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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."
Did his final words as he left have anything to do with biting his shiny metal ass?
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Summary and original speculation were complete BS.
To keep in the spirit of the thread, XP smells worse than your shiny metal ass.
Teach children how to learn to learn learning.
That now that OLPC is no longer a threat that all of the other vendors of small low cost laptops will simply stop offering them... Just a thought... :)
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
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
It was the demotion of Bender that prompted Ivan Krstic' to resign last month, so the damage to OLPC by their stupid demotion of Bender is not limited to just the loss of him. I wonder if anyone else will be leaving over this?
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.
Direct Link to Resignation letter
I was going to submit this story after finding it on Digg or Reddit; the headline was focusing on Negreponte(sp?) allegedly wishing to partner with MS to put XP on XO in order to sell more units. After reading the letter and there being no mention of it I decided against submission.
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.
... "bite my rubberized, lime-green ass."
Anybody want a peanut?
Not if your customer is the governor of NY.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
BWAHAHAHAHA!
I am writing this response on one of those laptops, running prerelease Ubuntu Hardy that I have just configured for it.
This laptop is not going to do any 3D modeling or video editing any soon, but for everything that belongs in a classroom it's fine.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
A: The x86 used is already very low power and very high integration, supporting sub-millisecond sleep states. With Amdahl's law being what it is, replacing the processor with a mystic 0 power CPU wouldn't add all that much to battery life. The TOTAL power consumption is 5W already, and the CPU's share of that power budget (when you consider CPU and not the associated control logic for memory, IO, etc) is low.
And in return, x86 compatibility is a good thing, because it opens up a huge world of binary software. For one, x86 is far better supported by just about everybody.
B: The OLPC actually uses a 15 W-Hr LiFeP (Lithium Ferro-Polymer) battery. Which is actually 4x the charge lifespan of LiIon, and has far greater environmental tolerance, and can even be composted for disposal.
Test your net with Netalyzr
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
Nowhere in his exit statement does Bender contradict the rumors about him being forced out. Instead he gives the standard "leaving to pursue other interests". This is a conventional explanation people give to avoid antagonizing their former colleagues. This concept might be strange to shot-from-the-lip Slashdotters, but it is common among people who don't view life as extended flame war.
You give a quote that seems intended to contradict the story, but doesn't really — this isn't just about whether or not the XO should run Windows. Besides, you don't say who you're quoting. One of your sock puppets, perhaps?
Negroponte said Bender was burned out after helping to shape OLPC for two years" But Bender already has new plans: to launch an independent effort to further the development of the XOs' homegrown software, known as Sugar, and get it to run on Linux computers other than XOs. "Sugar is in a narrow place and it is ripe to be unleashed," he wrote in an e-mail exchange. The AP article alos goes on to quote Negroponte as saying: "that an overriding insistence on open-source had hampered the XOs, saying Sugar "grew amorphously" and "didn't have a software architect who did it in a crisp way." For instance, the laptops do not support Flash animation, widely used on the Web. "There are several examples like that, that we have to address without worrying about the fundamentalism in some of the open-source community," he said. "One can be an open-source advocate without being an open-source fundamentalist." Negroponte added, Windows might be the sole operating system, and Sugar would be educational software running on top of it. That might disappoint advocates of open-source software who helped bankroll OLPC and cheered the challenge it represented to Microsoft's dominance. Unlike proprietary software like Windows, open-source applications are developed by a community of programmers and the underlying code is freely shared.
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
If you don't think 3d modeling is useful to learning math, sciences, and engineering, you are a genuine idiot. And if you do not think that video editing can help you learn literature you have no imagination, to boot. But perhaps I'm just misunderstanding you? Regardless, your comment is proof positive that a low slashdot ID doesn't mean anything.
Also no one should learn 3D modeling and video editing on a computer he can carry -- inexperienced user needs massive amount of resources and very large screen to be able to do anything with it.While my laptop is WORLDS ahead of the XO, I have a Compaq nw9440 which is MORE than adequate for learning 3d graphics with its Core Duo, 2GB memory, and nVidia Quadro FX1500 with 1680x1050 resolution. It is in a meganotebook (17") form factor with a three button touchpad and a full keyboard.
Given that many people got their start on an Amiga running Lightwave 3D on, say, a 25MHz processor and with maybe 8MB of RAM, and at NTSC resolutions (even interlaced with overscan you're looking at maybe 800x480 or so on an OCS or ECS Amiga) I'd say you pretty much have no idea what you're talking about.
By the way, google sketchup is a 3d modeler which can be immediately useful in a variety of projects and which doesn't require a degree to use. Perhaps you've heard of it? I bet many kids could learn to use that if they weren't being treated like idiots by arrogant assholes who think they know everything about how everyone else learns.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.'"