Slashdot Mirror
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 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.
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....
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
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.
Perhaps that is because so much of their funding came after they agreed to do things for the corporations that were offering to sponsor them? Like, say, agreeing that they would produce a system that could run Windows? As the AC noted, a $100 laptop is not at all impossible to produce, you just need to have modest hardware.
Palm trees and 8
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.
That's exactly right. The only reason the OLPC group set out to design the XO in the first place was that there were no computers in that size and price range at the time. They simply did not exist.
Well, now they exist. Cherrypal is selling them. They're not going to have the same kind of standardized architecture that the XO does, but nonetheless they're Real Live Computers that can run real operating systems (and by "real operating systems" I of course mean Linux).
OLPC ought to be putting educational software on those rather than blowing more money chasing this touchscreen pipe dream.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org