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Is One Laptop Per Child Winding Down?
An anonymous reader sends this quote from OLPC News about whether the One Laptop Per Child project can expect to continue much longer:
"Here is a question for you: 8 years on, would you recommend anyone start a new deployment with XO-1 laptops? With the hardware now long past its life expectancy, spare parts hard to find, and zero support from the One Laptop Per Child organization, its time to face reality. The XO-1 laptop is history. Sadly, so is Sugar. Once the flagship of OLPC's creativity in redrawing the human-computer interaction, few are coding for it and new XO variants are mostly Android/Gnome+Fedora dual boots. Finally, OLPC Boston is completely gone. No staff, no consultants, not even a physical office. Nicholas Negroponte long ago moved onto the global literacy X-Prize project."
A response from OLPC says their mission is "far from over." They add, "OLPC also has outsourced many of the software and development units because the organization is becoming more hardware and OS agnostic, concentrating on its core values – education."
I hate to be snarky, but did it ever wind up?
Indoctrination happens either way. Just look at how many people end up with the religion of the dominant culture of their region.
Sugar is the horrible POS that made the XO-1 such a sluggish pain to use. If they had developed a lean UI rather than deploying some overarchitected academic project that was clearly never tested on the target hardware it would have been much more appealing.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Only because we don't flat out ban it.
Each childs mind should be there's to invent and create on their own. Not their parents, not the governments, not religious nuts, not the corporations, and not advertisers.
I can go on eBay and get and Android netbook for the same price as a XO-1. It has more memory and ton of software that just works. Most pay as you go cell phones have similar power, a good battery life needed for these areas and has the dual purpose of, well being a phone. I can't see OLPC going any further unless it becomes a broker for similar devices.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
Think of all the poor kids who would be without worthless computers today had it not been for this program.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
There is no better source of information than the internet and it's kind of hard to connect to the internet without a computer.
Their current device is basically a ruggedized Android tablet; there are plenty of those available in toystores for less.
With regards to hardware and OS, they've gone as far as they can and the market has taken over.
They should focus on distribution to poor countries and the application side of things (which seems to be exactly what they're doing).
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
It was displaced by the "one cellphone per child" consumer-initiated movement.
Silly project dies a silly death. News at eleven!
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
The founder of the MIT Media Lab, which churns out nothing but useless ivory-tower crap, moved on to something more shiny?
Shocking.
OLPC was nothing more than a way to pay for travel to academic conferences and get his name into stuff.
Please help metamoderate.
I guess I never realized it was supposed to be a going concern. I always thought it was some fanciful charitable concern.
How about "Clean Water Per Child" or something more worthwhile to care about. Computer hardware isn't the same vein of need as just about anything else you might legitimately ascribe the term "need" to. If they are in a society where it is a "need", it is in just about every facet of their lives in a much more productive manner than giving them a laptop to go destroy.
mind control indoctrination at it's finest.
image a world where you didn't need the internet. you didn't need to be connected to one another, and you lived your life dealing with what you had locally. you would turn out to be smarter, faster, and more proficient, perhaps, spending less days associating with a screen that merely duplicated what everyone else was viewing. literally, all your experience would come from working with the real world, and not being driven into the pleasure of having information from a source that you normally don't gain any experience from using.
couldn't it be that you're addicted to starring at a screen all day, and you're ignoring other sources for information? other sources and methods of living your life?
also when I get on the bus each day, I see each and every one of them starring into their smartphones, no longer interacting with one another, mindless wasting their lives in games and Facebook shit. I imagine that because of this, most of them are just mindlessly addicted, and have forgotten what it's like to live in the real world.
I and a few other volunteers set up a few new deployments just this past January (2014) in Haiti. 8 years on, the XO-1's are still great learning tools. There is still a supply, as a lot of people redonated their "get one," and the laptops themselves seem to last almost forever. Spare parts aren't all that hard to find, and there are dozens if not hundreds of developers and sysadmins still supporting existing deployments, with the more adventurous of us working on new ones.
For anyone interested in starting a new deployment with XO-1's, you can get in touch with us at http://unleashkids.org and we can talk about the details.
This world sounds boring.
OLPC was a project to get computers into the hands of children in developing nations. This was at a time when a laptop for a hundred bucks was thought to be impossible...... and then along came smart phones and tablets.
The OLPC was made obsolete by these devices. You can now get Android tablets for under 50 bucks and have access to hundreds of thousands of apps on the Android OS. No longer are you stuck in a sandbox like system with limited hardware and software. Sure they arent as rugged but the low cost makes them more appealing and they are essentially throw away (though that is not necessarily a good thing)
See this:
http://globalnews.ca/news/1203449/canadian-makers-of-worlds-lowest-cost-tablet-aim-for-a-20-device/
Someone gave me one of these to play with, and it was terrible. I think the underlying idea may actually have been to make poor children not care that they don't have laptops, rather than actually giving them one that they can use.
Before smartphones, commuters were staring into books (which contained less information than an Internet-connected device can provide), doing crosswords or simply looking out the window. In my considerable experience of commuter transportation around the world, I have never seen people on their way to the daily grind "interacting with one another" to any significant degree.
So ban all education? It's all mind control...
Yes, it's definitely our White Man's Burden to save children from native cultures. Manifest Destiny forever.
The OLPC XO-1 enpirically demonstrated that one could manufacture a self-contained device that could credibly be called a "computer" for $100. While that's no big deal today, it was unheard of a decade ago, and the XO-1 stood as the empirical proof it was possible.
I'm affraid my current smartphone probably has more memory, more storage and is faster than my 8 years old single core laptop running W-XP.
So how about one smartphone per child?
Privacy is terrorism.
When I emailed OLPC last year, I didn't expect a response and I didn't get one. Instead, Project Rive's XO laptops came from the Contributors' Program, which is run by volunteers for volunteers. 10 computers go down in someone's suitcase, instead of 10,000 being sent to a government. This "unofficial" effort has long been doing a much better job than the official guys, because we give schools the support they need - from solar setups to curriculum. Unleash Kids launched several programs in Haiti this year. We're using the original XO-1 computers, with new tools like a customized version of Sugar, the XSCE school server, and Internet-in-a-Box. Yep, the computers themselves are still being used years later, and there's a community working to find new uses and users. There's 2.5 million XOs out there, built to last longer than the latest tablet. No matter what happens to the big guys, Unleash Kids and others inspired by the OLPC vision will continue
from something offensive, we knew it was doomed. A couple of people here pointed that out about eight years or so ago. Offending the people you're trying to help just shows he was never serious about actually trying to help people.
Time to double down
A few weeks ago OLPC 2.0 had a presence at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE 12X). Far from being "dead," it was as big a hit as ever. Of course, these were folks who are interested in open course software in education (OSSIE). There were deployers from several different countries sharing their stories and hardware/software developers demonstrating their work. Many people there showed interest in joining in this global movement to improve the education and lives of children everywhere.
People have criticized the XOs for their small memories and lack of lightning-fast performance. What they forget is that they are designed to run on very little power. There are viable deployments, in areas with no infrastructure, that run exclusively on solar power because that's all there is. They also use an "Internet-in-a-box" device that provides textbooks, lessons, and research materials similar to what they could find on the internet.
As an educator with over 30 years teaching experience, I can assure you that Sugar software is better than most commercial "educational" software. Sugar Labs has had over 10,000,000 Activity downloads so far. There must be something good there.
The problem is that most of the teachers using XOs and Sugar are overloaded with other obligations and seldom have a chance to really learn to use it creatively with their students. This problem is not unique to OLPC and Sugar.
One very large school district in the United States, was recently in the news because they were providing an iPad for every student, loaded with lots of commercial "educational" software that the "powers that be" decided they needed. Immediately there were all sorts of problems with security and smart high school students hacking the systems. The roll out is currently on hold. Meanwhile, a free workshop about using the tablets, held by the local Computer Using Educators (CUE) group on a weekend was attended by fewer than 50 people in a district with over 30,000 teachers.
Teachers everywhere, are just too busy doing other things required by their jobs not the least of which is preparing their students for mandated achievement tests and worrying about whether they will have a job the next school year. Some also feel their jobs are threatened by technology. And, of course, there is always the resistance to change.
But, where the proper groundwork has been done, some amazing things are coming out of classrooms using Sugar and the XOs. With olpc 2.0, it looks like it will continue to do so for many years to come. You are invited to be a part of this.
If you are a software or hardware developer or would like to get involved with assisting a deployment, there are many opportunities. There is also a need for people who would like to help with a project to bring the best of Sugar to the Android platform so it can be used on the millions of devices that are already in existence.
If you will be in Paris April 12-13, you might want to check out "Sugar Camp Paris." (http://fr.amiando.com/sugarcamp3.html). Other similar gatherings are held internationally throughout the year.
No, the XO and Sugar are still very much alive.
Getting children used to a free, non-proprietary operating system -- weaning them off Microsoft's teats, so to say -- is a social good in itself. To abandon this goal was a huge mistake.
Circumcision is child abuse.
you realize that the.. exact opposite has been the norm throughout human existance right? isolated groups of people do not develop things like "science" and "technology". if you want that lifestyle, go to somewhere like papau new guinea and see it first hand.
the mindless obsession with cell phones and facebook IS stupid. but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
... technology and the marketplace responded far more quickly, more cheaply, and vastly more efficiently than an NGO like OLPC could or would.
I wonder how much money was wasted funding this organization?
I bought one of the OLPCs (actually two, as part of the "give one get one" charity program) for my daughter who was in the target age group at the time - and shortly thereafter I also bought an EEPC running Linux. The result - user acceptance of the EEPC blew the OLPC into the weeds. The OLPC was on minor novelty value, and that was all. The Atom processor on the EEPC smoked the Geode of course, and the native apps has far better performance of course than the Python programs on the OLPC, but the real kicker was this: the EEPC let my daughter do thins she actually wanted to do! What a concept!
It is sad to such a significant amount of money and creativity being poured into a such a "broken by design" project. You pick the slowest processor out there (since low power consumption was apparently a pre-eminent goal of the project). But then you put very inefficient software on it. And it is not even a good app suite!
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Good idea tries to get low-cost hardware and a good educational platform OS into the hands of poor people.
Big American corporation comes along and drowns idea in a bathtub.
Big American corporation offers touch-screen television remote controls (which they call "smart" phones) as a replacement.
Everyone cheers.
The end.
Cheap it is, granted. And yes, its inceptors do (try to) target it at the educational market. I have in fact spotted several RPi machines at my university. However, getting a RPi usable to be part of a general science project is quite far from trivial. Yes, given its easily accessible GPIO, it's close to ideal. But basic and high school teachers rarely know enough to get a RPi to boot, don't even mention to control or monitor outside events.
You understand what "white man's burden" means, right? It's not a synonym of "charity". It's "deeming other cultures unable to properly rule themselves as an excuse".
Not only commuters, but drivers. I used to see people driving and reading a book all the time, now they just have a tablet.
My favorite was a guy passing traffic at 90 while playing a trumpet.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The OLPC News website in the past months has build up a reputation for sharply criticizing the $100 laptop project headed up by Nicholas Negroponte .. You can shrug your shoulders and simply ignore the blog, but Christopher Blizzard, one of the OLPC's contributors and an employee for Red Hat, looked a little bit further. It turns out that one of the site's authors works on an Intel project that is competing with the OLPC. Oops." link
Then they decided that it needed to run some form of Windows.
The End.
Bull.
The XO laptop was a product of the western media lab and a take-it-or-leave-it constructivist philosophy of education that proclaimed that teachers were of no consequence and that kids and their families could teach themselves.
There have been a bare 1.8 million OLPC laptops distributed
Most to Uruguay and Peru and almost none outside the Western Hemisphere. The notion that anyone could have believed OLPC was a culturally neutral ---- truly global solution ---for primary education seems laughable in retrospect.
From the beginning, OLPC was competing against simplified versions of the generic Windows PC with MS Office.
From the point of view of the third-world education minister, these were marketable skills that prepared a student well for the higher grades and vocational education, SUGAR was always going to be a question mark.
More importantly. these stripped down Windows systems systems did not attempt to dictate teaching methods or courseware generally.
I actually did live in the time you describe, and guess what: people like you complained in precisely the same terms about what the amount of TV we watched was doing to our minds. And what do you miss, exactly, when you are "no longer interacting with" that fascinating intellectual ferment of souls you meet on the city bus?
And for most normal use that is enough. It won't foster new geeks. But for all other purposes it fits the bill.
In fact, I would go so far as to say it quite literally changed computing by showing that a low power non-windows laptop could work (crank charger? hell yes). The form factor was closer to what made the Asus eeePC 701 famous - and get this, the even the name seems to derive from the OLPC mission [1]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
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We started a deployment of 150 XO 1.5s in Pakistan in 2011. It is only now that we feel we have started fully benefiting from the laptops in every class with every child. It has taken three years to integrate theseinto our curriculum. The project has enabled us to bring these children from very severely deprived backgrounds to the 21st century in a very poor area of Karachi. The sugar activities were astarter,butnow our children know how to research on the internet when it is available, go on facebook, make pen pals around the world, do projects that connect them with other kids around the world like celebrating Earth day last April. With the help of community supporter like Braddock they have access to internet in a box now. With Tony Anderson's help we have finally learnt how to use a school server properly for the first time. Nancy Severs gave us the courage to open up bricked laptops to give them a new lease of life to XO 1.0 we have. Sadia Balouch has been collecting and refurbishing XO 1.0 from the US and sending them across with friends and relatives. We have recieved about 40 XO's from her and I hear more are on the way. James Cameron from so far away has been hand holding us to fix our XO1.5's and has even introduced us to Samuel North in the UK who has fixed XO's which we could not fix ourselves.
So please tell me what makes up OLPC? is it the hardware, the software, the network, the ideas generated by people in the field, the help and courage passed on by volunteers, the love of learning that our kids have been given only because we embraced the One Laptop per Child belief that if we put a loptop in a child's hand we will open a whole new world for them?
To a lay person in the field the fact that there is a change in the OLPC organization has made little impact as long as there is a community out there that is willing to support us and even willing to send us spare parts. i have recieved free screens, serial adapters, batteries, chargers and even laptops from people I have never met.Just one email of help to the support gang oes it all. I came back from my first OLPC basecamp meeting in Melaka feeling more inspired then ever!
Kishwer Aziz, Pakistan
I know plenty of schools using Chromebooks now. You can buy Chromebook's in bulk quantities for around $150. But the real problem is the wireless infrastructure required for large groups of WIFI devices in a setting like a school. Or in poor areas where even wired internet might not be available. Their is so much more required then just getting hardware to these poor areas. We read of projects like balloons and drones being developed to provide a wireless solution. But none of them seem very viable given weather extremes and the fact you still need a base station providing the trunk line for those flying devices.
I think e also forget how many places in the World still lack basics like running water, sanitation and stable electricity. Let alone WiFi internet.
Children smell like doo-doo and crayons.
"Papert and Negroponte distributed [computers] to school children in a suburb of Dakar, Senegal. The experience confirms one of Papert's central assumptions: children in remote, rural, and poor regions of the world take to computers as easily and naturally as children anywhere. These results will be validated in subsequent deployments in several countries, including Pakistan, Thailand, and Colombia. [...] Naturally, it failed. Nothing is that independent, especially an organization backed by a socialist government and staffed by highly individualistic industry visionaries from around the world. Besides, altruism has a credibility problem in an industry that thrives on intense commercial competition."
Oh, wait, wrong decade. That quote was from the 1992 attempt to do this with Apple II and Logo instead of OLPCs, Sugar, and Scratch.
My bad.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
With Windows 8 requirement of a license by the proprietary hardware in order to perform a simple Linux install, is wrong. Its real bad. Just say NO to proprietary hardware.
Re-purposing a computer for One Laptop per Child or some other education use is why I buy all my hardware (PC, laptop and tablet) from Linux ONLY vendors. I figure I can always purchase a Windows license if I want one, however down the road that Linux hardware will not require a Windows license to run Linux because of some stupid proprietary chipsets in the hardware.
While there are many Linux only vendors, my favorite is ZaReason. System76 is another one, but they seem to focus on only one or two Linux distros, where the ZaReason techs will put on many more. Loving Debian lately and plan to play with Arch down the road.
Do yourself a favor, avoid any vendor that focuses on Windows and buy Linux hardware and if you really must have the latest version of Windows, purchase a license for your better LINUX hardware. At least it can run Windows without hassles, the converse is no longer true.
A Windows 8 device no longer runs Linux without hassles, best to avoid it for this reason alone.
I bought an XO-1 from the first "Give One Get One" promotion many years ago. I was a bit disappointed with it, but I learned to write Activities for Sugar and eventually wrote a book on the subject which you may check out here:
https://archive.org/details/Ma...
I used my XO-1 as an e-book reader and was so pleased with it and all the thousands of free e-books available from archive.org and Project Gutenberg that I learned to create and donate books to these sites and wrote a book on that subject:
https://archive.org/details/EB...
I also wrote a few Activities for the platform. So did many others, including some children. You can check them all out here:
http://activities.sugarlabs.or...
You can also check out Sugar itself, easily. Your Linux distribution probably includes it. You can run it in a window in your current desktop or log into it as an alternate desktop.
You can say that the laptop was never as good or as cheap as we hoped it would be. You could say that it never got into the hands of as many children as we had hoped it would. That would be true. But you can't say it didn't work. The Constructionist method works. If I had a kid I'd want him to be educated that way.
Consider this: In 1969 intelligent people thought we might have a sizable moon base and a donut shaped space station with a Hilton and a Howard Johnson's by 2001. That year came and went and we still have neither of those things. We barely have Howard Johnson's restaurants on Earth these days. But no reasonable person would say that the Apollo program was a failure. A disappointment maybe, but not a failure. And manned space exploration on the scale shown in 2001 will happen. Not as soon as we would like, but it will happen.
You can say the same thing about using computers to educate our children. It's going to happen. There are bad ways to do this. OLPC showed us a good way to do it. It is still showing us that.
Bump the parent up. They speak word.
Who needs laptops when you can give children the educational wonder that is velociraptors?
http://velociraptorz.org/
Did it ever wind up? If you cannot provide an iPad and chauffeured transportation to and from the school of your choice for every one of your bloody spawn, you are a loser.
Good points on dreams, and disappointments, and continuing hopes.
Here are some rambles of my own thoughts and experiences with OLPC and an independent software developer long interested in education (my wife and I made a free garden simulator in the 1990s).
I got two OLPs via the G1-G1 program. One never even made it out of the box, sadly. (I think of donating them somewhere sometimes, thinking it is better a kid has it than it becomes an unused collector's item.) I made a demo version of some of our plant growth software under Sugar and ported to Python, but did not take it much further. The code is here:
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
My hopes from 2007:
https://mail.python.org/piperm...
As I see it, the OLPC project shot itself int the foot unfortunately, especially with Sugar. (I've done that to myself enough times, so I know. :-) Sugar was a great idea, and still is, but it was just too much of a stretch and not especially central to the overall OLPC goal. The push to Sugar also just underestimated how fast kids can learn -- contrast with the Hole in The Wall project. As others have said, it would have been better to just get a plain Linux system running Debian and a standard window manager into kids' hands on a low-end ruggedized laptop. Sugar may have had innovative ideas, but it was a real stumbling block, Also not choosing ARM was another stumble. Dumbing down the browser was another stumble, Also promoting Python on low-end hardware was another stumble, as much as I've liked Python; Java or just C would have been a better choice. Or instead of Sugar, just all Squeak on Forth and ditching the OS would have at least been a more innovative plan and improved performance and understandability by ditching Linux. The keyboard also is a problem of usability and reliability. One of the USB ports on the machine we used stopped working quickly, and I can't see how they would really be waterproof anyway. Sugar was also a distraction form finding and organizing existing educational software and content, another stumble. (I know a separate foundation started to do free content for the OLPC, not sure where it went.) Not understanding that a village of often related people works together and could have a networked central facility (with one computer per child who wanted to use it, plus cheap usb storage fobs) is another cultural stumble. It's easy to say with 20/20 hindsight the OLPC group should have know these things as with all after-the-fact comments, but I won't let them off that easily, because people did point such things out from the start, and also you'd expect the team to have some expertise in education and culture and system design. These point to some sort of dysfunctional social process that must have been going on with early decision making.
What it mostly came down to as far as my involvement was that as a developer, why should I make an educational app specific for Sugar to reach an audience of a million (or whatever), going up a painful bleeding edge learning curve dealing with buggy ever-changing Sugar infrastructure, when I can potentially reach an audience of a billion or more writing a JavaScript-powered web app or just a plain cross-platform Linux/Mac/Win app like with Java or C/C++ or even Squeak? And knowing Moore's law means whatever I write now of bigger platforms will be accessible more cheaply in five or ten years? Even as a volunteer, the value proposition is weak.
I wanted the OLPC project to succeed. I even used it as an example here, suggesting the world might be better off if Princeton University dissolved itself and spent the endowment on OLPCs:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post...
Overall, though, just JavaS
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
image a world where you didn't need the internet. you didn't need to be connected to one another, and you lived your life dealing with what you had locally. you would turn out to be smarter, faster, and more proficient, perhaps, spending less days associating with a screen that merely duplicated what everyone else was viewing. literally, all your experience would come from working with the real world, and not being driven into the pleasure of having information from a source that you normally don't gain any experience from using.
That world is called the stone age. Being connected with each other, and having lots of information is a good thing.