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Skeptics Question OLPC's Focus With $75 Tablet
With the recent announcement of OLPC's shift in focus, many are criticizing the nonprofit's attempt to design what could be seen as unrealistic hardware at an impossible price point. "The OLPC project has become an unrealistic hardware 'dream' and lost its focus on education, wrote blogger Wayan Vota on OLPC News, which has followed the OLPC since its inception. The project comes up with unrealistic hardware designs and price points that destroy its purpose even more, he wrote. 'Excuse me if I get mad at the XO-3 hype. I'm angry at the energy devoted to fantasy XO hardware instead of OLPC educational reality. I miss the original OLPC Mission, where children, not computers, controlled our dreams,' Vota wrote."
Yes. The OLPC needs to be coupled with software that gives children a basic education with little or no teacher assistance. Then it's worth deploying in places where the educational system has broken down.
Like Afghanistan.
It is nice that they want to make laptops for these kids but I think they are overdoing it. It seems like the proponents are more enthralled with the sizzle rather than the steak. Why can't we just put in reasonable computer labs with Internet connections?
I studied in Mexico for a while and it is quite common for many people, especially kids, to go to the neighborhood Internet cafe and pay a small fee to use their computers. There were always lots of kids there and they didn't mind that it was a "community" computer. While it would be nice to give everyone laptops, the whole idea of providing computing to masses of schoolchildren in the developing world needs to at least start with computer labs in the schools.
Fundamentally I see problems with giving kids in the developing world laptops:
1.) These are poor countries and the devices may be lost/stolen/sold to pay for essentials of life
2.) Not likely to have Internet access at home, may not even have reliable electricity
3.) Access to teachers in school (and tech support...).
I think they just wanted to make glitz and glamor out of this. The idea of a computer lab is not very sexy when compared to giving kids expensive pieces of hardware which will magically transform their lives.
I always thought the idea of technology item X transforming problem Y as being a particularly dreamy form of dream. But I'm just an old cynic that has heard that line from so many before I stopped waiting. Maybe they could prove me wrong.
If anything they have to build something. XO-3 sounds kinda nice, if they could deliver. And you'd have a real product in a real market, not some pipedream. And you could always try to turn the pipedream into reality with a XO-3 buy one give type thing.
In any case the OLPC response by real companies has proven the market for the simpler sub notebook type thingies, so built it and they will come. And the social engineers can get a real product to form some betterment around.
I don't see what the poster thinks has changed.
Many of us have pointed out from the beginning that having a computer is not equivalent to education... let alone solving the problems of food and shelter.
OLPC is a Westerner's arrogant fantasy and has been from the beginning. Not at all saying we should not try and level the playing field, but the targets of this program are not suffering in their education because they don't have a Laptop. They are a long way from that.
Boondoggle? No, just misguided and arrogant.
And the nearly 1,000,000 XO-1 laptops in the hands of children in developing countries suggest you are a troll.
I agree, but at least they kickstarted the netbook craze which will help accomplish their goal without their direct participation.
We don't need them any more and I could care less if they never do anything worthwhile again. Their business model is not my concern,
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
I think they are either trying to be overly ambitious and unrealistic with themselves, or knowingly going to the press with absurdly low pricing to get headlines and discussion (like this) happening- but when/if it comes to light the price will be 2-3x of this. OLPC has got some lofty goals, but I don't know if they fully saw netbooks coming (competition) and have obviously before have came out with announcements of unrealistic pricing ($100 laptop) and when they released they were 2x that.
Tibbon
tibbon.com
This is what happens when you have techies trying to implement a business plan. they fail to understand the key drivers and get lost in the technical considerations. producing a $100 laptop in itself it's actually a meaningful goal, attempting to educate the poor is the goal, thats what they lost sigh of.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
No so long ago a few guys had a dream that computers should be in everyone's home, not just research centers and businesses. Now, most wired homes have multiple desktops and laptops. Dreams of a better hardware or software platform drive us to develop more efficient, cheaper systems. OLPC's founders and contributes are ambitious, and there is nothing wrong with that. While the perfect $75 platform may not be available next year, within 5 years its an obtainable goal. Remember a $200 machine is closer to a $75 dollar computer that previous "affordable machines" of late (excluding the recent popularity of netbooks).
my mom posts on slashdot.
Holy crap, Deja Vu! P I seem to remember something similar like "Oh they'll never be able to make 1,000,000 laptops at that pricepoint and distribute them effectively." OLPC: Proving you wrong, again and again.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
This is why the Open Learning Exchange was founded by Dr. Richard Rowe. He had been President of the OLPC project and broke away primarily to concentrate on the supplying educational software to the kids. See http://ole.org/about/faq/
You need courseware before you need laptops. Indeed, OLE's initial plan doesn't require laptops for the kids.
The irony is, the hardware more-or-less existed when the OLPC was first conceptualized - and it could've been done inexpensively at that time, too. Five years ago, a $100 linux-based "netbook" would've been entirely feasable.
No, it wouldn't have had color or an x86 processor. And yes, it would've been a crappy monochrome LCD. But it'd have gotten great battery life, been able to do audio and the basic tasks outlined for the project, and (importantly) been able to be sold for under $100.
It was pretty obvious that Intel was making buku bucks off the advertising associated with the original platform. The OLPC guys got taken for a ride by associating with Intel on that one.
This time around, with enough volume there's no reason $100 shouldn't be achievable for a consumer price, and a lot less than that for production.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
The OLPC needs to be coupled with software that gives children a basic education with little or no teacher assistance.
This is the fantasy that sank OLPC the first time around.
Every culture has its own educational tradition. Its own theory of how children should be taught,what they should be taught, and by who they should be taught.
There are gatekeepers, secular and religious.
"No" means "no." No purchase orders. No deployment. No support. No protection.
You can't work openly.
You can't work secretly without someone paying the ultimate price.
"If you educate a boy, you educate an individual; but if you educate a girl, you educate a community. No other factor even comes close to matching the cascade of positive changes triggered by teaching a single girl how to read and write." Stones Into Schools
Taliban bomb schools in NW Pakistan
The geek will blithely hand the Afghan girl a lime-green laptop that can never be openly carried or displayed.
It would be suicidal even to speak of it to a stranger.
The girl is illiterate, like her sisters, her mother, her grandmother.
True literacy implies a basic understanding of all forms of communication. The girl needs to learn how to see. The girl needs to learn how to hear.
The girl needs a teacher. She needs a school - a defensible space in which to learn.
Kids can, and will teach themselves given the chance.
another link
(you may want to skip about 5 minutes into the video. The comments are good too.)
T
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
after the others start seeing the benefits of reading, the popularity will grow
Nope. There are two very human reactions:
1. Don't admit that you can't read. Avoid situations where it would be obvious to others.
2. Claim that reading is unimportant. Say that people who waste time on reading are nerds.
And the nearly 1,000,000 XO-1 laptops in the hands of children in developing countries suggest you are a troll.ZZZ
Confirmed deployment of OLPC outside of Columbia, Peru, Uruguay and Rwanda is - for all practical purposes - insignificant. Summary of Laptop Orders
Citation needed. That they were all delivered already.
Not only will those developing countries use them, they'll also spend 12+ hours a day making them. Then some Audi-driving party boss(or his equivalent in the Third World) enslaves the very people that were meant to be freed by this technology.
At that cost, you've just added a slave labor incentive to the mix. How about just cut to the chase if all you're going to get is slave labor in a Third World country?
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Couldn't a program be run by some big corporate mob where they give you a hundred bucks off the cost of your shiny new laptop. Then they could take your old one, give it to the poor with Linux installed on it? I have a couple of old laptops here that would fit the bill perfectly and I bet a lot of other /. users would too. We don't need to create something when the resource they need is sitting around wanting to be used but headed for the dump or years in a dusty draw.
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
He's right. The OLPC project appears to have lost its focus on improving education for the most disadvantaged children, and is instead attempting to innovate in other ways. This falls into the same category as many other tech/geekdom mistakes: making the gadgets and gizmos the focus rather than what they can do for people. I love building and upgrading computers, trying out new operating systems, and just generally tinkering with all sorts of things, so that is a legitimate hobby for me. But crap like M$ software and things like Macs are popular because people can just get their real work done with them. The most awesome, multi-touch, quad core, 16GB DDR4 tablet computer won't help an author like my mom finish a book faster, or do anything to help a kid learn if the kid can't get one. Make it work, and make it available NOW, and you've got a winner.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
As stated elsewhere, I've been to Afghanistan - in fact, this time last year I was there, in Kandahar.
Afghan society has been smashed FLAT. It started with the Soviets, got worse during the warlord era, still worse during the Taliban era, and is now slowly starting to recover.
All the mechanisms of government - gone. No government services. No social programs of any kind. The concept of a policeman being someone you go to when you need help, instead of being a stoned agent of extortion - completely alien.
And it's been like that since 1979 or so.
Average life expectancy is 35 years. **35**.
So you're dealing with a couple of generations of Afghans for whom this way of life is completely normal. That all the wretched poverty and all the rest is how life is lived and how life has ALWAYS been lived.
The whole culture has PTSD.
Not that there weren't individual Afghans who wouldn't leap at something like OLPC. Some of them, for exactly the right reasons. Some of them because they could sell it and buy opium or hash. And the former would run a very real risk of being assaulted (or doused with acid, as happened at a girl's school when I was there) because some dirtbag thought education was unIslamic.
Solving the problem of a failed state like Afghanistan is an enormous, enormous problem with no easy or quick solution. And while I applaud the intent behind OLPC, I think it places far too much faith in both the transformative power of technology and the innate goodness of people. Afghanistan doesn't need OLPC. It needs trained Afghan teachers, regular funding for those teachers, a supply of paper and pencils, and a security situation stable enough so that kids can go to school without fear of being blown up, shot, or sprayed with acid.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
Its absolute garbage that a company cant produce a useful 75 dollar laptop. I may not be completely enlightened as to all of the technical hurdles, I'm sure that they can put a commodore 64 into something the side of a fingernail. Add on a flat pressure keyboard, a crappy LCD display with no backlight, and a 10 dollar 8GB SDcard for the slim, custom operating system and apps, and you start getting pretty close. It sounds like this company has blown a tonne of cash on trying to find a new iPod that even though its targetted at kids in suffering nations, everyone will want one because its 'such impressive technology'. FFS, a modified nintendo DS is nearly achieving all of the design goals of this project.
tl;dr : this made some people rich.
yeah! a crime to say such a thing, the holy CPU will be displeased with me I know, but it would be more use to get some smart people together to design and print rafts of sturdy books comprised of diagrams and cartoons, the cartoons suggest ways of acting together, complex ideas not apparent to primitive cultures (ie disease transmission/control) and social interaction, and the diagrams show how to build a decent house, smelt metal, build tools, quarry/shape stone, dig wells, arrange sanitation etc, I think that would be more useful and cost effective.
When the OLPC was first announced, I was surprised that they were making things so hard on themselves. A clamshell, with keyboard, with color screen? Trying to hit a $100 price point? It seemed like that would be hard, and it was... hard enough that they didn't hit their target. The OLPC XO costs double the target price, it is glacially slow, and at least the one I bought has a totally unusable touch pad.
What I thought they should have done was to make something rather like a Handspring Visor, but bigger. A tablet with a touchscreen and a stylus. One piece, no hinges. It could have a flip cover, and the cover could have little pins that go into molded dimples on the tablet; the cover would protect the touchscreen when closed, but would not be actually part of the tablet and would be easy to replace. But a plastic cover isn't a strict necessity; a slip case of cloth or vinyl or whatever would serve just fine.
Color is great, and kids love it, but it is not necessary and hitting the price point is more important.
I remember when the Palm PDA first came out, I read about attachments you could get to hook up science probes (thermometers and pH probes) and how teachers were taking kids out to ponds or wetlands to measure things. No color screen there, not needed.
I have carried a Palm or Handspring PDA since the Palm first came out. I have used them for reading books (mostly fiction but some nonfiction). The core mission of the OLPC really is to serve as the textbooks for the children. No color screen needed.
So, let's imagine a tablet, with a touchscreen and a stylus. The stylus stores in a "silo" as with a Palm PDA. The screen is maybe 6 inches (15 cm). Like a Palm PDA, it has a few "hard keys" along with the screen, and in fact let's give it a game pad (direction pad) like a Nintendo DS, and standard 1/8" mini jacks for headphones and microphone. It has whatever CPU makes technical sense, likely an ARM (certainly not an x86). It even has a USB connector or two, making it possible to prop this thing up and plug in a keyboard (whatever you can buy cheapest from some Chinese manufacturer). It would be great if it had an SD card slot, but with the USB connector you don't actually need an SD card slot and it's more important that it be simple and cheap to produce. Design it brain dead simple: take it apart, and you have the mainboard, the screen, the battery pack, and the case. Could this be built for the sub-$100 price point? Yes. Now upgrade the screen to color, if you can hit the price point. Then maybe add WiFi, if you can hit the price point. Cameras are fun too, if you can hit the price point.
If you can save money by making the screen the exact size and shape as would be used in a hugely mass-produced portable DVD player, do that. If you have to, make a dual-screen design like a Nintendo DS that uses standard cell phone displays. As long as you can make a device that can be field-repaired and cheaply mass-produced, you can be flexible with the design. But it doesn't have to look like a laptop and it shouldn't have any hinges or other moving parts. Maybe it doesn't even have a DC power jack; maybe you charge it by plugging in to the USB port. Or maybe not; I'm not an expert on this stuff, have an expert advise you on what is most cost-effective.
Now mass produce the things and sell them to anyone who wants one. Get the production quantity up. But hit the frakking price point.
For bonus points, make thermometers, pH probes, volt/ohm probes, and such that plug in to the USB or the microphone jack, and mass produce those as well.
Actual devices like this, in actual school children's hands, would be far better than a more ambitious device that doesn't hit the price point and only gets deployed in a very few locations.
P.S. I'm glad the XO-2 seems to be dead. Dual full-color touch screens with a hinge? That is not a design for inexpensive mass production.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
That's when they dropped the ball and became completely uninteresting and evil.
http://msversus.org/
Apparently many slashdotter have no idea what Afghanistan needs in terms of education. Although the DiY solutions is always the geek's perfect dream, in reality, given the infrastructure and the local needs, a PC won't do it unless coupled with a structured involvement of local communities, with proper training of teachers. OLPC (the organization) deals with the highest level of government, which at the moment is a corrupt bunch. Teachers cannot be substituted, as you can easily read from Greg Mortenson work (far more effective than OLPC wil ever be in Afghanistan in its current implementation):
http://www.threecupsoftea.com/
One Let-down Per Case
Try 'beaucoup'
I knew this project was doomed from the day it started - bleeding hearts "saving the world" though technology? Technology rarely does that, people do that. I have a bleeding heart too but you have to realize this stuff is not simple to solve. Now they've wasted a metric fuck-ton of money and time that could have been spent doing real stuff like helping starving people migrate, learn to farm, or fuck - just sending them rice instead of computers. The solution is not to give starving/dying/underpriviledged people people access to crummy versions of modern technology, it's to help them learn to survive on their own and addressing the root causes of their problems, which often involve government, land, and resources.
Here's a hint:
Can you eat the OLPC? Can you cook with it? Can you use it to light up the hut at night? No, it doesn't do any of those things very well.
Negroponte is on my shit list above even Kamen for being the most pretentious and stuck up "world problem solving" useless engineers.
And you all totally care and will even see this post because I'm an A.C. /rant
What you see as "slavery" is the normal path of industrial development.
When starting from nothing, it has always been necessary to leverage human capital. The Industrial Revolution was built on cheap labor, yet its outcomes (eventually) brought about prosperity and improvement in quality of life for all classes. It made the modern socialist welfare state possible.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
"The OLPC needs to be coupled with software that gives children a basic education with little or no teacher assistance."
Why? And if you could, is it workable?
Even in Afghanistan there are plenty of sufficiently educated people capable of teaching. Or learning to teach. Or assisting in the process. You don't need a low student to teacher ratio for effective teaching. If that were the case then US primary and secondary schools would be awesome and US colleges and other countries primary and secondary schools would suck.
If you don't have educated adults who support the education of children, how do you expect these computers to get into the hands of the children in the first place? Put simply, education is NOT A TECHNICAL PROBLEM. It is a social/political/economic one.
The OLPC is a waste of time and money. If you insist on technology, we have these things called ereaders made by many different companies. They can hold many books (texts and works of literature), have a long battery life, are inexpensive and are a known quantity. Humans managed to create our present state of technology with a centuries old learning system. We shouldn't be so arrogant to assume that we can do better.
Hmm... and confirmed deployment of Microsoft Windows outside of Africa, Asia, Americas, Europe and Australasia is - for practical purposes - insignificant. C'mon. if you exclude the main places where a system has been deployed, of course you don't find that many deployments. The summary you point to says 1.3 million and directly supports the grandparent. I find it very significant that Uraguy, the first deployer, seems to keep ordering. Presumably this shows that the XO was a good product and greater deployment has only been stopped by Intel/Microsoft marketing people who managed to stop it even getting to teachers to learn about and test.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();