Why OLPC Struggles Against Educators, Big Business 261
afabbro writes "The current issue of BusinessWeek has an expansive article of the history of OLPC and why it has, to date, been a flop. Among the reasons: no preparation for the educational systems expected to use it, uncertain pedagogical theories, poor business management, competition from Microsoft/Intel, and no input from education professionals in designing the software. As BusinessWeek quotes one educational expert, 'The hackers took over,' and the applications are too complex for children to use. To date, 370,000 laptops have been shipped — a far cry from the original 150 million planned to be shipped by end of 2008."
anything influential will be influenced (Score:2, Interesting)
To "control change", first learn the variables. (Score:2, Interesting)
I really want the OLPC project to succeed, though the switch to a Microsoft OS as a standard install (note: NOT MANDATORY, ONLY STANDARD) has dimmed my enthusiasm som
How about the Wall Street Journal? (Score:3, Informative)
The death of OLPC is obviously Intel and M$'s fault. Executives from both companies derided the device as a "toy" and failure before it was designed and then did everything possible to kill it. Here are the the short version [theinquirer.net] and detailed original [wsj.com] accusation stories. Intel kept up the FUD war [slashdot.org], destroying sales that had been committed before the device was complete. Their employees even ran a hostile news site to make bad press [slashdot.org].
Re:How about the Wall Street Journal? (Score:4, Informative)
"The Intel machine is a lot better than the OLPC," says Mohamed Bani, who chairs Libya's technical advisory committee but doesn't have the final say on buying laptops. "I don't want my country to be a junkyard for these machines."
Don't get me wrong... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you have a better way to build a mousetrap, build it and see if people will buy it. Trying to tell them they need it before you build one is
Re:Don't get me wrong... (Score:5, Insightful)
With charitable motives rather than financial, OLPC created the next generation machine for the next 2 billion users. The Aus EEE PC and competitors all copied the low BOM of the OLPC, and now target the billions of people world wide who can't afford a Wintel machine from Dell. It's the next big wave in computing, and OLPC led the way.
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Frankly, as prices continue to go down, they should aim to improve their current model with slightly better specs and have two models. Ship a beefier $200 model, and try to get the current model down to $100.
And even though only 370,000 have shipped to date, many of those are smaller trials
Re:Don't get me wrong... (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, most discussions about charitable undertakings end there. Projects like OLPC make people FEEL like they are making a difference, regardless of whether or not any measurable long term benefit is actually being achieved.
Just look at the trillions of dollars that have been flushed down the proverbial toilets of many developing and third-world countries. Certainly the intent of such aid is noble, but what has it accomplished besides distracting us from the factors that prevent real change from happening?
I know that asking such questions often makes one a pariah in the eyes of narcissists more interested in self-gratification than actually helping people who need it. But when are people going to realize that sending money or goods to countries ruled by corrupt governments only benefits the corrupt governments?
Re:Don't get me wrong... (Score:4, Insightful)
People do realise this, but it is very hard to get money to the right people, even if you can find them. Politically the World Health Organisation and the World Bank cant just ignore ministries, however corrupt they think they are. That's not to say they aren't trying.
It's also very hard to measure the successes, since we have no baseline or no indication of what would happen if there was no aid or no intervention. It's very easy to interpret our failures to completely fix problems as a failure to make any positive difference, especially since when a situation does get resolved it stops being news. You are right that good intentions plus money does not necessarily equal success, but a lot of good is done.
Since we in the West have got wealthier our perception of what is poverty has also moved upwards. Attempting to lift an entire continent out of a state it has essentially always been in is a task of unprecedented difficulty and will never be fully achieved, since our goalposts will continually move further and further away, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try.
Having said that the OLPC project does not seem to have been very well thought out, but a lot of the ideas, especially that of empowering the children of poorer nations, are sound. It's got people thinking in the right direction, and as others have pointed out has prompted the development of similar commercial products.
Re above, I don't *think* that it's off-topic. (Score:4, Interesting)
If we are to rationally analyze the success or (comparative) failure of the OLPC, it is crucial to understand that the big NGOs are staffed by people who don't much care about the good of the poor. Many of these people are also vastly corrupt and tied into the regimes they are supposedly working to change; regimes that gain from having desperate, ignorant, weak populaces. Myanmar really isn't that anomalous.
Should the OLPC even try to get computers in through governments or would they be better trying to get the relevant officials bribed to just stand aside? I don't know. But we cannot understand the decisions of nations like Libya and Nigeria without starting with the assumption that the good the children is, at best, fourth or fifth on the list of things they looked at when saying yes or no to OLPC.
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Now, the OLPC may or may not achieve major success and impact, but the concept seems sound and good, and deserves a second try if the first one doesn't succeed. As long as the second try is absent of monopolisation.
Not a "better mousetrap" - there IS a strong why (Score:4, Informative)
The /why/ is curiosity. Kids have lots of it, but you tend to lose it over time as they get slapped in
the hand and get told by adults to get serious. There's no telling to the number of great engineers (or doctors, or artists, or what-have-you) that we missed out due to stifled curiosity.
The OLPC offers unlimited tinkering and very deep and broad educational (education as in building mental models of things and learning to learn, not as in rote memorization) experience for kids, and can help them learn to read and write and communicate and explore the 'net. It is not "a better mousetrap" - there was no mousetrap before, unless you are referring to the school itself as the mousetrap. And OLPC does not intend to displace schools.
Ok, the business model may not be too sound (but the entry of the ClassMate and 3$ Microsoft software bundles can be seen as partial successes - if the goal is affordable computing to 3rd world kids, things look much brighter than a few years ago). Yes, Negroponte is not a finance magician, and I guess he has learnt the hard way that large corporations do not always place developing nations before shareholder value - that's what PR is for, anyway.
Re:Not a "better mousetrap" - there IS a strong wh (Score:2)
On the other hand, I find it much more likely that we have gained engineers (and doctors and artists and what-have-you) because the kids did get serious. Those professions require more than simple curiosity, they also re
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Or to chop it down to something more memorable, the kid asks "why" and follows with "why". The engineer asks "why" and follows with "how?"
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If you have a better way to build a mousetrap, build it and see if people will buy it. Trying to tell them they need it before you build one is ... well, not how things work really.
You've dismissed the entire advertising & marketing industries in two sentences.
There are plenty of business models built upon hyping a crappy 'mousetrap' and milking it for as much as you can. You've experienced this every time you've gone to a bad movie that had a well edited movie trailer & splashy ad campaign.
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That's exactly how things work in academia and research (i.e., apply for funding before you even start working).
distribution (Score:5, Insightful)
Hackers like to think they can do everyone's job better even if it way out of their scope. I guess that's the difference between hackers and engineers, engineers understand that it takes managers, PHB's, marketing, sales, and production staff to make it work. Hackers think it just takes code.
Re:distribution (Score:5, Funny)
That's because in theory, we can.
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In theory... (Score:2)
In theory, theory and practice are the same.
In practice...
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As soon as i read that article a while back about the guy who complained there wasn't a decent distribution system in place I knew it was doomed[...]Hackers think it just takes code.
Not to push the point, but the guy you are talking about is Ivan Krstic, one of the OLPC hackers, and he was complaining about the failure of the project's administration to put a distribution system in place. Which shows the hackers wanted the project to succeed as much as anyone and were under no illusions that code would fix everything. Blaming the hackers for a lack of a distribution system is silly.
*everyone* thinks they can everything... (Score:4, Insightful)
I have news: Everyone thinks they can do it all.
Since you mention engineers, I'll start with them. I've seen a lot of code written by engineers, and it's been uniformly horrid. Many schools still teach FORTRAN as their first/main language. Good god.
I see a lot of code written by scientists. Not one would think of letting an untrained programmer run their wet lab assays, but they think nothing of having graduate biologists write their programs. Guess what, it's even worse than engineer code!
In an ideal world, we'd all farm out the stuff we're not good at to people trained to do it. I'm not holding my breath...
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A Players Hand Book? Those are my kind of engineers! What about Monster Manuals and Dungeon Master Guides?
No different from business (Score:5, Interesting)
To not involve educators in the requirements building phase of this was doomed to the same failure. The problem is that it is visible to more people, sad to say.
educators yes, educational theorists NO (Score:5, Insightful)
To not involve educators in the requirements building phase of this was doomed to the same failure
Part of the problem may have been that the folks running the show often were "educators" (professors and such), but not of their target audience. Teaching at the K-12 level is not at all the same as teaching undergraduates and graduates at MIT. They certainly should have brought in experienced actual teachers from the K-12 (or K-6) level they wanted to reach.
But this comment from the summary is appallingly clueless or mendacious:
Among the reasons [for failure]:...uncertain pedagogical theories...and no input from education professionals in designing the software.
Anyone who has actually taught knows that "pedagogical theories" and "education professionals" (e.g. those who graduate with PhDs in education, as opposed to PhDs in the subject they teach) are worse than useless, that such things are responsible for half the time-wasting if not counter-productive garbage that clogs the educational system, total sidewalk-supervising theoretician castles-in-the-air bullshit.
Indeed, I bet the OLPC people had some nifty "pedagogical theories" -- you might say the whole concept of the OLPC is a major pedagogical theory itself ("give them computers and they will learn!"). The problems the OLPC people are having ironically self-illustrate the uselessness of "pedagogical theories" constructed in the absence of pedagogical experience.
Re:educators yes, educational theorists NO (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd agree with most of your comment except for the above parenthesized pseudo-quote.
The OLPC crowd has made it clear from the start that their intent was never to provide kids with a computer. Their intent was to provide access to information. The computer was included simply because to most of the target population, the only possible access to good information requires a computer and a wireless network. We have centuries of experience saying that the traditional books just weren't making it; kids in underdeveloped areas typically don't have access to those in any meaningful sense. But the Internet can be made available at a cost that's orders of magnitude lower than building a local library in the local language and populating it with good books against the opposition of local rulers. So they were aiming at leveraging the Internet, via a wireless-only small computer, to give the kids access to real information.
But you'll find all over in comments from the OLPC folks that the computer itself was never the primary goal. It's just a tool. The goal is access to information, something that the commercial and political systems show very little interest in providing. We might also note that the listed problems can mostly be summarized as the results of commercial and political opposition to providing their kids with such information.
It's not terribly surprising that, with such a goal, the OLPC project might have a certain skepticism about involving education professionals except as occasional consultants. A personal anecdote: As a high-school in the 9th grade, I decided that math was interesting, so I started asking the math teachers if I could borrow their books. I'd read one, return it a few weeks or a month later, and ask for another. After a few months, I'd read all the texts for the school's courses, so I started asking if I could borrow their college texts. Each teacher flatly refused to let me read them. I "wasn't ready" for college stuff. I had some friends at a nearby college, so I started borrowing from them. This got my teachers very upset.
Since then, I've mentioned this experience to a number of teachers, and every one of them has agreed that I "wasn't ready" for the advanced stuff. This was clearly nonsense, since I could understand the college texts. The theory that I developed, which I've seen a lot of support for since, is that the teachers were simply threatened by the loss of control from my going behind their backs and getting more information from other sources. This is a common problem with "educators" everywhere. They control what the kids are supposed to be learning, and they tend to clamp down on kids who try to avoid the controls and advance too quickly or into areas that the teachers don't understand.
This was well before there was such a thing as personal computers, so it has nothing to do with computers. They might not say it too openly, but part of what the OLPC project has been aiming at is breaking the stranglehold of the local authorities, and give kids access to much better information than they've ever had. I'm not at all surprised that this should get "pushback" from the local authorities as well as the commercial world.
And anyone who has ever seen any ads should understand that the commercial world is not interested in education. It is interested in persuasion, something very different. So we should especially expect pushback from commercial sources.
(And my Firefox 3's spellchecker didn't like "pushback"; it suggested "pushcart" as the right spelling.
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> for the advanced stuff. This was clearly nonsense, since I could understand the college texts. The theory that I developed,
> which I've seen a lot of support for since, is that the teachers were simply threatened by the loss of control from my going
This is utter nonsense and the sort of thing I was ranting about in another post.
In many other countries that college level mate
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Access to - good - information on the web demands basic literacy, a host of more advanced skills and a large store o
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It's enough to make you want to move to the EU.
They are even more of a hinderance to this generation then they were to our generation.
It boggles the mind.
Because it is a stupid idea? (Score:2, Insightful)
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People start their projects, invite some expert in relevant fields to participate but when any of these experts tells them that they are doing X or Y thing wrong, they get all proud and stubborn and ignore the advise.
What does this experts do? they just leave (as people has been leaving the OLPC project)...
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Big f*cking deal. They are generic. They have been for
decades. Their primary value is the fact that they are
"compatable".
They had a good mission (Score:4, Interesting)
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The OLPC's mission went into the crapper for the same reasons The New Math went into the crapper:
Whatever Happened To New Math? [americanheritage.com]
The geek as cultural imperialist is his own worst enemy.
The Classmate or XO runn
I was trying, but I couldn't find anything (Score:5, Funny)
on the environment, but the boy was stumped. "I was trying, but I couldn't
find anything,"
What the boy didn't know, was the rest of his classmates *did* find something and
the classroom immediately erupted in a resounding "RTFM!" in response, showing
proof that children in developing nations can at least find Slashdot.
Who says it's a failure? (Score:5, Insightful)
This article seems short of facts and long on assumptions.
Re:Who says it's a failure? (Score:5, Insightful)
This seems like a great success to me:
1) identify a need that the market is not addressing (cheap, simple, robust, networked machine)
2) make one in a non-profit for 3rd world children
3) convince all the industry that they need to emulate and best it
4) let everybody enjoy the resulting products
I really am thankful to the OLPC project for that.
I also read cool things about the OLPC's music and sound tools in Linux Journal. It will probably be part of Fedora or Ubuntu I install on my EEE when I hand it down to my son.
He will probably enjoy it a lot and that will be another OLPC success (albeit a modest one).
You won't see me count the OLPC project as a failure any time soon. They really helped change the world.
'The hackers took over' (Score:5, Insightful)
I was at a Microsoft presentation once where the speaker said Microsoft were not interested in hiring 'hackers', they wanted serious programmers. The concept didn't impress me then, and it doesn't now.
Doing away with hackers will have the effect of homogenising the industry. Guess what tho, not every country thinks this way, some developing nations will look at the stagnant 'hacker free' computing industry and destroy it in a matter of years by producing more innovative products.
I mean innovative in the real sense, not in the bland 'keynote speech soundbite' sense.
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Doing away with hackers will have the effect of homogenising the industry. Guess what tho, not every country thinks this way, some developing nations will look at the stagnant 'hacker free' computing industry and destroy it in a matter of years by producing more innovative products.
Making technological innovation happen is maybe 5% actual "innovation". It takes many people of many different specialties to actually put it all together and get it to society. An anti-gravity machine some hacker develops in his garage is absolutely positively useless unless they can get it to the population at large. Making that happen is just as hard and complex as the "innovation".
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Hackers have roles designing operating systems and configuring complex projects.
Good managers understand business demands and customer expectations.
There needs to be both and not too much of one or the other. My old man would plan for over a month before his team woult write a single one line of code. A good project focuses on customer and corporate requirements and then designs the model of the application before any code is written.
Today ever
All criticism comes from non-users (Score:4, Insightful)
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A poor understanding of end user needs (Score:5, Insightful)
It didn't start out as someone going to schools and asking the people what they needed. It seems like the most reasonable course of action for a project like this is:
1. Go to the schools and listen.
2. If you still think that computers are the solution, bring some expensive ones into some places as a pilot project
3. If that is proven, then remove functionality from the expensive ones until they operate like the cheap ones
4. If they still prove useful then maybe decide to make the cheap ones
Did this happen? If it did and the cheap ones worked in prototype form but not in their final form, then the OLPC's problems can probably be solved. If not, then it was probably doomed from the start.
The "do something I think is cool and see if people like it" plan of action tends to lead to disappointment when people don't like it. The likelihood of disappointment is proportional to how cool you think the project is.
If you donated $150 per child to each of these classrooms, would they automatically use the money for OLPC laptops? What if they could get real, full-scale laptops and support discounted to $150? Would they buy them? My guess is that the answer is no in most cases. They'd buy the things they need instead.
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"I think the reason is that the OLPC was always a solution in search of a problem. It started out as "lets make a cheap laptop"."
And had that stayed the main focus, then perhaps the project would have been more successful. What the military calls "Mission Creep" ended up sinking an interesting, practical approach to making laptops more affordable.
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A large pilot project with more expensive (but discounted) laptops would clearly have been a good idea. You could still do the OLPC if the pilot project worked out. And you might not have spent as much and disappointed so many people if it failed.
Educational software is hard (Score:4, Interesting)
Educational software is hard to write. Really hard. Except for very well defined skills, like typing or flying an aircraft, most educational software doesn't help much.
The OLPC should come with one or two really, really good applications for teaching reading or arithmetic, ones smart enough to self-adjust to the user's level and move them forward. That alone would justify the thing.
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1) Testing Applications. These are no more than Electronic versions of the lists of exercises found in texts, with a little logic thrown in to mix up the questions, and maybe to direct the difficulty to how the kids answer the problems. These are just substitutes for paper - no constructivism involved, very little thinking required
Fuck them. (Score:4, Insightful)
>and the applications are too complex for children to use.
That line makes me want to say 'fuck you'. The idiots here aren't the children nor the hackers, that much I'm sure of. If I could figure out the C64 [mostly] on my own in a world where there was no 'world wide web' at my fingertips, and adults would go 'compute-what?', I'm sure today's kids will do alright with these computers.
I guess the upside is that even if this guy stood up before 100 children and told them the machine is too hard for them to use, if 99 of them would be naive enough to believe him, there would be that one kid thinking 'oh yeah? This is so on'.
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I'm guessing that the issue is not that the applications are too complex for a child to use, but rather for all children to use. Sure, you figured out the C64 on your own as a child, but could every other child that you went to school with have done the same thing?
I think this is the perspective lacking for a lot of people who have posted on OLPC stories. It is easy for us to get excited and think "what child wouldn't want one of these? A laptop to hack away on is exactly what I would've wanted!". The rea
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There were magazines like Creative Computing and Compute! which could be found in any drugstore. There was the BBS. There was public broadcasting, with programs like Canada's "Bits and Bytes."
The middle class kid never needed the web to get started in computing.
Read the non-print version for photos (Score:3, Informative)
I often wonder why Slashdot posts links to a version of the article formatted for printing rather than the main article.
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too soon to write off as failure (Score:3, Informative)
But my son loves it, he's 6 and he loves playing sim city, even when I point out that his city has zero population and he clearly does not know what tax is. He will learn about taxes all too soon and in the mean time, he will learn about computing organically. I'm pleased that he has a chance to do so without being force fed "only one way to do things".
And I'm sure the kid who thought the internet was inside the OLPC has learned a lot through having an XO too.
Would there even be a classmate PC if not for XO. Would classmate have been as good as it is if XO and the new OLPC had not pointed the way for how all of these devices could be better. Will the next generation of XO and classmate and ee-whatever be better yet next time around. YBY sweet fat A.
Seems to me that Negroponte has achieved a great deal, and I suspect that there's a lot more to come and that the children are the winners.
I and many believe firmly that widespread education is a dire need as well as sustenance, and that the former could help provide the latter in years to come.
I wouldn't write Negroponte or OLPC off yet, the OLPC foundation (and the Intel classmate team, for what they do) has my sincere thanks.
Applications are not complex (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the problem is that the OS UI, and the Apps, are new and different. I think the adults evaluating this are stuck in old ways of thinking. They learned computers on Windows, and Windows and Windows app ui conventions are just how it should be, dammit. Anything else is scary and complex, from their solidified-brain perspective.
People aren't willing to give something new (and yes, pretty much objectively better) a chance.
It's the old "we haven't changed anything, and we're not dead yet, so why change something now"
conservative viewpoint.
The "Hackers" were successful (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep, the work they dreamed up will sweep the world in ways they did not envision.
As far as the "failure" of the OLPC to sell in the millions.
1. A lot of money was being spent by MS and Intel to sink it.
2. It is hard to get $$$ out of many third world countries without graft.
3. It is hard to scale up the distribution and services side of an organization. 0-150 million in a few years is almost impossible on a shoestring budget.
Then, these problems are compounded by the unwillingness to gain volume by selling at retail. Then, they tick off the hardest core supporters by embracing MS.
Yep, this thing will tank.
But the good created by hackers will live on (Score:2)
Yes, I believe the OLPC will tank(the product as it exists today), but most of the good will last.
Because the hackers have created this new segment, we will see the cost of components drop lower in the LONG term than even the OLPC project could have done alone.
Because of this new segment, Linux will develop at a faster rate. Bringing additional benefits to the "have not" population that can not afford MS Tools.
Why the surprise? (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps it's the cynic in me, but I always saw this project as a rather hare-brained attempt at making MIT significant again the way it had been in it's Project Athena glory years. It's not so much that Negroponte failed to delivery a solution for a given problem, as much as MIT developed a solution no one asked for or wanted.
Now perhaps we could spend the money on health (Score:2)
We could ask them.
two week learning curve: must be way too hard (Score:2, Insightful)
"In Luquia, Justo Miguel ComÃn, a fifth-grader who is the youngest of seven children of subsistence farmers, was delighted to get his laptop in late April. "I like the math games, and I love the camera," he said two weeks later.
[...]
Yet when BusinessWeek asked her son detailed questions, it became clear he didn't fully understand the computer's capabilities"
--wow... a fifth grader can't completely understand the full capabilities of a new piece of technology in TWO WEEKS. Maybe they
Winning by Losing in this case (Score:3, Insightful)
Another thing to understand is that OLPC is not best suited for the very poorest countries. It is better suited for moderately poor countries. Peru, where people generally are not absolutely starving, is a better choice than Haiti.
the hackers took over? (Score:4, Interesting)
Might sell more if they would sell it... (Score:3, Insightful)
They really need to cut that elitist 'only for the third-world' bullshit and just sell the devices over regular retailers.
It's the textbook companies, stupid (Score:3, Insightful)
The reason computers have failed as general educational devices so far is because (at least in the US) there's no material to use on them--no textbook companies will offer a fully-digital version of their textbooks. And that is why in most schools, the ONLY classes that commonly have computers for each student are computer-specific courses.
The MAIN advantage of computers in a general classroom use would be digital textbook storage (and the cheaper distribution costs that could be passed on to schools and students), but textbook publishers will not offer digital versions of their books. Why that is I don't particularly know--since they are in electronic form at some point before hitting paper anyway--but until there is a good base of digital text material to work with, computers in the general classroom situation will go nowhere, because the potential cost savings of them cannot be realized. If schools could spend more money for some mini-PC's or e-book readers but spend a lot less money on "books", that might work out to be financially attractive--but it's not legally possible now. (Electronics prices are always dropping; what are textbook prices doing??? Going up or down???,,,)
In a general gradeschool situation, using "the internet" to teach is usually not useful for learning about anything other than goatse and tubgirl.
~
Re:OLPC (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, the OLPC is useless as a computer for a geek. Fair enough, it wasn't designed to be a computer for a geek. It was designed to be a learning (not teaching, learning) tool for a child. That's a completely different thing. And oddly, I notice that all the reports of actual children being handed an OLPC without any instruction or guidance seem to end with the child being entirely comfortable with it, having no problem figuring it out, and generally out-running the adults when it comes to using the thing. They even pick up the networking parts of it naturally. Yes, children are in fact smarter than most adults like to believe.
Re:OLPC (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:OLPC (Score:5, Funny)
1. Do something.
2. Do something else.
3. "and then some magic happens"
4. Profit!
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Hrm... that goes right with 42 = 6 * 9 for meme-ness.
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Hey, that's just a slight rephrasing of Adam Smith's "invisible hand of the market" theory. We have a lot of people here for whom that is a primary religious belief.
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Hey, you must have been reading George Bush's biography! It seems that the only profitable parts of his "business" experience consisted of buddy-buddy dealings with government agencies to channel tax money into support of his businesses. If you're not familiar with the story, look into his dealings with the Texas Rangers, and how they became profitable, at least for Dubya and a few friends, who managed to pocket most of the public subsidies for things like their new stadium.
But this
Re:OLPC (Score:5, Insightful)
Except that the "and magic happens" is actually a fairly routine part of early education. Most kids like to learn, want to learn. It takes the education system several years of intense effort to beat this penchant for learning out of most kids. You may have to teach the kid how the card catalog in a library works, but once you do he'll cheerfully get together with a bunch of his friends and organize finding all they need to know for the essay assignments you give them. And probably more, I usually ended up with three or four essays for every assignment I'd been given. You may not even need to teach them how to use the card catalog, I figured out on my own not just the card catalog but how the Dewey numbers on the spines of the books worked (got a lot of teachers mad at me because I was supposed to go to the card catalog, and instead I'd head straight for the section of shelves I knew had the books on the subject I needed and I Wasn't Supposed To Do That and I should Stop That This Instant, Come Back Here And Start Again And Do It Right This Time).
Re:OLPC (Score:4, Interesting)
What you are describing there is called "task-based learning." It's a pretty common pedagogical approach in secondary education, first showing up in medicine and law. The idea is that by intelligently creating a task/project, you can be sure that students will follow a fairly predictable path towards completing it, learning things along the way. The biggest learning advantage to this is that, more than learning how to complete the task, the student learns how to learn how to complete a task.
It seems, however, that in the US educational system anyway, we are moving away from this model, which encourages creativity, self-sufficiency, and autonomy, and toward a "cram for this standardized test" model, like where I live now: Japan. This is a mistake. And that's coming from one of the guys who writes and coordinates a large standardized test!
In the case of the OLPC, this pedagogical concern has been and continues to be at the heart of all the questions about its efficacy as a world-changing tool, whether the critics realize that or not. It has never been clear what one could learn from having a little green typewriter which may not even have internet access.
As an educator, tester, and geek, I have mocked the dunderheaded goodwill of this project from the first time I heard about it. The cry for more computers in the classrooms of the world is very rarely raised by the teachers themselves. Computers are great for education mainly as a means of finding information, and in such a case, the essential ingredient is internet access. Once that requirement is satisfied, any terminal is fine. Beyond this, what is a student to do with a PC? Type? Is this substantially different from writing by hand? No. It's just more convenient.
I have seen it argued that the OLPC project would expand IT/programming to impoverished children and give them a means of developing their economy. Rubbish. I have a master's degree and teach at a university and do statistics-heavy research, but if you handed me an OLPC and said, "your project is to write a program that alphabetizes this list," which--if I remember correctly--was one of the first assignments in my friends' programming classes, I would have no idea of how to even begin. I have done zero programming. I would require some explicit instruction to at least know how to get started. Explicit instruction requires access to a knowledgeable person. If I live in the boonies of Kafoonistan, and I don't speak English, how am I going to get access to such a person? Even if I were to use my OLPC to read up online about how to begin... I don't speak English. How do I learn English? I need access to a knowledgeable person.
You see where I'm going with this.
The OLPC project overlooks the single most important thing to any educational system: People. We learn from other people. I didn't get into stats until I was 30, and I've done a lot of self-study with books to get where I am now, but if I didn't have access to teachers in graduate school and knowledgeable colleagues at work, and the money to take distance courses on some of the arcane procedures and programs I use, I would still be totally in the dark. If I hadn't had a string of great teachers, there's no way I could have learned Japanese.
The OLPC is gadget. It's handy, to be sure, but without the infrastructure--and by that I'm referring both to net access as well as a functioning education system--all it can really be is a toy. Even in your example, the teacher was an important component, if not always a helpful one. He/she would ultimately look at the output you created--the outcome of the task--and tell you whether it was acceptable or not.
This is how we learn. You can't just give people a tool and a task and say "go." Someone needs to show you how to use that tool; someone needs to design that task; someone needs to be available to guide people through it and get them past the bumps in the road; someone needs to tell the student if the task has even been completed.
People really do love to learn. But learning is a social act, even if it's done on the internet. Without people, the OLPC is just a pencil for someone who doesn't know how to read or write.
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But why would one give these kids an assignment to write a program? The assignment's more likely to be "Draw a map of the area around the village.". The OLPC is the tool the kids use to draw the map. And to get all their friends together to help point out landmarks one of them may have forgotten to include, and to argue about where those landmarks are relative to one another. No programming needed by the kids to do that. And yes, you can do that kind of assignment in a classroom with paper and pencils. Unle
Re:OLPC (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree with you in observing that all the published commentary so far has indicated strongly that children seem very happy with and comfortable with the OLPCs, so the claim that they're too complex for children to use is highly questionable. I have a feeling that "they don't work because the team didn't take input from education professionals" actually translates to "education professionals are rejecting the OLPCs whether or not the computers and software are good because they didn't get to push the development team around."
Remember, contemporary education processes are all about complying with some ideology of how teaching should be done, not about actually successfully teaching kids.
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I find it interesting that you invoke your friends high status - but neglect to tell us exactly what she uses it for that so pleases her. Are we supposed to accept the OLPC is a Good Thing merely because Somebody Important u
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Please point out what makes it arrogant, and back up your opinion with a little more than a statement if you're going to post. I actually agree with GP (to some extent) that educational professionals wanted to voice some opinion in the development that it was THEIR product in some way. You tend to back up a product at a company if you work on it in some way and make a contribution, it gives pride (otherwise you wouldn't tou
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I'm serious. I'm not sure what "learning" the OLPC is trying to get the kids to do?
Learning how something otherwise useless works, is
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That's adult thinking. What the child's learning is problem-solving, co-operation and collaboration, and how to go about finding answers to questions when you have a question you need an answer for. The OLPC is a tool for doing those things. Hence why most of it's applications network automatically. It's got puzzle games which teach problem-solving. If you're working on a puzzle, all your friends on the network can automatically see (just like they were looking over your shoulder) and you can talk with them
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And again, you're missing the point: you don't teach them to use the OLPC. That's why it's UI is such that it mostly doesn't require teaching kids how to use it. And at that age, kids don't need to learn food storage techniques. What they need to learn is how to find out about and learn about food storage techniques. Which is a special case of learning how to find out and learn about anything.
You're demonstrating a dichotomy I've seen a lot in college. Most students would memorize what was taught. In a phy
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I grew up in a cutting edge school district with brand new apple ][+ and later ][e computers. The few faculty who "knew" how to use them were a joke. The kids were largely let loose on logo because the school didn't know how to do anything except 1 teacher could make new logo disks. The kids surpassed the adults in no time and not just in logo, but in general operation of the computers as well. THOSE old computers were technic
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MOD PARENT DOWN! (Score:5, Insightful)
How can people, especially on slashdot (where this has been thrashed out countless times before), keep remaining so wilfully ignorant of the goals of this project?
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No, don't mod him down (Score:2)
You're making too much of a difference between "undeveloped" and "still developing" then, because the later still has those problems in abundance. OLPC may not have been intended for jungle tribes with no housing, but just because it was headed for places where roofs exist still doesn't mean that those places don't have hunger, water quality problems, and economic stagnation. The priority to get those things first still trumps getting a
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Well, you see, there is this gigantic group of people who aren't experiencing shortages in food, potable water, basic shelter, etc etc etc. People who
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Re:It was predictable (Score:4, Informative)