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Walter Bender Resigns From OLPC
westlake writes "Walter Bender, the former executive director of MIT's Media Lab, and, in many ways, the tireless workhorse and public face of OLPC, has resigned from OLPC after being reorganized and sidetracked into insignificance. The rumor mill would have it that 'constructionism as children [learn] learning' is being replaced by a much less romantic view of the XO's place in the classroom and XO's tech in the marketplace."
The software stack may be questionable, but the hardware is brilliant.
Nothing else comes close for efficiency, cost, battery life (with working software), ruggedness, total lifetime, etc.
The thing is VERY tough (i've tossed mine several times), very low power (3 hours battery life with 100% broken power management. Good power management should get 6+ hours battery life for typical users), with a brilliant screen. Just put real software on it and its very nice.
Let alone the environmental tolerance: Normal notebook batteries die if you try charging them at 100F.
Test your net with Netalyzr
From a romantic standpoint, less business is a GOOD thing.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
But first you have to learn the teachers how to teach to teach teaching.
My brain hurts.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
What does that mean? Does that mean OLPC is lacking paper clips or advanced audio technology that came hidden in a pink box? Or they lack negotiating skills that is needed to change a NO into a YES, aka ISO Norway style? May be they just need a can do guy like Bob...
I hope not. Look I'm as big of an OS X fan as anyone, but it is not really suited to the OLPC project in a number of ways. Also, the all OSS stack makes sense with regard to their mission, to bootstrap an intellectual property creation industry in these nations. Being able to edit and modify all the code provides a starting place for this project to sustain itself via the user base.
I'd sure rather have MacOS than linux or XP, given the choice, if I was a third world kid who wanted to learn something.The OLPC software is very well designed for its core tasks of educating children, which is quite different from general purpose computing. As a kid, I'd much rather have had an OLPC that allows me to learn with all the other kids in my school, than even a modern OS X system. Swapping it out for OS X makes little more sense than doing the same with WinXP.
This would merit the moderation if not for the fact that this account is one of your seven sockpuppets. You even created one so you could insult me.
The twitter monologues. Click on my homepage and be amazed.
And how does making them dependent on a foreign company for any computer-related job (which, by the time they are grown up is likely to mean pretty much any job) helping them? Phase two of the project aims to have the countries that bought the first generation laptops manufacture their own version two, based on the designs and code from version one. If you install XP on them, then none of the children will develop the expertise to to write version two of the software stack.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
If you were engaged in a discussion with a person and suddenly six others showed up to shill and agree with the original one, how would you like that? More importantly, he knows very well what that kind of activity looks like to moderators - seven people carrying on a "conversation" with each other in opposition to you is usually a recipe for being modded down (and get him karma in the process).
I don't know about you, but I have a single Slashdot account and I'd like to think I'm responsible for my own opinion being modded up or down. twitter went to karma hell because the Slashdot community got tired of his bullshit. He can't have that, so instead he blames it on a vast conspiracy by Microsoft and creates seven different accounts, as opposed to actually correcting the problems that got him in the hole to begin with.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
All too often those who claim proficiency in pedagogy are merely hiding their lack of brilliance behind a stack of journal articles and study results. I draw inspiration from Shin'ichi Suzuki, founder of Talent Education, who with no formal training in education single-handedly created one of the most successfull methods of teaching music to children. Back in the 70s Suzuki was widely criticized by American violin pedagogues who denounced him as a crackpot. The Suzuki method was built on a common sense view of learning which begins with this observation: children naturally learn their mother tongue without the help of experts. Therefore, children know how to learn, and mothers are the best teachers.
Now apply that view to homeschooling and an interesting picture develops. Parents are fully qualified to teach young children. As children get older they benefit from subject matter experts, but it does not require a brick-and-morter school to provide them. K-12 teachers complain about the lack of parent involvement, especially as the children get older. With homeschoolers, the parent is always involved.
Hold on, there! Who says education has a core of three R's? Or a core of anything? This is just pedagogical pablum passed along year after year as if it were inscribed in stone by the almighty himself. Stringing together Python scripts could very well be much more relavent to today's children.
Gary Dunn
Open Slate Project
Children are small humans (shocking but true) and humans learn best when they are involved with something with which they are interested. Computers are useful for this sort of thing because they are applicable to basically everything.
Here's a simple truth for you: Those who are able to manipulate information have an edge over those who do not. For instance I can make my own vector maps instead of paying for them; I can also get my own information on the nutritive value of foods instead of buying a carb counter book simply by downloading a freely available government database.
I was in a GATE program in elementary school and they told me I could not participate in astronomy because I was too young. Today I am a math idiot. Perhaps if instead of quashing my enthusiasm, they had presented me with mathematics related to something I was interested in, I would be more comfortable with it today? Unfortunately, even so-called "Gifted and Talented" programs are really just a means to "deal with" "problem children" (I was disruptive because I was bored) and to park them somewhere.
What I'm trying to say is that presenting children with the maximum number of options is critical. Lots of the functionality on the system isn't necessary for all purposes. You have the option to not use it all. Meanwhile, including it may be what gets one more child interested in something that saves our collective bacon. You never know.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"