One Laptop per Child project
Gregg DeKoenigsberg, Red Hat
They rely on the open source community and a partnership with them so that they can sell their product.
RedHat is the primary software developer for the laptop, the XO, which he is showing us now. It’s smaller than I would have picture, sort of like the size of those neo devices.
if you have linux and want to contribute to software
wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar_with_sugar-jhbuild
Works well with fedora
The foundational belief in the XO project
We take more for granted than we can possibly understand. We make assumptions that may be wrong in the rest of the world.
Have you ever lived in a town without a library? without a telephone? without electricity?
We live in a world where we have so much info to absorb that we look for away to get away from it, to figure out what the best source is, or which tv channel to watch. Africans don’t enjoy that luxury—this is an unknown problem. Akst and Jensen—Carnegie Corp.
The Xo is partly supposed to be a textbook because of that. A way to view the world’s content—so designed to be an ebook reader.it swivels and turns into a little ebook reader. Cool. Can run in that mode on less than one watt of power.
It’s not only a textbook, but a library. Many places in the world can’t afford libraries. Much content of wikipedia, wikimedia, project gutenberg, MIT Open courseware, public library of science, entire internet, Google
Has speakers, camera, phone— the web cam cost 60 cents extra. Price will probably be about $150 now. The goal is connectedness.
We live in a world that has fundamentally more world connectedness than before, so the device intends to let people to connect to that.
Xo will be an orchestra. Tan Tan? the killer app he says for this project. Like garage band stripped down
The XO will be networked. Rabbit ear antennas allow it to connect with another XO nearby. The idea is to allow “mesh” networking—to let them connect these laptops to other ones. It won’t allow the internet, but all the kids in the village could connect to each other via these devices. This feature is a work in progress. But if one of them was connected to the internet, all of the others could.
It’s human powered. They ship with a yoyo that allows it to generate power—the goal is for every minute of using it, you get ten minutes of use. The idea was that the crank didn’t generate enough power, so the yo yo allows a lot of different ways to spin it and get power and it generates more.
The XO will be an opportunity. Negroponte says, “It’s an education project, not a laptop project.” They are trying to instill a sense of ownership with the students and the parents.
Objections to the project:
people don’t need laptops, they need food
This reminds me of Karl Fisch’s session—don’t limit us just because we are attempting something
Dr. Sen, Nobel Laureate in economics, “No substantial famine has ever occurred in a democratic and independent country, no matter how poor.” You need a tool to tackle the poverty, which must go beyond food.
another objection—computers don’t work in educatoin
but you learn computers by having long access to it over time, and have access to them
Fear—The XO will be used to exploit children.
The built in camera, when the kids take it home…how do you deal with that in the developed world? We try to get parents to understand how to use tools. So we probably need to do the same approach in the developing world.
Their problems they will have are ones we deal with too, and if they have parity with us, they’ll experience some of the problems we have.
OLPC can’t know all the answers right now. But the first goal is to make the question about how to use the laptop a real question. Then we can solve the problems.
(personally I applaud the OLPC for going forward—at least they are attempting to address it and maybe drive other vendors to start thinking about it and addressing it.)
www.olpcnews.com if you want to read some fearmongering and analysis who have big concerns about the project.
www.laptop.org which is the home of the project.
Colin Powell says that “perpetual optimism is a force multiplier.”
Great quote.
No moving parts, has a handle, membrane covered keyboard, trackpad, camera and mic built in.
Sugar is the interface which isn’t a standard desktop and probably what you have read about some of the controversy of this device.
Noun camp versus verb camp—everything in software
Files, folders (Noun people won)-
Sugar is based around verbs.
Current pilot is Thailand, Brazil, Uruguay, Nigeria, Libya
Uruguay deployment is going most effectively. The local people are running the pilot. Goal is to run pilots, study what’s making them successful and then applying those models elsewhere.
Intel is working on a similar one using their chip, because AMD powers this laptop.
Negroponte wanted to also make sure that the clever kids could “open the hood of the car” and use open source, so that’s partly why he went to redhat.
email gdk at redhat.com to get on mailing list if ou want to know when the U.S. will get these.
They’re now going to show us the actual Sugar interface.
Activity ring shows all the things that are running around a circle in the center, that depicts a stick figure person in the center. There is a neighborhood view that shows more stick figures and if you click on that kid, it shows what they are doing and it launches the application that they are using on your computer.
Showing us Tamtam, which allows you to create your own music. icons of instruments.
They are working on designing a server where the village could have one server. E grainery project does this…internet in a box for villages that don’t have connectivity.
Camera, Writing program, Etoys, music tool.
Because of the size of the hard drive, you’ll really only be able to have 50-100 activities on your hard drive. If you want to run an activity that is on another person’s laptop, it’ll load it up and just delete one you don’t use often.
Will it be a device that is used by a whole family? They don’t know yet.
Interesting seeing it in person. There are quirks in what they are showing us, but it is still in the design stages for this new version.
I wish there was money in this project to send a teacher from the States to these villages or Peace Corp volunteer or someone to work with the families and village to get the implementation off the ground.
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