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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
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?
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.
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
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?
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.
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
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.'"