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Why OLPC Struggles Against Educators, Big Business
afabbro writes "The current issue of BusinessWeek has an expansive article of the history of OLPC and why it has, to date, been a flop. Among the reasons: no preparation for the educational systems expected to use it, uncertain pedagogical theories, poor business management, competition from Microsoft/Intel, and no input from education professionals in designing the software. As BusinessWeek quotes one educational expert, 'The hackers took over,' and the applications are too complex for children to use. To date, 370,000 laptops have been shipped — a far cry from the original 150 million planned to be shipped by end of 2008."
God, are we going to have to see a slew of these posts now? The world doesn't stop every time someone famous dies. Should we stop reporting news on other subjects to stop and mourn the passing of each famous person? How famous do you have to be? Is a child star from 1 episode of original star trek famous enough? How about an ensign? A local news reporter? Maybe an MTV VJ.
Oh, and the best part, I'm sure a news reporter would be one of the most disgusted if we stopped news reporting to focus on his passing.
In the book "The IBM Way" i read something along the following lines: we must control change, or change will control us.
I think the intent of the OLPC is good, and there are tangential benefits to such a program, however I think this justifies all the people that in the beginning asked one simple question: Why?
... well, not how things work really.
If you have a better way to build a mousetrap, build it and see if people will buy it. Trying to tell them they need it before you build one is
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
OLPC is useless as a computer. I'm a geek, and one of my colleague's got one, and as far as I could tell, it was mostly useless.
The problem was, assuming the person didn't know anything about computers (reasonable given the target audience), there were no way to figure out how to get anything done. Not that I could figure out, and I'm a geek.
Maybe I'm not geeky enough after 25 years in the business.
Giving someone a complex piece of technology without instructions is stupid, and useless. I suspect that these will become fancy paperweights for teachers.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
The absence of teledildonics and social groping capabilities doomed this project from the beginning.
What good is a mesh networking system if it can't transmit the teledildonics data that is so necessary in our every day lives?
As soon as i read that article a while back about the guy who complained there wasn't a decent distribution system in place I knew it was doomed.
Hackers like to think they can do everyone's job better even if it way out of their scope. I guess that's the difference between hackers and engineers, engineers understand that it takes managers, PHB's, marketing, sales, and production staff to make it work. Hackers think it just takes code.
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
If you let the IT folk articulate the business process, you're going to get the same exact thing. That's why we have business analysts whose job it is, ostensibly, to figure out what the business people want and translate it into a swiss army knife that's going to be wildly popular and successful.
To not involve educators in the requirements building phase of this was doomed to the same failure. The problem is that it is visible to more people, sad to say.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
Just a suggestion, but maybe using 3rd world children to carry out jihad against the technology industry isn't a great plan.
OLPC had a good mission when they wanted everything on the system to be fully open source, with simple point and click applications and the ability to view the source of any application. However then they got into talks with microsoft, and started to include some very complicated applications with their product, and their mission kind of went down the crapper
His teacher had told the class to search the Internet for information
on the environment, but the boy was stumped. "I was trying, but I couldn't
find anything,"
What the boy didn't know, was the rest of his classmates *did* find something and
the classroom immediately erupted in a resounding "RTFM!" in response, showing
proof that children in developing nations can at least find Slashdot.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
Who says it's a failure? Just because there aren't more people willing to donate a rather expensive bit of hardware during rough economic times doesn't mean the design is bad. There will be one geeky kid in each group who will figure it out and show the rest. As for input from education professionals, I can't imagine a more counterproductive thing to do.
This article seems short of facts and long on assumptions.
Oh dear, it seems what we have here is yet another slide towards the desire to forget computings hacker origins.
I was at a Microsoft presentation once where the speaker said Microsoft were not interested in hiring 'hackers', they wanted serious programmers. The concept didn't impress me then, and it doesn't now.
Doing away with hackers will have the effect of homogenising the industry. Guess what tho, not every country thinks this way, some developing nations will look at the stagnant 'hacker free' computing industry and destroy it in a matter of years by producing more innovative products.
I mean innovative in the real sense, not in the bland 'keynote speech soundbite' sense.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
all that is really besides the point because what percentage of children want to be programmers? 1% or 2%? You can be a perfectly educated teacher or biologist or farmer or whatever using Windows. There's so much educational material available on the Internet that has absolutely nothing to with what operating system or software development philosophy you use. Wikipedia works the same in Windows or Linux. The whole "omgz no microsoft" fiasco was a major major turn off for me. Just more OSS zealots preaching their same sermon at the expense of everyone.
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
At least don't keep modding this tired, old and long debunked meme up. OLPC is NOT aimed at places with current food/water/shelter shortages. It is aimed at developing countries, not undeveloped countries. Think of many south American countries as perfect targets. They have solved the basic problems of food, water, shelter and education. This project will move education on to the next level.
How can people, especially on slashdot (where this has been thrashed out countless times before), keep remaining so wilfully ignorant of the goals of this project?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The most interesting thing is that the one non-critical voice mentioned in the article (the Peruvian schools using the laptops) is the only voice which seems to have actual experience using the laptops. That seems to me to be a very good sign that those who are shouting so loud aginst it are reading from Microsoft publicity briefings and not from reality. Negroponte's comment that he is acting like Greenpeace lying down with Exxon is kind of telling. If MS is the one responsible for making computers bad for education then working with them really is like working with the devil. Anything you do will be twisted againt you.
Everything looks like a nail. This is the programmer disease: they're so used to configuring stuff on their boxes, they don't realize (a) their programs must connect to reality at some point and (b) not everyone wants to spend hours every day playing computer. Solipsists.
Anti-Globalism, Traditionalism, and FreeBSD.
It seems to me that OLPC packed those tiny laptops with some really nifty features and some kinda neat pieces of software. Problem is, how do you integrate these devices into curricula? How do you prove to teachers that integrating these devices into curricula is beneficial? How do you adapt these devices to the multitude of curricula in many different locales and cultures? The intent of the project is pure, but sometimes seems somewhat boneheaded. This initial flop comes with little surprise. I hope the project can adapt to maximize the benefits for all parties involved. This will have to include much more conversation between the intended user base and the producers. There really can't be a one size fits all solution for the third world's educational needs. One size fits all solutions just don't exist. I have yet to find a good baseball cap that stays on my head ;-).
I think the reason is that the OLPC was always a solution in search of a problem. It started out as "lets make a cheap laptop".
It didn't start out as someone going to schools and asking the people what they needed. It seems like the most reasonable course of action for a project like this is:
1. Go to the schools and listen.
2. If you still think that computers are the solution, bring some expensive ones into some places as a pilot project
3. If that is proven, then remove functionality from the expensive ones until they operate like the cheap ones
4. If they still prove useful then maybe decide to make the cheap ones
Did this happen? If it did and the cheap ones worked in prototype form but not in their final form, then the OLPC's problems can probably be solved. If not, then it was probably doomed from the start.
The "do something I think is cool and see if people like it" plan of action tends to lead to disappointment when people don't like it. The likelihood of disappointment is proportional to how cool you think the project is.
If you donated $150 per child to each of these classrooms, would they automatically use the money for OLPC laptops? What if they could get real, full-scale laptops and support discounted to $150? Would they buy them? My guess is that the answer is no in most cases. They'd buy the things they need instead.
Well said! OSS zealotry is one of the most retarded trends I've ever seen in the geek community, and hurts us all greatly.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
Educational software is hard to write. Really hard. Except for very well defined skills, like typing or flying an aircraft, most educational software doesn't help much.
The OLPC should come with one or two really, really good applications for teaching reading or arithmetic, ones smart enough to self-adjust to the user's level and move them forward. That alone would justify the thing.
Speaking as one whose taught for years, your comment is insightful:
To not involve educators in the requirements building phase of this was doomed to the same failure
Part of the problem may have been that the folks running the show often were "educators" (professors and such), but not of their target audience. Teaching at the K-12 level is not at all the same as teaching undergraduates and graduates at MIT. They certainly should have brought in experienced actual teachers from the K-12 (or K-6) level they wanted to reach.
But this comment from the summary is appallingly clueless or mendacious:
Among the reasons [for failure]:...uncertain pedagogical theories...and no input from education professionals in designing the software.
Anyone who has actually taught knows that "pedagogical theories" and "education professionals" (e.g. those who graduate with PhDs in education, as opposed to PhDs in the subject they teach) are worse than useless, that such things are responsible for half the time-wasting if not counter-productive garbage that clogs the educational system, total sidewalk-supervising theoretician castles-in-the-air bullshit.
Indeed, I bet the OLPC people had some nifty "pedagogical theories" -- you might say the whole concept of the OLPC is a major pedagogical theory itself ("give them computers and they will learn!"). The problems the OLPC people are having ironically self-illustrate the uselessness of "pedagogical theories" constructed in the absence of pedagogical experience.
>and the applications are too complex for children to use.
That line makes me want to say 'fuck you'. The idiots here aren't the children nor the hackers, that much I'm sure of. If I could figure out the C64 [mostly] on my own in a world where there was no 'world wide web' at my fingertips, and adults would go 'compute-what?', I'm sure today's kids will do alright with these computers.
I guess the upside is that even if this guy stood up before 100 children and told them the machine is too hard for them to use, if 99 of them would be naive enough to believe him, there would be that one kid thinking 'oh yeah? This is so on'.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
It was predictable enough, and many of us did point out the terribly obvious flaw in the OLPC plan -- that people experiencing shortages in food, potable water, basic shelter, education facilities, farmable land, etc, etc, need those survival basics covered far more than they need a laptop. I still don't really see how this was not obvious to Negroponte et al.
Well, you see, there is this gigantic group of people who aren't experiencing shortages in food, potable water, basic shelter, etc etc etc. People who've got the survival basics covered, yet are still extremely poor. They are the target market for this laptop.
This isn't for that tragic starving child with no clothes no food no medicine and flies all over his body that you see on those interminably long "Christian Children's Fund" commercials. This is for his distant neighbor 6000 miles away who lives in a home, on a farm, enjoying a meagre lifestyle, while the children work on the farm, or the local mine, or pick fruit, or help chop down the nearby rainforest for additional income. This is for them.
There are lots of countries who have met the basic requirements for survival, but who lack the infrastructure and wealth we enjoy in 1st world countries. This is for them.
I often wonder why Slashdot posts links to a version of the article formatted for printing rather than the main article.
--Sam
Caveat Utilitor
I have news: Everyone thinks they can do it all.
Since you mention engineers, I'll start with them. I've seen a lot of code written by engineers, and it's been uniformly horrid. Many schools still teach FORTRAN as their first/main language. Good god.
I see a lot of code written by scientists. Not one would think of letting an untrained programmer run their wet lab assays, but they think nothing of having graduate biologists write their programs. Guess what, it's even worse than engineer code!
In an ideal world, we'd all farm out the stuff we're not good at to people trained to do it. I'm not holding my breath...
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
I have an XO - It has lots of flaws.
But my son loves it, he's 6 and he loves playing sim city, even when I point out that his city has zero population and he clearly does not know what tax is. He will learn about taxes all too soon and in the mean time, he will learn about computing organically. I'm pleased that he has a chance to do so without being force fed "only one way to do things".
And I'm sure the kid who thought the internet was inside the OLPC has learned a lot through having an XO too.
Would there even be a classmate PC if not for XO. Would classmate have been as good as it is if XO and the new OLPC had not pointed the way for how all of these devices could be better. Will the next generation of XO and classmate and ee-whatever be better yet next time around. YBY sweet fat A.
Seems to me that Negroponte has achieved a great deal, and I suspect that there's a lot more to come and that the children are the winners.
I and many believe firmly that widespread education is a dire need as well as sustenance, and that the former could help provide the latter in years to come.
I wouldn't write Negroponte or OLPC off yet, the OLPC foundation (and the Intel classmate team, for what they do) has my sincere thanks.
Nullius in verba
I've reviewed the details of the Sugar UI and the apps that come with Sugar, and I was struck by the fact that every effort has been made to make the operation of the programs simple and intuitive. There's clearly a lot of usability design in there.
I think the problem is that the OS UI, and the Apps, are new and different. I think the adults evaluating this are stuck in old ways of thinking. They learned computers on Windows, and Windows and Windows app ui conventions are just how it should be, dammit. Anything else is scary and complex, from their solidified-brain perspective.
People aren't willing to give something new (and yes, pretty much objectively better) a chance.
It's the old "we haven't changed anything, and we're not dead yet, so why change something now"
conservative viewpoint.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
from the santa-is-not-a-capitalist dept.
Funny that they refered to Santa Claus. When some journalist asked Carlos Slim if he was planning to donate some of his money, he answered that he did not want to go like santa claus just giving away money, but that he prefered to invest in developing specific programs for the integral development of people.
That is what makes a businessman succesful I guess... the OLPC guy just thought that throwing a bunch of cheap and durable computers to kids would make them learn... but they did not really thought about integral programs (and not talking about "computer programs" but real ones) in which this XO toy could be used...
Now, any government who wants to invest in them needs to find a reason to do it. Before that, the relevant development programs must be implemented, and I think the governments that could benefit won't go as far as creating their own programs (due to the lack of interest, money or will)
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
The root cause of that is those people's fixation with destroying Microsoft, which is not about to happen any time soon.
If instead they spent their time and energy promoting what is good about their software (and not treat it as a pseudo-religion to which everyone must convert or die), things would be very different.
The twitter monologues. Click on my homepage and be amazed.
The Bbusiness Week article is terrible. It is written by shills for shills and factually inaccurate
The OLPC XO is being deployed in various places in the world. The deployment is being handled locally, as it should be, in a culturally sensitive fashion.
The XO is designed for use by children and has a very simple but clever User Interface which is easily learned by exploration.
The collaboration aspects of it are outstanding.
The work by "Hackers" was a huge success. Take a look at the number of UMPC's that will ship in the next 3 years. Tens or hundreds of Millions.
Yep, the work they dreamed up will sweep the world in ways they did not envision.
As far as the "failure" of the OLPC to sell in the millions.
1. A lot of money was being spent by MS and Intel to sink it.
2. It is hard to get $$$ out of many third world countries without graft.
3. It is hard to scale up the distribution and services side of an organization. 0-150 million in a few years is almost impossible on a shoestring budget.
Then, these problems are compounded by the unwillingness to gain volume by selling at retail. Then, they tick off the hardest core supporters by embracing MS.
Yep, this thing will tank.
Sorry about continuing my post this way.
Yes, I believe the OLPC will tank(the product as it exists today), but most of the good will last.
Because the hackers have created this new segment, we will see the cost of components drop lower in the LONG term than even the OLPC project could have done alone.
Because of this new segment, Linux will develop at a faster rate. Bringing additional benefits to the "have not" population that can not afford MS Tools.
The /why/ is curiosity. Kids have lots of it, but you tend to lose it over time as they get slapped in
the hand and get told by adults to get serious. There's no telling to the number of great engineers (or doctors, or artists, or what-have-you) that we missed out due to stifled curiosity.
If you have a better way to build a mousetrap, build it and see if people will buy it. Trying to tell them they need it before you build one isThe OLPC offers unlimited tinkering and very deep and broad educational (education as in building mental models of things and learning to learn, not as in rote memorization) experience for kids, and can help them learn to read and write and communicate and explore the 'net. It is not "a better mousetrap" - there was no mousetrap before, unless you are referring to the school itself as the mousetrap. And OLPC does not intend to displace schools.
Ok, the business model may not be too sound (but the entry of the ClassMate and 3$ Microsoft software bundles can be seen as partial successes - if the goal is affordable computing to 3rd world kids, things look much brighter than a few years ago). Yes, Negroponte is not a finance magician, and I guess he has learnt the hard way that large corporations do not always place developing nations before shareholder value - that's what PR is for, anyway.
All laptops suck.
When you buy a laptop you have these there basic choices:
1. Windows. An OS that sucks, on decent hardware.
2. Mac OS X. A decent OS, on hardware that sucks.
3. Other UNIX. A decent OS, on decent hardware, but no applications.
OLPC adds a fourth category:
4. OLPC. An OS that sucks, on hardware that sucks, and no applications.
It's a hat trick!
The problem is that Sugar is a wretched interface for any purpose -- including pedagogical -- and most of the OLPC applications are no better.
There is no, nada, zip evidence that Sugar is intuitive for children. Its defenders simply offer anecdotes about how some child figured it out and says that it is "easy". Such anecdotes do not prove anything.
A child who has never used a computer before has no standard with which to compare. You will get the exact same responses from a child who is put before an old minicomputer running BASIC and presently figures it out.
Nor is the speed at which the child learns sufficient evidence. Children are brute-force learning machines; that is a basic biological function of children. This is why children excel at puzzle games (think Myst) in which deliberately bad interfaces are created to confound the player.
What happened with Sugar is that the OLPC project decided to create their own unique user interface based entirely upon their own intuition and educational theories. The result was what you expect when a bunch of hackers step outside their field of expertise and try to build a user interface.
The OLPC project disregarded just about every rule in the book on how to build a good UI. Being old time hackers, they couldn't resist magic keyboard shortcuts. Whimsy in naming and icon design is forgivable; using familiar symbols (we're talking symbols that would be familiar to these children) for completely unrelated purposes is not.
Sadly, the impact of all this is that the kids who experience it will end up "upgrading" from Linux to Windows and not look back.
I agree. I think I will start OWSPC - One Wooden Spade Per Child. It's a project that I will start in a poor country to provide wooden spades to rich kids in industrialized nations.
The kids don't give a damn what the OS is. Hell, if you had never used a computer before, would you know anything about an 'OS' and its religious wars?
True, some people would like to promote OSS with the OLPC. It turns out that OSS is very customizable and has no licensing costs. So it is not such a dumb thing to do; and it got MS to contribute its apps at huge discounts just to not lose on the PR bandwagon. What's not to like? Affordable computer education for kids?
As long as the technology works and there is no recorded RMS greeting during startup... go Linux!
I am very interested in your obvious approach to solve shortages in food, potable water, basic shelter, education facilities and farmable land. Especially if it can solve everything at once, instead of focusing on small, well-defined problems.
Negroponte is not superman - but he has a valid point: kids /are/ the future. And to make the future better, you have to invest in education. If you can get kids to learn autonomously and to use computers - well, you're on your way to helping fix all that long list of shortages when the kids grow up.
> I've long thought that was the original goal, "How many kids can we get to use Linux"
Frankly, I don't understand how you think having MS under the hood of the OLPC would help it be a better educational computer. If you had used one for even 2 minutes you would understand that the end user has no direct interaction with the underlying operating system at all, he is supposed to use the Sugar interface and the applications installed in it by default.
There are plenty of reasons why Linux was a better choice than an MS operating system, but I don't see how "educational indoctrination in Linux use" could be one, since using Sugar has little relation to using Linux with a more common desktop environment like KDE or Gnome. (Note well: I am not claiming that there are absolutely no reasons why using an underlying MS operating system might be better than using Linux. I'm sure if I tried hard enough I could come up with a few of those, also.)
On the other hand, I find it much more likely that we have gained engineers (and doctors and artists and what-have-you) because the kids did get serious. Those professions require more than simple curiosity, they also require a large measure of mental and self discipline. Any fool can ask 'why?'. It takes much sterner stuff to seek the answers and apply them.
They failed at moving 150 million $100 laptops.
If their original goal was to move 370,000 $200 laptops, would they have succeeded? I think that shipping 370,000 $200 laptops is pretty impressive. I couldn't have done it.
The point being, why do we need to be so quick to label the OLPC project as a "success" or "failure" and why does that value need to be bool instead of float? As to whether or not these 370,000 laptops will be useful and/or change these countries/kids for the better, we're probably going to have to wait a while to sort that out.
> One last thing, you just got owned...
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I don't know why people are surprised. Failure is the norm for utopian pipe dreams, not the exception. Had any significant number of these machines made it to the third world, things would have been even worse. Graft, theft, and the blackmarket would rule the day.
Perhaps it's the cynic in me, but I always saw this project as a rather hare-brained attempt at making MIT significant again the way it had been in it's Project Athena glory years. It's not so much that Negroponte failed to delivery a solution for a given problem, as much as MIT developed a solution no one asked for or wanted.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
care for the 1,826 million children (I have included all of them for simplicity) in the world under the age of fifteen. 150 for each child per annum, the UN could foot the $273,900,000,000 bill from the world gdp of $ 65,610,000,000,000 and still have loads of change. Or perhaps they all really do need a green plastic computer?
We could ask them.
Posts, MyBio or Sig, may contain satire, sarcasm, bolded nouns be sardonic or even witty & be Church of SD
" OLPC is NOT aimed at places with current food/water/shelter shortages"
You're making too much of a difference between "undeveloped" and "still developing" then, because the later still has those problems in abundance. OLPC may not have been intended for jungle tribes with no housing, but just because it was headed for places where roofs exist still doesn't mean that those places don't have hunger, water quality problems, and economic stagnation. The priority to get those things first still trumps getting a weird laptop to the kids there.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
the article stated:
"In Luquia, Justo Miguel ComÃn, a fifth-grader who is the youngest of seven children of subsistence farmers, was delighted to get his laptop in late April. "I like the math games, and I love the camera," he said two weeks later.
[...]
Yet when BusinessWeek asked her son detailed questions, it became clear he didn't fully understand the computer's capabilities"
--wow... a fifth grader can't completely understand the full capabilities of a new piece of technology in TWO WEEKS. Maybe they should ask him again in two months, or six months.
Heck, my great-grandmother spent her whole life thinking that soap operas on TV were as real as news reports.
In theory, theory and practice are the same.
In practice...
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
So Microsoft decides to "donate" their apps.
Big f*cking deal. They are generic. They have been for
decades. Their primary value is the fact that they are
"compatable".
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Yeah... providing me a nice free OS that in some ways is a challenger to the current MacOS was a really dire thing that hurt us all horribly.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Exactly. Any parent knows that for a kid, the kid's question after "Why?" is just "Why?" again. An engineer will ask "why" and, when they get the answer, think "interesting" and add it to their pool of knowledge, looking for an application.
Or to chop it down to something more memorable, the kid asks "why" and follows with "why". The engineer asks "why" and follows with "how?"
Because it's a DUMB IDEA. So dumb, that even some "educators" agree with businesses on that point.
I really want the OLPC project to succeed, though the switch to a Microsoft OS as a standard install (note: NOT MANDATORY, ONLY STANDARD) has dimmed my enthusiasm some. But in no way that I've seen have they demonstrated the coherent action I would expect of a five person startup in a basement somewhere. This whole project looks to me like a serious case of diffusion of responsibility and ill-defined decision authority.
When that keyboard glitch turned up a while back, they should have been all over the place within days with a clearly written response, complete with Youtube videos and still images on Flickr under every possible keyword. When Intel started pushing the Classmate they should have (as Negroponte now acknowledges) either kept quiet or done a far better job of making their case. And now that the organization has effectively forked, is the Sugar team talking with Asus about a ruggedized version of the EEE running the OLPC OS and software set?
Like or hate Apple, from day one they had their evangelists out there when they were creating the Macintosh and every key related technology. Maybe somebody should send the OLPC folks a few dozen copies of Kawasaki's first book. Hell, maybe Lasermaster still has a few copies of their reissue sitting around.
But even so, let's keep in mind that all they need to do is keep on their current curve for another year or so and, one way or another, the project should be fine. This kind of thing genuinely is non-linear and now that we have several reference specs for UMPCs, at least one of which is open source, maybe the "success" will end up being an ecosystem of several devices created from aspects of several of the current UMPC approaches, running various OSes, that the current OLPC team members will use to carry out programs under different names and different leadership but achieving the original goal. And let's remember that Asus' president said that he was inspired to create his EEE line by the OLPC project, which is itself a certain kind of success that the project has already reached.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Straw man. GP said nothing like that.
I agree with a lot of what you say, but as someone with teaching experience, the learning process can't all be free form. You need to bring everyone together on the same page, AND THEN cut them free to learn on their own.
Most good teachers will teach this way if allowed, but in Texas, between the PC police and the No Child Left Behind, teachers are extremely limited in what they can teach. Their lesson plans are literally dictated to them, and if they deviate and something goes wrong, it's a career problem.
Anti-Globalism, Traditionalism, and FreeBSD.
> Intel and M$ made
> sure preexisting orders were cancelled.
I hope you're not referring to that dumb rumor (one would call it FUD) about how intel
was involved in the demise of the OLPC. Do you have some proof of your claims, other
than creative spelling and links to the jargon file?
And I don't mean things reposted by Slashdot, which has been far from fair in their
covrage of OLPC.
As a person teaching in "higher education", my experience with "educational experts" is that the words make up an oxymoron. Educational experts exist only in the minds of those who buy into the theories proposed. In fact, these experts - who abound in American secondary education - cannot even agree amongst themselves the best way to educate American students. How will these "experts" - who can't fully educate the most affluent students on earth - even BEGIN to understand how to educate the student with an empty belly and rags for clothes?
That's not "OSS zealotry", and you should know it. OSS zealotry is the refusal to use anything except OSS, even when the closed-source alternatives are superior/more cost-effective/whatever. That sort of thinking is the thinking of fools.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
I'm not entirely sure about those two, but as for governments, I'm not sure that I believe that anymore. We've seen an awfully consistent trend of wealthy government/NGO officials saying that they "can't" when what they really mean is "it would be awkward and we just don't do that kind of thing".
Seriously, given the body count in any major famine or disaster or simply grossly poverty-stricken area, there is just as much at stake and on a timescale no longer than Bosnia. That being the case, why the frak aren't we just bloody well making hundreds of thousands of aid packages and just dropping them over every damn starving village? Little packets of not just food, but multivitamins, solar powered minipumps, LED lamps and radios, ceramic filters for water purifiers with instruction in the local language about how to build them, reflective material and frames for building solar ovens, and so on. Maybe even include a stainless steel bowl or three and a few comics in the local language to encourage literacy.
We could fit in a cubic foot enough to change the mortality rate of an entire village. And we could pack it all in another cubic foot of bubble wrap that would let us drop it without parachutes and have the bubble wrap itself (excellent insulation) be a part of the package. And the whole shebang would not only cost a hundred bucks or so per to make, we could have much of it made in factories in the region, providing real jobs doing real work instead of just handing over charity.
I just don't goddamn well believe anymore that if we airdropped a few dozen of them over a village at three in the morning while airdropping liquor and money around the camps of the local thugs, we would still have the same level of suffering that we now see. And having looked into the technology approaches of most of the big charities, I wouldn't put them in charge of speccing a junior high school prom let alone hundreds of millions of dollars worth of projects each.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
If by that you meant $1,100 macbooks, of course I agree. But isn't OS 9 pretty much freeware at this point? Or at least OS 8? Darwin obviously is. I must admit that I keep hoping that some country with none too much concern for IP will start making Mac OS clone laptops with tech circa, oh, 1998, or maybe Palm OS devices circa 2004 and start selling them really cheap.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
And you'll probably make buckets o' money.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
The death of OLPC is obviously Intel and M$'s fault. Executives from both companies derided the device as a "toy" and failure before it was designed and then did everything possible to kill it. Here are the the short version and detailed original accusation stories. Intel kept up the FUD war, destroying sales that had been committed before the device was complete. Their employees even ran a hostile news site to make bad press.
And of course, because it's FUD from BusinessWeek, we're all going to pretend this vicious attack is correct? OLPC was fine right up until it sold out to Microsoft.
Hypocrisy and treachery against the FOSS community like this are why I am no longer a member of Slashdot.
The other person was asking proof from twitter.
Not true. It "started out" as "how do we distribute information cheaply?" It works very well indeed at that. Among other things, it's a superb ebook reader, which a HUGE thing for kids in a place where they have a massive book shortage.
You, afaict, don't know a damn thing about the OLPC project and even less about project management for this kind of work. Now maybe I'm wrong, I've only worked on a few dozen tech development projects, only a few of which were related to education, but in my world, you start out with whatever cheap crap you can get your hands on, you modify it with stuff that you built yourself to get your proof of principle, and that is how you get your first data. Now, the truth is, I've seen projects done your way (sort of). In fact there are dozens of valid ways to test out a concept and different teams may equally validly choose different approaches.
How about you go off, actually learn something about the OLPC project and the developing world and maybe even learn the idea that maybe the world contains approaches you don't know yet and maybe a thing can be done in ways you're not used to and still be valid and then...
Naw. Go away. You're clueless.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
I also write grants for nonprofit and public agencies, and the third item in this blog post involves some of the research into computers as educational devices. It isn't positive. That doesn't mean someone won't find a way to make computers useful in a statistically significant way, or that the next great hacker with a world changing idea won't get their first computing experience via OLPC or Intel's version or whatever, but it's harder to justify computers en masse without more solid evidence behind it.
Tell me, in what way can you show that the particular money that is being spent on OLPCs would otherwise be spent on health care? Do you say the same thing about the far larger amounts we pay for pet food? Or video games, perhaps? This isn't some sort of tidy little game with a big authority figure offering us one or the other; it's a bunch of folks looking at a world that has hundreds of basic problems and doing their best to address what they can.
And, oh, btw, if you're worried about health care, providing a device that will massively improve education about things like avoiding water contamination (and trust me, I've had to listen to plenty of aid workers who were stymied by the difficulty of teaching that one) will provide at least as much improvement in long-term and even medium term health as would spending the money on, say, sending doctors to treat malaria.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
There are lots of countries who have met the basic requirements for survival, but who lack the infrastructure and wealth we enjoy in 1st world countries. This is for them.
Keep in mind that the reason you've had to keep making this argument again and again is because some people are probably being paid to ignore you and spread FUD. Lowlifes all of them.
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Paid marketers are the worst zealots.
Now stop and reassess what sort of coverage we can expect from them.
And, yes, I did make my living for years working for ad agencies, Time, Inc, McGraw-Hill's magazine division, and various other mass media creating business.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Personally, I first heard about Intel's tactics in a piece in, of all places, the Wall Street Journal.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
If we are to rationally analyze the success or (comparative) failure of the OLPC, it is crucial to understand that the big NGOs are staffed by people who don't much care about the good of the poor. Many of these people are also vastly corrupt and tied into the regimes they are supposedly working to change; regimes that gain from having desperate, ignorant, weak populaces. Myanmar really isn't that anomalous.
Should the OLPC even try to get computers in through governments or would they be better trying to get the relevant officials bribed to just stand aside? I don't know. But we cannot understand the decisions of nations like Libya and Nigeria without starting with the assumption that the good the children is, at best, fourth or fifth on the list of things they looked at when saying yes or no to OLPC.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
The problem isn't that they applications are too difficult for children to use. The problem is that the application interface is such a departure from what ADULTS are used to. They then map their inability onto kids. Kids are adaptable, after all, and they're not afraid of new things.
If you don't know what you're doing, you can't make mistakes.
C'mon, if there's anything this thread can use it's actual feedback from folks personally using this stuff. Spill.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
They've still got six and a half months to sell the other 149,630,000 laptops.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
OLPC is presently not the resounding distribution success it originally predicted, but it is well on its way to achieving some of its goals. Intel has introduced the Classmate PC as a response to OLPC. Libya chose to distribute that instead. Is that really a loss? How much does it matter if Libyan kids are using Classmate PC instead of OLPC? The ultra-low cost PC market was in part created by OLPC. Microsoft drops the price of its software for poor countries from $150 to $3 to respond to the threat of Linux and OLPC. That is a good thing.
Another thing to understand is that OLPC is not best suited for the very poorest countries. It is better suited for moderately poor countries. Peru, where people generally are not absolutely starving, is a better choice than Haiti.
Have you seen pictures of a 19th century classroom? Do you have a personal recollection of a droning teacher reading to your class from a book? These are both examples of a particular theory of learning - one that places high value on memorisation and repetition. It works for some.
A more modern view of learning posits that we learn better by doing, and by discovering things for ourselves - this is called constructivist learning.
OLPC and the software on it is intended to support the constructivist learning model. Have a look at Alan Key's TED Talk to get a better idea of what this means in practice.
These are real educators, and people who have a passion for teaching. If you're interested in what's driving them, Ken Robinson's "Do schools kill creativity" TED Talk is also a must-see.
Incidentally, if you have kids in school you owe it to yourself to see the Robinson TED Talk. And then show it to your kid's teachers.
J
"the hackers took over?" - what a bunch of molarchy. I and the rest of my generation cut our teeth on Commodore64's and AppleII's. Those had no gui, or wysiwyg tools in the beginning. BASIC was taught in 7th grade as a class! Kid's today don't even have "computer science" class where they actually learn how to use a computer and why it does and how it does what it does. Instead they have "MSFT Office class". As a result they don't know that the Word icon is actually telling the computer to run c:\program files\office\word.exe (for example) so they are stumped when an icon gets deleted and wonder why they get viruses after using KAzaa so much. OLPC is an attempt to go back to really teaching computers. The system isn't "hard" it's just not familiar because we've let MSFT hold people's hand to freaking long which has made us all lapdogs.
twitter and Odder are the same person
Ms apps tend to be a little more intuitive then some Open source apps can be. Sure, if all your use to is a CLI, then any GUI would be difficult to jump into. But for the most part, there might have been something MS could have done better and their name might have promoted more interest in the project leading it to being less of a failure.
It is really no surprise that the OLPC doesn't sell well, since they aren't actually selling it. There are plenty of people who bought a Eee or maybe a N800/N810 who would have gone with a OLPC instead if they would actually had a chance to buy one. Over here in Europe there simply is no proper way to buy one and even G1G1 isn't really an alternative, first of it was only a time limited USA-only offer and secondly it is twice the price, which simply is to much to keep up with the competition. If people have the choice between $400 OLPC and $300 Eee, most will go with the Eee.
They really need to cut that elitist 'only for the third-world' bullshit and just sell the devices over regular retailers.
The hardware has got nothing to do with it, and the hackers have got nothing to do with it. And to a degree, the OLPC buying restrictions don't even have much to do with it.
...Don't take my word for it, ask any teacher what they would rather have: internet computers for every student but no books, or unlimited access to textbooks for every student, but no computers. Which one do you think they would choose?
The reason computers have failed as general educational devices so far is because (at least in the US) there's no material to use on them--no textbook companies will offer a fully-digital version of their textbooks. And that is why in most schools, the ONLY classes that commonly have computers for each student are computer-specific courses.
The MAIN advantage of computers in a general classroom use would be digital textbook storage (and the cheaper distribution costs that could be passed on to schools and students), but textbook publishers will not offer digital versions of their books. Why that is I don't particularly know--since they are in electronic form at some point before hitting paper anyway--but until there is a good base of digital text material to work with, computers in the general classroom situation will go nowhere, because the potential cost savings of them cannot be realized. If schools could spend more money for some mini-PC's or e-book readers but spend a lot less money on "books", that might work out to be financially attractive--but it's not legally possible now. (Electronics prices are always dropping; what are textbook prices doing??? Going up or down???,,,)
In a general gradeschool situation, using "the internet" to teach is usually not useful for learning about anything other than goatse and tubgirl.
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you have the hardware but what about the content? so will the kids be accessing the net and going to social network sites?
:)
the cheap computer is just part of the problem. i would like to see if they can get free unrestricted access to all the library of congress collection. i'll get very excited when that happens. books are becoming much expensive than computers.
the internet gave cheaper access to information. but useful information is still hard to come by these days for free.
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
OLPC are a great asset for young kids. But as you have said not many have been sold mainly do the lack of good software around i would say.
But in order for software to be developed programmer that are willing to code for it must get there hands on one.
Young enthusiastic student like my self need easy access to one in order to develop for that. If i have throw 300 - 400 pounds to get one then id rather not cause i dont have that amount of cash.
THat is why people that can afford to get one are those that will turn it into there one machine. Easier access to us, will provide more software to everyone.
So ship us some, and we can start working on some good programs.
It did when Kurt Cobain died, and Jerry Garcia too, and don't forget when Britney dies (because it would end one harvest of media madness)...
I have no recollection of '150 million computers by the end of 2008' - so I'm questioning the validity of using this as an argument. Wikipages, google searches, etc - I'm not finding a cite for that number.
In my mind, that's a ridiculously over optimistic number, and the OLPC infrastructure could never support it. If that was actually a quote from an OLPC representative, can someone give me the cite?
Event Management Solutions : http://www.stonekeep.com/
I can look through my current personal inventory... Dell Poweredge SC400 server, bought with no OS and it came with windows and Linux drivers - 299 dollars, with 100 dollar rebate. so 200 bucks and bought it new from Dell. Currently tying on a dual core dell laptop. 400 dollars new, not a refurb. gig of ram and a cd burner, and it came with xp, bought it a year ago. Dell has been selling 500 dollar boxes with 19 inch lcds for the last 4 years, and somtimes low as 399.
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
And for the very same reason, that's why Linux faltered on the desktop while OS X took off.
Don't get me wrong. I love hackers. I am one. But hackers don't relate well to the "average Joe". We tend to think that "it can't be that hard! We figured it out! They should be able to as well!"... when in truth we don't think like the statistical norm - and it shows in our software and (especially) our user interface designs.
My understanding is that msft has hated this OLPC program since it began. And that msft has worked hard to undermine the program. For example, if msft found a school that was interested in OLPC, msft would step in and offer to install a msft network instead. Of course, there may have been a lot of msft sponsored fud: "the OLPC teaches children non-standard computing" and of course: "msft will offer something better."
The following activities are the favored ones. By that I mean that the OLPC people get all excited about them, think that they are ideal for all children, and want them on every laptop.
Tam Tam: it's supposed to be for music. You get 4 programs. One of them lets you click on icons for sound. It's just sound effects; you can not play a tune. Another program lets you mess with oscillators! There is an underperformaing program with pages of music on some kind of non-standard undocumented scale; the UI is painfully awkward though. You can choose from some awful instruments, like "dog" and "dice".
Pippy: this is Python. Eeeew, and ouch! You're limited to one file. You have to edit with the AbiWord (word processor) engine.
TurtleArt: this is a cross between LabView and Logo. It's hard to use, yet also very limited.
Etoys: no joke, this is Smalltalk!!! OMG, WTF??? It comes complete with tiny print and the, uh, "performance" you'd expect.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=184648&cid=15251436
If you're miles ahead of everyone else in your Maths classes you're going to get very bored.
Bored kids try to find things to do, such as show how smart they are by undermining what the teacher is trying to teach, by messing about, or simply by doing something totally different to the rest of the class.
Kids learn very little if the class is constantly disrupted, or if respect for the teacher is lost.
So yes, the teachers are trying to control what you are learning, but so that you do not fuck up the education of the other kids.