Posted on February 01, 2008 by Edward Cherlin in Use Cases: Community, Content: eBooks

I am Edward Cherlin and when we think about how to use the OLPC XO in education, the easiest idea is to create free electronic versions of existing textbooks. But this is to waste most of the power of the computer. I don't mean electricity, but the power to inspire, the power to open new doors. Let me give you an example:

gabe olpc
Let's read OLPC eBooks together

From the invention of printing to the beginning of the electronic age, the best way to increase literacy was to print and distribute more books. Under favorable circumstances, such as the US in the 19th century, many children who could not attend school attained literacy by reading at home. In the 20th century, children's books like The Wizard of Oz flourished.

Putting an infant in your lap and reading out loud leads inevitably to the child, over time, insensibly starting to read along. Experience shows that this is far more effective than classroom learning. But what can illiterate parents do? Can they learn to read so as to teach their children? The ones who are still illiterate are the ones who think not.

It turns out that the most effective literacy program for adults in India is same-language captioning of Bollywood musicals, using the karaoke technique of coloring the syllables as they are to be sung. Audiences in India will go to a popular movie five or six times, memorize the words, and sing along. With same-language captioning, people who thought themselves too old to learn reading find that they are reading right there in the theater.

So far, so good. Parents can learn. Now what about the computer? Well, the computer can present captioned music videos, or can read books aloud with text-to-speech (TTS) software. We could get TTS software that colored the words on the screen. So now we have the child on a lap, and a laptop on the child's lap, and the parent and child singing along to their favorites, as I once did to Burl Ives on the record player.

The child probably learns to read faster than the parent, but however that may work out, both learn not only reading but sharing learning. Our current educational systems sadly neglect this essential point.

Tags: | | | | | |

Posted on January 08, 2008 by Guest Writer in Use Cases: Community, Content: Reference, Content: eBooks

I am Mita Williams from The Leddy Library at The University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada.


Open your mind to XO

I had heard of the One Laptop Per Child program months ago but it wasn't until I heard fellow librarian Rochelle Mazar speak about how she used the project to engage students with the "issues of information access and activism" that I made the connection between the work of the OLPC and the professional work that many librarians are engaged in.

The connection that came to mind was not between libraries and formal development efforts (although there are organizations like eIFL.net and Librarians Without Borders that do this) but the work that libraries are currently contributing to on the "open" front: open source, open standards, and open access.

Libraries have many reasons why they should actively support open systems. There are concerns that "if the Kindle's DRM model becomes standard, you can kiss libraries goodbye . " Competing book digitization projects from Google and Microsoft mean that library content will be restricted by search engine choice.

Thankfully, there is the Internet Archive's Open Content Alliance that have partnered with (fellow) libraries like The University of Toronto to ensure that the world's treasures are available to all of the world.

Recently, I put up a library display on the OLPC and what it has to do with libraries. This sort of local outreach is important because even through our own university publishes a number of journals using the Open Journal System, there are still many faculty who aren't aware that they give up much of their own rights to re-distribute their own research once its published in a commercial research journal.

If the purchase of XO laptops are going to be at the expense of a developing country's textbook budget, then not only libraries have to make concerted efforts that every reader has his or her book.

Tags: | | | | | | |

Posted on December 20, 2007 by Martin Woodhouse in Content: Reference, Content: eBooks

martin woodhouse
Martin a few years ago

I apologise deeply for my absence from these pages for more than a month now. I have spent the intervening weeks in completely redesigning and rebuilding my website which isn't quite finished yet but is up and running and contains 120 or so fairly entertaining ( I hope) pages.

What the Lightbook is not

One thing is now clear to me, in any case. The solar powered e-book reading device which we have re-christened the Lightbook is not a computer, any more than a pocket calculator or a portable phone or indeed an electric toothbrush or a gas cooker is a computer.

I make the point light-heartedly and even nonsensically, here. But to persist in even looking at the Lightbook as though it were a 'computer' is not merely to miss the point but, damagingly, to adopt a mind-set in which yes, of course, it's an inferior, a 'pared-down' version of something which it isn't and was never intended to be.

No, you can't read the Web with it. You can't play shoot-up games on it, nor take photographs, record MP3 tracks on it, any more than you can with a paperback book. In fact, I dare say, the Lightbook shouldn't really be appearing on this site at all --- except that it does what Nicholas Negroponte originally intended; namely, it brings education, knowledge, learning, to those billions of human beings in this world who lack electricity, let alone a connection to the Internet, who have never read a book, but whose lives would be improved immeasurably by the ability to do so at negligible cost.

May I summarise the Lightbook again?

It will consume about a fifth of a watt in power while reading the pages of a book out of a (physically tiny) memory bank and placing the corresponding data as pixels in colour on a screen. If that screen is backlit -- which for much of the time it need not be -- then overall power consumption might rise temporarily to around one watt.

The Lightbook reads books of all kinds, of any genre from novels or textbooks through children's story books to full-scale, wholly pictorial comic books, in colour, in any language and using its own typefaces and layouts. Its own proprietary page format --- to be issued, and taught, free of charge to any user who wants it --- is called "Illumination" and has been in (error-free) existence for twenty years now.

It is this format, together with the Lightbook's own operating system and interface, and its hardware configuration, which accounts for a power need so low as to be supplied from its own inbuilt solar panel --- just as a pocket calculator is powered.

Its manufactured cost will be that of:

  • its simple, slow, low-powered CPU and associated circuitry, including local memory and screen output 'card'
  • its case with four buttons and a reading 'slot' for the small external SROM units which will each hold around a thousand standard-length electronic books (in "Illumination" format),
  • a screen, roughly 6" x 4-5" and probably 800 x 600 pixels, roughly similar to to the screen designed by Mary Lou Jepson and her team at MIT and as used in the XO
  • a solar panel of the same size, together with the controlling circuitry which will keep two standard AAA cells trickle-charged and thus provide several hours of use in the absence of daylight.I have already costed this, in consultation with several first-class practical electronic design and production engineers, and our consensus is that the entire unit, produced in runs of a hundred thousand or so, will cost less than US$20 and will probably eventually get down as low as US$10 per unit.

    This is virtually a throwaway or drop-in-the-mud price.

    And it needs no costly infrastructure to support it. It will never need to be upgraded or updated --- the twenty or so Illumination books created between 1990 and 1994 are still perfectly readable today. It will rely on nobody except ourselves, its makers, who will also have set up the truly massive, world-wide, multicultural, international publishing house which will supply it with reading material.

    (Oh. And its lifetime carbon footprint must be rather less than that of a very small field-mouse.)

    As I say, it's possible that a device which is not a computer in any sense of the word may be out of place on a site devoted to One Laptop Computer Per Child.

    I hope, though, that it can remain here for your interest, consideration and criticism and, just possibly, so that as a project it may attract that financial support without which the Lightbook won't get launched.

    Which will be a very great pity indeed, for a few billion people.

    Lightbook: Website | Forum

    Tags: | | | | | | | |

.

Posted on November 25, 2007 by Wayan Vota in Software: Applications, Content: Reference, Hardware: Screen, Content: eBooks

Recently, Steve Cisler, went to the headquarters of the Internet Archive, an Internet library with permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format.

The Internet Archive is a great resource for exploring the digital past, and was a fellow Tech Award Laureate in 2007.

More to the point, the Internet Archive ♥ One Laptop Per Child's wondrous eBook technology. Just check out Steve's video about his trip:

Tags: | | | | | | |

Posted on September 19, 2007 by Martin Woodhouse in Hardware: Power Supply, Hardware: Screen, Content: eBooks

martin woodhouse
Martin a few years ago
In the company of my young assistant Callum -- aged thirteen, writes PC games in his spare time, holds that the Help button is used only by wimps, and has already emailed Winchester College (which he is about to attend) to make sure that they have a computer-controlled milling machine he can use -- I have taken the battery out of my elderly Toshiba Satellite.

It is 70mm x 18mm x 170mm, weighs 630gms, and has a capacity of 2.8 ampere-hours at 12v, or 33.6 Watt-hours. It is thus something of a brute, lasts about 2 hours in the Satellite, and has an eco-impact -- when we include its disposal -- which I hardly care to think about.

Power consumption in computers is notoriously hard to measure and varies greatly according to what the machine is actually doing from minute to minute. My best guess is that the average laptop consumes between 90 and 120 watts (though a current magazine review of a 'multimedia' laptop quotes a battery life of only 67 minutes!)

Suppose we want to lower power requirement by an order of magnitude?

Tags: | | | | |

Posted on September 12, 2007 by Martin Woodhouse in Sales Talk: Competition, Hardware: Peripherals, Content: eBooks

martin woodhouse
Martin a few years ago
I thought I should report on where we are with the design of the $50 I-Book Reader. "We", in this instance, being myself, my young business partner Ben Wibaut, and David Thornhill, who teaches engineering at Queens University, Belfast and who is making a model of the I-Reader for display purposes.

Before I list the components we suggest for this machine, with their costs and their estimated power consumption -- an absolutely vital aspect of things for a solar-powered device -- may I remind everyone that its design process is quite different in approach from most information processing gear, including the XO.

We are here asking not how much in the way of function we can supply for a given complexity, but rather the reverse. The only task we have is that of taking a few kilobytes out of memory and displaying them on a screen as a picture in 64 colours or less.

How, then, can we achieve this as simply as possible, and using what in the way of power? The answer here is "with a power demand so small that we can supply it from a solar panel built into the lid of the Reader itself."

Tags: | | | | | |

Posted on August 21, 2007 by Wayan Vota in Hardware: Peripherals, Sales Talk: Products, Content: eBooks

olpc xo printer
OLPC XO: printed
As I was printing out Steve Cisler's excellent ebook reader, and there could even be a Library of Alexandria's worth of electronic content, but nothing beats the printed word. Especially when you want to spread your ideas, dreams, or just classroom writings with those in the offline world, like parents, teachers, community members or secondary school admissions counselors. As Steve says in his evaluation:
In order for teachers to take the information they find online or on the CD-ROMs I recommend extra resources for printing black and white documents, diagrams, and maps that can be taken to the coordinating centers by the CCTs or directly to the schools by teachers. There must be ways of delivering information even where no ICT exists.
And yet there isn't a printer in the OLPC product mix.

Tags: | | | | | |

Posted on July 27, 2007 by Martin Woodhouse in Sales Talk: Competition, Use Cases: Education, Hardware: Screen, Content: eBooks

martin woodhouse
Martin Woodhouse's youth
Around two months ago I proposed, in these pages, a $50 e-book reader for distribution to OLPC's (and Nicholas Negroponte's) original target population, the poor of the World who have neither shoes no electricity and for whom 'school' is a scarce and sporadic luxury.

You can go back to my original article to see why I, and now others (including many of you, perhaps) feel that OLPC has lost its way in a street-market of fairly nice, fairly cheap laptops for nice, tidy Asian classrooms. It's enough to note that such is the case.

After my first proposal back then, though, I have been concerned in case it might appear that -- as we say in sunny England -- I am 'all mouth and no trousers'. So, if you will allow me, may I here present an update on where the Illumination Book Reader has got to?

In the past two months, then, I have designed both its interior and exterior, several pictures of which are shown here. It is, as you see, very simple in concept and appearance, with Mary Lou Jepsen's screen on its front, along with four buttons placed so that they are neatly accessible by your thumbs when you are holding the Reader exactly as you would hold a paperback book.

Tags: | | | | |

Posted on July 11, 2007 by Wayan Vota in Hardware: School Servers, Countries: Uruguay, Content: eBooks


OLPC XO's in Uruguay
Ever since Nicholas Negroponte realized that Presidents loving OLPC laptops doesn't equal Ministers buying XO's I've been waiting to see what the participating countries' request for proposals (RFP's) would look like.

These competitive RFP's are the method by which every honest government purchases goods or services, especially millions of dollars worth of goods, and I fully expect One Laptop Per Child will need to first get countries to issue RFP's. Then, once governments have an outstanding RFP, OLPC can respond with the best one-to-one computing solution.

In a surprise move that somehow slipped past me, Uruguay has issued the first Request for Proposal that I know of as part of Ceibal (Conectividad Educativa de Informática Básica para el Aprendizaje en Línea).

Tags: | | | | | | |

Posted on May 27, 2007 by Guest Writer in Use Cases: Education, Content: Reference, Prototypes: XO, Content: eBooks

martin woodhouse
Martin Woodhouse's youth
Its Martin Woodhouse again, and according to the Sunday Times of London, I am an eccentric Englishman.

When the One Laptop Per Child project was announced I thought, as I am sure we all did, that Information Technology had come of age; that it had moved from being a bright teenager to an adulthood where wisdom and love are added to cleverness. That hasn't quite happened yet, but it can still do so.

The OLPC XO, for instance, needs similarly to move from mere brilliance -- it is, I repeat, brilliant in design, just as OLPC is gorgeous in kindliness and concept -- to maturity. It needs to do the job it is meant to serve: to educate the world's illiterate, and therefore unempowered, poor.

Now before designing anything, it's always wise to consider its purpose, sometimes very carefully indeed. We have set down that purpose, and we need, accordingly, to ask what it is that a person needs in order to move from illiteracy to education? (As, I remind you, each one of us has done while we were ourselves growing from infancy, through childhood, to being an adult person. We are just proposing to allow every person in the world the same opportunity; that is all.)

Tags: | | | | | | |

Posted on May 08, 2007 by Guest Writer in Use Cases: Education, Content: Education, People: Negroponte, Content: eBooks

olpc negroponte
Nicholas Negroponte of OLPC
I am Roland, and I amazed what MIT Professor Nicholas Negroponte and his team have achieved so far. They have reinvented the laptop and tailored it for kids. They have reinvented its user interface and also tailored it for kids. The number of innovations and the new opportunities for education are fantastic.

One Laptop Per Child has based their project on a teaching method called Constructionism. Like OLPC's hardware and software achievements also this method is innovative and intends to boost the natural curiosity of kids. I understood - hopefully correctly - that Constructionism is about asking questions and looking for answers, about independent thinking, about having fun, about collaboration and about creativity and expression, about making things, being active and productive, about learning by doing and by figuring out new ways.

With Constructionism applied using a Children's Machine XO there are no clear boundaries anymore between school time and spare time because learning is fun and having fun includes learning. If this philosophy can be realized by the OLPC project the positive impact on the learning experience as well as on the learning success must be tremendous. Even more importantly it creates independent thinkers and makers instead of repeaters and imitators.

Wow! These are truly prospects worth investing your best. The software suite available now (browser, tam-tam, chat, video-chat, the mesh-network-collaboration etc.) supports most of these new ways of playing/learning. With those prospects in mind I have been curious with what equally innovative learning content OLPC might come up to interactively apply the above learning style.

Tags: | | | | |

Posted on April 12, 2007 by Guest Writer in Commentary: Academia, Use Cases: Community, Content: eBooks

I am Edward Cherlin and I have a fairly extensive draft for a book with the tentative title "The MIT $100 Laptop: 101 Uses for a Computer You Can't Get", or possibly "Ending Poverty for Fun and Profit", and I have been talking to a possible publisher.

There are actually a few more than 101 sections, but we can deal with that. I plan to put the profits from the book into my non-profit, Earth Treasury, and use them to support further anti-poverty initiatives.

You don't have to read the book to get the main point: Anybody can join in the OLPC project, whether by contributing to the development of the XO laptop and its content, or by working on the consequences of the project, such as teaching e-commerce skills to the children who will shortly be online, connecting with them via e-mail, chat, VoIP or whatever, or just watching the videos they will soon be uploading to YouTube and telling your friends about the good ones. It's up to you how much you get involved.

Tags: | | | | | | |

Posted on December 20, 2006 by Wayan Vota in Content: Reference, Content: eBooks

The previously dormant OLPC Library newsgroup, a forum to discuss "content collections for OLPCs, both software and booklike" came alive recently with emails by past and present librarians, looking for the content organization of the OLPC XO.

The first email was from Jim Pace, a former librarian, who shared his hope, one we can all ascribe to:
Years ago I thought E-books would take off and revolutionize the dissemination of information, especially with the development of E-paper at Zerox PARC. But I was wrong. Perhaps this laptop project will do what E-Books did not: Bring the world's collected knowledge to a significant portion of the world's population. A public library in every citizen's pocket.
And such a noble goal is also in the minds of One Laptop Per Child.

Tags: | | | | | | |

Posted on November 20, 2006 by Wayan Vota in Sales Talk: Price, Prototypes: XO, Content: eBooks

The OLPC Wiki is an amazing resource for anyone wondering about the One Laptop Per Child program, its aims, goals, and benefits. It's also a great place to ask questions about the Children's Machine XO-1 and its educational benefits.

But that's not the route Henry Skelton took. He skipped right over the Wiki and its crowdsourcing wisdom and poised a question directly to the Open OLPC listserv. Looking at a strict cost comparison between books and laptops, Henry asked "How will the OLPC truly help education"?

Tags: | | | | | |

Posted on August 14, 2006 by Wayan Vota in Use Cases: Education, Countries: Thailand, Content: eBooks

After thinking more about last week's announcement by Thailand's Caretaker Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra that the OLPC laptop will replace books in Thailand's schools, I have to question those that believe Prime Minister Thaksin's quote
"Each elementary school child will receive a computer that the government will buy for them, free of charge, instead of books, because books will be found and can be read on computers''
is a positive change for Thailand's students.

Tags:

Posted on August 13, 2006 by Wayan Vota in Commentary: OLPC News, Countries: Thailand, Content: eBooks

Yesterday, we learned that Thailand's Caretaker Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra announced his country will test 530 laptop prototypes in October and November. Today Malaysia's Star is reporting this interesting quote from Prime Minister Thaksin:
"Each elementary school child will receive a computer that the government will buy for them, free of charge, instead of books, because books will be found and can be read on computers''
Huh, so with the OLPC laptop there will no longer be a need for books in Thailand's schools, eh? Am I the only one deeply uncomfortable with that idea?

Tags: