Clinton Roy of the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland recently gave an Ignite talk about OLPC.  He touches on collaboration, the musicpaint activity, and OLPC’s projects in Australia and New Zealand.
The Michigan State unexploded-landmine-avoidance game was recently released for PC as well as XO. Children testers in Cambodia and developers were interviewed about it earlier this month.
Game developer David Braben and colleagues are working on a tiny circuit board suitable for game development, with a few hacker-friendly ports, which will fit into a gumstix-sized package. They are calling the device Raspberry Pi.
Their stated goal is a device with a 700MHz ARM processor, 128MB of SDRAM, a USB (out) port, an HDMI connection, and an SD card slot… relying on the USB input for power.
Unlike Gumstix, which found a corporate and DIY niche for its boards, Braben is focused on minimizing the device’s cost, making sticks ‘cheap enough to give to a child to do whatever they want with it’ and to make learning computing fun. An admirable goal. The project already has its naysayers, however, as it is hard to hack without many peripherals as well. What would you do with one or a few of these?
By Antonio M. Battro, OLPC’s Chief Education Officer
Jeffrey James wrote a critique of OLPC last year, proposing a balanced pattern of “sharing computers” among children (say 5 children per computer, in the US or the UK) instead of the olpc “one to one” model – one laptop per child (and per teacher). As an alternative to olpc, James proposes that “the number of students per laptop stands in roughly the same ratio as the difference in per capita incomes between the rich and the poor country” (p. 385). In his view, the OLPC idea to persuade the developing countries to exceed the standards of shared computers of developed countries seems “utterly perverse” (p. 386).
It seems that his reasoning will fail if we substitute mobile phones for laptops. We don’t frequently share mobile phones, and in many poor countries their number exceeds James’s predictions about ratios of income and information and communication technologies in the hands of people. It seems difficult to accept the universality of his model about “sharingâ€, because laptops, tablets and mobile phones are rapidly converging in new hybrids.
On the other side, his ideas for successful low-cost technology sharing are not clear. One of his options, for instance, is “to purchase Intel’s Classmate computer at a similarly low price and let [them] be shared by as many students as is thought desirable†(p.389). In Argentina, where the Classmate has been most widely adopted, the national government is deploying some 3 million Classmates to cover the whole population of students and teachers of the secondary public schools in the country, on a one to one basis – an idea first proposed by OLPC some 5 years ago. It would be interesting to know the current state of affairs of other options he references (Simputer, NComputing, sharing multiple mice). However the quoted references are from 2006 and 2008, and 3-5 years is a long time in the digital era.
From the point of view of psychology and education, some comments about “teaching†need careful revision. First, in his paper James never speaks of the need to give laptops to the teachers, despite the significant mass of teachers in the world. On the contrary, OLPC programs start in every country by giving a laptop per teacher and providing corresponding teacher training. We know that a) “digital skills†develop in stages from the very early ages, as a second language (Battro & Denham, 2007) and b) most teachers didn’t have the opportunity to early access to this new global environment in the poor and developing countries.
From a recent letter to the editor at Education Week:
Tablet PC learning can provide basic knowledge needed by everyone—English, math, basic physics, and science, hygiene, “How Stuff Works,†and “Rules of Considerate Conduct.†A memory stick instead of a textbook for each K-12 subject would provide continuity. It also would allow students to learn any time in any place on any path at any pace. A memory stick can hold an entire K-12 course, including embedded and practical test questions.
The One Laptop Per Child project has provided more than 1 million laptop computers worldwide. Soon the project will make a tablet PC available… Tablet PCs are already available… this approach to learning is not new. This is the future of schooling.