A View From Inside the OLPC Project

icknay writes "Here's an interesting rant on the OLPC from someone who worked there, including: 'The core mistake of the present Sugar approach is that it couples phenomenally powerful ideas about learning — that it should be shared, collaborative, peer to peer, and open — with the notion that these ideas must come presented in an entirely new graphical paradigm. We reject this coupling as untenable. Choosing to reinvent the desktop UI paradigm means we are spending our extremely over-constrained resources fighting graphical interfaces, not developing better tools for learning.' I have an OLPC, and the OS itself seems quite unfinished. I buy the argument that it would be better to focus on Sugar as educational software, and let it run on Linux, Windows, whatever."

Comments

Re:We are not in the dark.

[nuzak]

No kidding. Look at Odder's single other post:

There is near unanimity in the technical world that OOXML is not a worthwhile or well written standard. It is not complete or consistent. There is not even a working reference and it is also patent encumbered. That it passed is a textbook example of how position and power can be abused.

That pontificating tone is pure Twitter.