linux lab in the San Francisco State University to just goof around with these machines. It is really funny to hear them hiss at each other as they try to figure out how close the nearest XOs are. Yep, they talk to each other. They emit a brief hissing sound when you ask them to calculate the distance between XOs. They listen for the hissing sound (or so I was told, dunno, didn't check into it) and then they calculate how long it took for the sound to reach each other, and then they all report back to each other, and they determine how far apart their fellow XOs are. Hilarious.
They also have built in video, which two of the resident children were really enjoying by making monkey faces, much to the embarrassment of their parents. Insanity, you know, is inherited from your children. heh. One kid composed music on his XO. He is 5. As in less than 6 years old. You can add eyes to the screen, and the screen will talk to you to tell you how many eyes it has. Very entertaining for a 3 year-old. Did I mention that these computers are called One Laptop Per *Child*? They really figured out how to make these computers entertaining *for kids*. This is really a kid-centric device.
The amazing thing is that it brings out the kid in adults.
Yep, it is a small display, but it does 800x600 fine in colour, more in greyscale.
Main memory is 256meg of ram, not 256kb, which is plenty for most reasonably complex software.
Storage is 1gig, but it is flash ram based and doesn't suffer the same mechanical problems standard drives do.
There are tradeoffs, but the software they run is DESIGNED to handle them, which makes the system perfectly usable.
This in turn implies that the society is not making the best economic use of its citizens, for in many cases their potential is not being fulfilled and their contributions are not being rewarded (or encouraged).
In the US, the federal government has relatively little involvement in such decisions, which are handled at the state and local level. With the change in strategy, the OLPC effort can address individual states and cities. Of course, there are underprivileged students in every state, but here, too, the OLPC sales effort must deal with the same kinds of issues that they found in Thailand, Nigeria, and elsewhere. If you were the Superintendent of Schools for Detroit's school district or the State Secretary of Education in Mississippi, would you spend the taxpayers' money on XO laptops, on teachers to help schools comply with the No Child Left Behind mandate, or on something else?
I bought an XO laptop during the Give One, Get One promotion, and admire all of the effort that went into its design. It's fun to use, even if it is a bit underpowered and the keyboard is tough for continuous typing. I wish the OLPC team the best of success with their program, but it's also likely to be a tough sale here in the US, patriotism notwithstanding.