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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?
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.
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.
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.
perhaps. I believe the current ubiquity of under-$100 computers is due in part to OLPC. I just wish everybody would make devices waterproof and drop-resistant by default, as the OLPC project pushed.
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.
It wasn't silly when it began. When it started, ethere was nothing of the sort even remotely available on the market. More like, market has caught up and can produce hardware cheaper now.
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/
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.
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
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
Expanding a bit from my previous post: Of course, interested kids will get their RPi going, and might end up making magic, just as many of us did with our 8-bit machines 25 years ago. However, the bar the OLPC set to itself was quite different — And might I say, much higher: To come up with a {product, system} that's made for kids. For all kids. To help them to learn about everything, not just about how to do I/O with a computer. An operating environment that's tailored to a constructuvist view of education, allowing them to (easily) understand what's going on in the programs — But even if they don't want to, give them a wide array of programs to hand-hold them through the whole educational process.
Not by far the same task. Both RPi and OLPC set on for extraordinary tasks. But their targets are very far from each other.
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
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.