Category Archives: Laptops

Major updates about laptops and tools for learning, XOs and Sugar

Tablets and the future of knowledge-sharing

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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.

Documenting life on Earth – Abel and his XO

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Last July 24, thousands of people all over the world submitted their videos to YouTube to share their lives, to participate in Life in one Day (La vida en un dia). This was an experimental bit of cinematography to create a documentary created entirely by YouTube users, capturing one day on Earth. Ten OLPC students from Peru took part, posting videos of their day for the project.

Now all of the stories have been edited together into a single documentary.  The film was directed by Kevin Macdonald and produced by Ridley Scott.  National Geographic is helping with distribution.   Rick Smolan was also involved in the film’s development last year.   Since its global online premiere at Sundance, the documentary has been received enthusiastically at the Berlin and SXSW film festivals.

The film will be shown in theatres across the US this summer.

Here is the official trailer:

 

And here is the story of Abel, an 11-year old shoe shiner and one of Peruvian gen-XO children who took part – part of his video was included in the film, showing his life working on the street, and what he loves to read on Wikipedia. He and his father had the luck to be flown out to Sundance for the online premiere!
Hat tip to Mike Massey and OLPC Mexico.

OLPC Australia’s XO-AU USB toolkit

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OLPC Australia has released an update to their USB ‘toolkit’ for XOs, a collection of software on a USB thumb drive designed to assist in recovery, repair, and support scenarios. The new version is ready for testing, and Sridhar expects only documentation changes between now and its final release.

The XO-AU USB is OLPC Australia’s official means of delivering updates and troubleshooting tools to schools.

Peru’s new XO assembly lines

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Peru has a large and complex XO project, certainly the most varied anywhere, with its mix of rural and urban, powered and off-grid. Now they are adding local assembly of future laptops, something many countries have considered but few have carried out.

As noted recently, local assembly offers shorter startup times for production, and gives the deploying country more of a stake in the ongoing project.
Peru is being supported directly by Quanta, our factory in China, in this. Similar arrangements will be a bit easier now that the first one is underway, but this sort of arrangement is hard to work out unless the deployment team is planning for a steady flow of hardware delivered over years.

Nevertheless, this is a great step for olpc sustainability. Between Peru’s interest in assembly, Uruguay’s recent interest in design for new audiences, and Paraguay’s interest in developing better software and OS builds, Latin American deployments are taking up shared ownership of most aspects of the project.

From their official announcement:
Continue reading →

St. Kitts and Nevis to give laptops to all high school students

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Last week, St. Kitts and Nevis Prime Minister Denzil Douglas announced an expansion of its (lowercase) olpc program to cover all high school students. The program is sponsored by Taiwan, and focuses on knowledge-sharing, creativity, and empowerment of students.

Glenn Phillip, Minister of Youth Empowerment, told the St. Kitts and Nevis National Assembly:

“In his foresight the Prime Minister did not just require that each student is provided with a laptop, but rather that each student receives a tool that could help shape them into productive citizens, innovative thinkers, problem solvers, a new breed of citizen, equipped to form part of a Knowledge Society.”

That’s the sort of international partnership the world could use more of.

0.3% of XOs run Windows

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A stray comment today about Windows not working on ARM machines, by someone who thought all OLPC laptops had moved away from Linux, reminded me to reaffirm something:

Every one of the 2M+ XOs we’ve ever made shipped from the factory with Linux. As far as I know, under 7,000 XOs have ever run Windows natively* – some 0.3% of all laptops we have ever produced. Most of those dual-booted into both Sugar and Windows XP, as part of programs sponsored independently by Microsoft. I know of a few teachers that had those machines in at least one class, but have never seen reports from a class using them — if you know of one of these schools, I would be most interested to hear about the experience — particularly from schools that used both OSes.

The XO community around the world includes one of the largest deployments of Linux to primary students anywhere in the world. This is something we can all be proud of.


* To be fair: running Windows in emulation through wine or SugaredWine is quite popular for certain activities.  Three cheers for the wine team’s excellent work!