One Laptop Per Child News

I am Dave Wallace and I like to do visual astronomy and night sky photography while traveling.

For this purpose, a full-blown planetarium program with its ability to show telescopic views, invisibly-dim objects and control telescopes was overkill. What I wanted was simply a program for the XO laptop that could answer the question:

"What's overhead next week and 5000 miles from here?"

So my StarChart Activity was designed with those requirements in mind.

Design:

The program's catalog is small on purpose: If you're limited to the Mark One Human Eyeball, keeping track of all the stars in the Tycho catalog is way overkill. So my catalog only contains data for the 1800 brightest stars, the moon, the sun and six of the planets.

Setting the time for some other location or for some future or past instant requires that the user enter the time and zone offset -- this avoids having the program try to predict the correct time zone. "Right now" is easier, so I have the option of plotting the sky as of "now" (and updating the plot once a minute).

Setting location can be very approximate for a whole-sky chart. Knowing your location to within a couple of degrees of latitude and longitude is more than sufficient. I allow several options with respect to display color, provide the ability to show the chart in "star chart traditional" (east on the left) or "map" (east on the right) orientation, show or hide the constellation stick-figures and let the user choose how many stars to plot by their brightness.

Planned Improvements:

The ability to share the activity data is not currently implemented. And I want to re-format the toolbars so all controls are still visible when the screen is rotated. Those two additions will complete "version one".

For version two, I'm tempted to extend the program to make it useful for an observer with binoculars. This means the observer has both magnification and greater light-gathering capability than the program is currently set up for. So I'd need to add the ability to show just a selected, small patch of the sky on demand and I'd have to show dimmer objects.

The catalog would therefore have to include about 10,000 more stars and represent the brighter Deep Sky Objects. I'd also like to be able to show the name of a selected star and of its constellation. This would be a teaching aid.

Educational Use:

Besides being an aid for viewing the night sky, the star chart can show how the sky looks from somewhere else and/or at some other time. You can demonstrate what it means to live on a round, rotating planet.

You can show that the sky moves one way as the year progresses while the moon moves the other at about 13 times the rate. You can show how the planets seem to move roughly in the same path. You can even show that the moon will occult the planets and eclipse the sun. Even if your inside

I suppose it even could be used to teach Python programming for the XO. At least it helped me learn to do it! You can read about my adventures in programming the StarChart Activity on the OLPC News Forum.

Tags: Dave Wallace | Mark One Human Eyeball | OLPC News Forum | OLPC Planetarium | Star Chart Activity | StarChart |

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Ah, I can still remember the day we got the first computers in our school. Not just any school mind, but my school. And not just any of my schools, but my primary school. The school where even the lightest of impressions would burn into your naked soul until it hit the bone.

There, in that school all of a sudden we found a computer upon a table. No-one of us younglings knew exactly how it got there or what it was for... Yes computing of course; the meaning of which overlapped pretty much with game playing, although very few of us had actually played with or owned a computer.

Oh how the black magic of the thing attracted us like flies. It was a PC of sorts, but not of the Intel variety. Nor was it any of the MSX-y variety which I had come across before. But it had a tape-drive, just like the MSX. And it took forever to load anything.

But it would keep you amused by making funny screachy sounds as it did so. A bit like a demented robot. And that is about all I remember, because this wonderful educational device fell flat on it's face at the end of the eighties. I think it sort of landed there by magic, at that odd place at the end of the class.

And the teachers of my school sort of hoped it would sorcer itself away. Which it did after two months. In a puff of smoke, never to be heard of again. To great delight of said teachers who never actually tried to use it to educate us.

Burn out

Now we will fast-forward to the present day. I'm Ties Stuij, Journalist come nerd/developer working for OLE Nepal in Kathmandu. Through the greyish magic with which fate spins its web I somehow find myself working in this dynamic and stinky city. Working on educational software for these black magic boxes for OLE Nepal. Well, not really working at present. Resting would be more accurate of a description.

The whole development team is in a state of lazy rest. Not a laziness used as a coping strategy to counter the dreariness of everyday office life... Quite the opposite.

This laziness is a coping strategy to alleviate our fused out brains that have been mutilated beyond recognition by our iron willpower to make the best damn educational software this side of the horsehead nebula.

Ehh.. Did that sound just a bit pretentious? Perhaps, but we have been working awfully hard to produce a final build of a software suite called Epaati, that will assist teaching children from both grade 2 and grade 6 (8 respectively 12 years old) maths and English.

Final build in the sense that this version of Epaati will be put on these mini (super) computers, called XO's. These computers will on their turn be put in the greedy little hands of Nepali schoolchildren in about a week.

Oh the pressure, the pressure!

We've been developing Epaati for quite a while now, but up till now we unleashed it's considerable power only upon our test audience, game jams and the teachers of our deployment schools. And our digital child has grown quite a bit since it's conception. We developed 47 learning activities in all.

Tons of bugs can hide in and amongst their folds and crevices, and there's nothing like the urgency of actual use to drive the hunt in uncovering and squashing them. Animal rights organizations were held at bay with long poles, while this digital mass murder was underway. It's hard to believe that there were so many bugs to be found. But then again, this suite is the result of 6 months work by three to four developers and one graphics artist.

Another thing that's annoying is that this software is for little puppy-eyed kids who might actually be helped in their development by our efforts. You know, a regular customer is a party on equal footing.

You ship a bug, and she'll know this is an industry hazard. But those little kids... somewhere in that jaded, cynical, hedonistic, western brain of mine those kids invoke scary feelings of social responsibility, which drive you to walk the extra mile.

So the OLE Nepal offices have of late been a battlefield on which many a shard of good will has driven itself in the bloody soil, when it had to admit defeat against fatigue and sleep-deprivation while all involved tried to MAKE STUFF WORK. And not just the development team of course.

While our immediate task for the coming deployment is done. Other sections are still in full gear working with getting the XO's ready, beating school servers in shape, testing jabber servers, giving press conferences, instructing teachers, aligning us with other parties involved,.. etc. Let them work like mules, we don't care. Our brains are soup, we're of no use.

As reporter after reporter is shuffling into our office to get the news on what is to come, we are already done. Filled with a vague satisfaction that stage-builders must also feel, just before a theatre play starts that they built the decor for.

Here there be monsters

We are doing quite cool stuff here, on the brink of the unknown. I myself am in charge of optimizations, as it's called. And that task was more satisfying than expected. The XO's aren't the most powerful computers in the world and as it turned out the software we use to build our activities (Etoys, on top of Squeak, for connoisseurs), wasn't yet prepared to handle a project of our scope in such a constrained environment.

For example, when I started off, a number of activities we made would take over a minute and a half to load, and some wouldn't load at all. Also our software took up way to much memory, affecting other software as well if it was being used at the same time. This was making the user experience much less fun and much more frustrating than is acceptable.

Not to speak of the activities that didn't even work. If I wouldn't be able to find some solutions, or find people that would find solutions, my job would be unenviable to say the least. Once I oversaw the full scope of our problems (or was I just exaggerating everything in my head), I got scared indeed.

Also considering I had hardly coded in Smalltalk (the language of which Squeak is an implementation) before. Luckily Smalltalk/Squeak is a very comfortable environment to work in and me and others managed to trim our problems down to an acceptable level. In certain cases the loading-time speedup was tripled or even quadrupled. All our activities are now loading, while memory consumption is halved. Not that we're there though.

While I'd like to bring down loading time even more (Most of our activities load between 20 and thirty secs now; Still quite a bit in the light of a child's impatience.), we need to address amongst others character-encoding and sound related problems. But these seem to be solvable problems, our biggest enemy being time and manpower.

Live or die

The strange thing is that we've created a beast, but we've got no clue how it's going to behave in the wild. Maybe it'll just curl up and die, just like the computer in my boyhood school. But I must say that the enthusiastic reactions I've seen from actual teachers (two of which have stayed in my house for a few days, while they received training) have very much outstripped my expectations.

And I think that if I and my comrades could already be enchanted by that computer that was basically just sitting there at the back of the class, these action- and content-packed babies will certainly have an impact on those child-brains in rural Nepal.

Postscript

For those that want to try our beast of burden, you can download the XO bundle by surfing to http://dev.laptop.org/pub/epaati/Epaati-10.xo For XO illiterate Squeakers: the bundle is a simple zip file. Just unzip it and click the image in the epaati dir.

Tags: Educational Software | Epaati | Horsehead Nebula | OLE Nepal | OLPC | Smalltalk | Squeak | Ties Stuij | XO Bundle |

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At the recent OLPC Learning Club DC meetup, we learned about a fun Activity for the XO laptop: Speak. Very simply:

Speak is a talking face for the XO laptop. Anything you type will be spoken aloud using the XO's speech synthesizer, espeak.

You can adjust the accent, rate and pitch of the voice as well as the shape of the eyes and mouth. This is a great way to experiment with the speech synthesizer, learn to type or just have fun making a funny face for your XO.

But that description does not do justice to the fun you can have with Speak on the XO laptop. To really understand how it connects with children, you have to watch a child use Speak. Let's have Marayd show us its full educational engagement:

Did you see how quickly she go into it? It was definitely the big hit with everyone from child to adult, and expect other XO User Groups to be experimenting with Speak shortly too.

Better yet, share you Speak story with us now, so we can all co-learn.

Tags: OLPC | OLPC Learning Club | One Laptop Per Child | Speak | Speech Synthesizer | XO Laptop | XO User Group |

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t is with great sadness that I have made the decision to sell my XO computer. Last fall when I heard that the XO was going to be on sale, thanks to OLPC News, I said this will be the computer for me! My co-workers will tell you that this computer was awaited as eagerly as my first child. I was in love with this computer because of the commitment to open source. I was in love with the idea that it was NOT Microsoft.

I loved the educational mission of the computer. I love the size. I loved the chance to learn. And I love the philosophy of the computer. It’s built for the conditions I will experience in Africa. In June I will leave the US for two years to serve with the Peace Corps in Ghana.

I am very positive about technology. I love new tech and usually put up with a lot of glitches. But the OX defeated me. I had high expectations because they were being sold to people in third world countries as their only computer.My disappointments are as follows:

1. No alternate power source shipped with the OX. Even for people living in the US an alternative power source was attractive because we often use our laptops where there is no power. And for me it was even more attractive because I was going to a third world country and though an alternative power source would be wonderful. OLPC was adamant that they would not send me one. The manufacturer of the YOYO would not sell me one. I tried to find the amazing $12.00 solar charger. No luck.
2. The touch pad is very buggy. I do not want to have a mouse. The less stuff I bring and carry around Africa the better. The touch pad goes crazy at least once an hour some times more often. Then you have to reboot sometimes just reboot, sugar other times reboot the whole computer.
3. Booting up takes a very long time. It’s like using a computer from 5 years ago. I usually have a puzzle to do while the computer boots up.
4. The camera and the record features are great but only seconds of recording time?
5. The video on the camera is very poor quality.
6. My browser does not work. It crashes all the time. I have upgraded to the latest update of the OS. That does not help.(I use Opera instead)

.

Tags: Alternate Power Source | Education | Ghana | Internet | OLPC | Opera Browser | PCV | Peace Corps | XO Laptop |

No XO Laptop For A Peace Corps Volunteer Going to Ghana | Comment (51) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

In the New Year, I got fed up with the "I Don't Have My XO" whine in the OLPC News G1G1 Shipping Problems Forum and decided to do something about it. I donated my XO to a needy G1G1. LesleyT was the lucky recipient, and now that the month is coming to a close, we have an update on XO laptop usage from an excited user group: special education students in North Carolina. First off, let's hear Leslie's description of her special needs user group:

The children I use the XO with are in a special education class, and I'm only with them a few times a day, usually during their computer lab time. Most of them can read, write, and speak, although not always at grade level. They are vociferous consumers of media, especially flash games, but I'm unsure if they understand what they are doing. They click and pound. They ask to be put on a specific site if they can't find it in the drop-down menu, then click on pictures of cartoons they like until they come to a game. If a game is too hard, or freezes, they simply open another browser, or move to another computer. While waiting for internet explorer to start, they might click enough times to open 10 browsers.

While waiting for the XO laptop to boot, Leslie's students put the screen through their own version of ruggedness - the lick test. Thankfully, Leslie reports that Mary Lou can add "saliva resistant" to the XO check list. Leslie also reports that her students take to the XO in other ways too.

Tags: Angelman Syndrome | Assistive Technology | Gibberish | Saliva Resistant | Special Needs | XO Laptop |

One Assistive Technology Laptop Per Child | Comment (17) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

Currently, the XO laptop from OLPC does not have spreadsheet software. The One Laptop Per Child developers did not think there was a need for it when they designed the initial Sugar activities, and to an extent, they are right. Children do not need the ability to run macros on numeric data - that's an adult request. But it is an opportunity for children and adults to bond over basic math, as the Thailand pilot showed:

One of the most engaging project that has involved both students and parents is the family accounting initiative. For six years, many families have recorded their income and expenses in order to better manage their spendings. It was originally done using a simple balance card written on paper. Later, many had switched to Excel (via desktop PCs at the school's computer lab and the help of their children). It was a case where the benefits of technology was clear and well appreciated. Thus, having a spreadsheet on the XO has been one of the most widely requested features from the parents. Being able to do their accounting at home through the help of their children is extremely attractive.

It's not only the Thai's who understand the need for spreadsheet software on the XO. Dedicated members of the OLPC Learning Club DC also want spreadsheets on the XO.

Tags: Eben Eliason | GNumeric | Manusheel Gupta | OLPC Thailand | Open Source | PPSS | Spreadsheet Software |

OLPC Solution Needed: Spreadsheet Software on XO Laptop | Comment (16) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

There seems to be a lot of bad news for One Laptop Per Child lately (the Brazil loss, the OLPC CTO leaving), and even more bad press.

First from pundits in the computer field who clearly (and surprisingly) don't "get" what the OLPC project and the XO are for, and secondly from users who now have their hands on their G1G1 XO and are let down that it isn't a polished product and doesn't run like their $1500 Windows or Mac laptop does. People who expect instant gratification can be very hard to please.

I'm John Koger and I am concerned that the One laptop Per Child project may fail before it really gets rolling.

Hardware is too Competitive

My blunt expectation at this point is that the OLPC project in its current form will fade away. Computer hardware is a razor-margin and ruthless market, and being non-profit isn't a huge advantage over competitors that are low-profit.

I suspect it will be very hard and expensive to keep up production of the hardware part of the XO, especially in the face of commercial--retail--offerings that will soon undercut the XO's price point by a significant margin. And the OLPC hardware team will be hard-pressed to keep the XO laptop competitive with the commercial offerings down the road.

Continue reading "Focus on Educator eToys Activities, Not XO Laptops"

Tags: Asus Eee | G1G1 XO | John Koger | OLPC Activities | Squeak | Ubuntu Linux | XO Laptop | eToys |

Focus on Educator eToys Activities, Not XO Laptops | Comment (40) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

I am Nicola Ferralis and the conventional way of teaching science has been through lecturing. The motivation behind this method was often the convenience that comes with it. In a lecture an instructor follows his notes or a book while the audience listens. Although questions are often expected, this rarely happens. This method usually is not very compatible with experimental sessions, where students are asked to prove something through an experiment, because they are not trained to question their learning, but only to follow directions. This detachment between lecturing and the experimental training is, in my opinion, a reason why often there is very little excitement from the students over the sciences.

A consequence of this one-way of transmitting knowledge (from the teacher to the students) induces a high level of dry memorization by the students. The reason behind it consists in the lack of development of quantitative and analytical skills that comes with the traditional lecturing. As side effects, sciences (and in particular the physical sciences) are perceived as cryptic, difficult and requires a student to be "very smart".

To overcome such limitations, the physical science education community over the years has suggested that the "inquiry-based" learning provides a much more effective way of teaching the sciences because more it follows more closely the scientific method. This is indeed the true way of teaching problem-solving skills.

Tags: Constructivism | Constructivistic Approach | Etoys | Inquiry-Based Learning | Lillian McDermott | OLPC XO |

The Role of Constructivism in Teaching Science | Comment (22) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

I am Edward Cherlin and I think the OLPC program is astonishing in its goals, even if some doubt its ability to perform. It proposes to educate up to a billion children with the latest in technology and information, and to some degree their families as well.

OLPC aims to add several percent to annual economic growth in the developing countries, with spillovers to the developed countries that will have the opportunity to supply technology and we don't even know what else. (This is not officially stated, but I infer it from the goal of ending poverty. If anybody wants, I can run the numbers in a future article.)

The XO will provide more access to health information than we could dream of a few years ago. Of course, we don't yet know who will make that information available in local languages, nor who will access what parts of it and put it to use. The XO will let the children and their communities talk together all over the world, if they want to, and who knows what that might lead to?

XO Collaboration

But today, I am voting for a different aspect of the program as potentially the most astonishing. The XO laptop software is set up for collaboration. Several children can sign on to the same instance of a Sugar activity, including paint, music, write, browse, and program. In some cases, many children--entire classrooms or entire schools. And there are games, of course.

Tags: Adam Smith | Edward Cherlin | Harry Potter | OLPC Collaboration | Sugar Activity | Track Changes |

OLPC is About Collaboration, Not Cheating | Comment (2) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

"Punt!" When your options have all run out, sometimes the thing to do is just kick the ball as hard as possible and hope that it goes somewhere helpful. While this may seem a nasty comment about the One Laptop Per Child's "buy two, give one" approach, it really is not. In the early days of the personal computer (1975 - 1980) we did nothing but punt. We put out hardware that only early adopters could love in the hopes that someone would write software to make them useful. Eventually, someone did.

It required a large base of early adopters, but we had that, and it seems as if the XO-1 laptop will have an even bigger base. In order to result in development there must be a matrix of communication, but that's not hard with wikis, etc. (we had none of those back then and had to rely upon club meetings and newsletters).

There also being a significant body of experience with open source software development, it should be much less difficult for people to work out how to get programs developed as a group effort. What will be necessary is some significant input on educational software and courseware - the experimental stuff as well as the established approaches.

Tags: $100 Laptop | Nicholas Negroponte | OLPC | OLPC Punters | Open Source Software | Visi-Calcs | XO Laptop |

One Laptop Per Child's G1G1 XO Plan is Punting to the Pilots | Comment (7) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

This weekend, September 21-23, Columbia University's freeculture chapter will be hosting an OLPC Journalism Jam as a part of the OLPC's (indian) summer of content

We're looking for journalists and journalism students, techies with an interest in content management systems and online newspapers, graphic and layout designers, and education students with an interest in writing to join us to create:

1. A single edition of a online newspaper
2. A bundle of the open source tools you need to publish one
3. An open content how-to guide for groups of kids who want to start their own paper

We're looking to do all this in a single weekend. After the Jam, we'll publish our results to the web under Creative Commons licenses so that other groups can benefit from our work. Participation is free. Care to join us?

Word on college walk is that some legendary radical lawyers will be making guest appearances on Friday, and I was invited to remix my Portable Culture Machine's presentation to help break up the coding sessions on Saturday.

Tags: Eben Moglen | FreeCulture Chapter | Journalism Jam | OLPC Miracles | Online Newspaper | Summer of Content |

Hope You Like Journalism Jammin', Too | Comment (2) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

I have been following this thread about sharing and privacy on the One Laptop Per Child XO computer with great interest and thought it was worth bringing this out to a broader audience in the hopes of widening the conversation.

The discussion revolves around the default policies governing the sharing of content (documents, projects, journal entries, etc) that students create using the XO-1. This issue is a great example of the way in which modern software design has begun to resemble traditional architecture, as a leading art.

Walter Bender explicitly recognizes the power of affordances to shape the dynamics of student interactions when he makes the case that the prudent design would

"[let] the human social context dictate the rules of sharing and privacy rather than trying to engineer them."

It is important to recognize that modern software environments often must decide between policies which are culturally practiced versus ones which are strictly enforced (or encouraged, e.g. through UI).

Tags: Anonymous Browsing | FERPA Regulations | OLPC Privacy | Share Alike | Walter Bender | Wikipedia |

Sharing and Not-Sharing Alike User Generated Content | Comment (9) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

When designing the XO computer, One Laptop Per Child designed the sound card to be able to measure DC voltages. Now why would the talented team behind the "$100 laptop" go to the trouble of hacking an audio jack microphone into a data port? Maybe they had the same revelation as Martin Visser did:

A colleague of mine who has quite a few OLPCs, mainly for testing the wireless stuff out, told of the absolutely clever analog input port the OLPC has. Not content with a regular AC microphone input, it can be configured in two other modes. One is a straight DC input that can measure between 0 and 3VDC. I immediately thought of kids in Africa being able to hack electronics together from old radios and the like and using the OLPC as a simple oscilloscope or voltmeter. The other analog input puts 2.5V and allows you to measure across this. This means a simple potentiometer can be read. Great for all sorts of science experiments, but also a good way of providing another interface to control the Tamtam musical instruments.

Taking this idea a step further in his comment on Building One Laptop Per Socialized Child, Nick explains how children could use cheap sensors to learn about electricity:

Tags: Analog Input | Arjun Sarwal | Jaya Kumar | Martin Visser | OLPC TamTam | Potentiometer | Voltmeter | XO Oscilloscope |

An XO Oscilloscope to Measure Children's OLPC Learning | Comment (8) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

This week's OLPC Community News included links to new wiki pages containing some long awaited educational content, guidelines, and sample activities addressed to educators for creating outlines for new activities:

19. Educational activity guidelines: Lauren Klien has been working on templates for learning activities and guidelines for people writing them. If you are working on activities of your own, please post them to the wiki and add/suggest guidelines of your own that you have found useful.

21. MaMaMedia has started to move content into the OLPC wiki.

. With these announcements, One Laptop Per Child has finally answered my criticism that it is almost exclusively technology oriented and that its website does not contain much information on its educational side. Now the new wiki pages take a first step in the right direction.

The wikipage "activity guidelines" reminds the inventors to weave the main constructivist threads into their activity outlines. One new aspect is that now also teachers, to which OLPC leadership had an unfavorable attitude, seem welcome to take part in the activity development. Moreover the development of not only activities but also of lesson plans and - believe it or not - even curricula is encouraged.

Tags: Constructionist Activities | E-Toys | Idit Harel Caperton | MaMaMedia | OLPC Wiki | Seymour Papert |

One Step Closer to an XO Education Project | Comment (30) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

Since OLPC is an education project but the education part of it is not well documented in OLPC's website I read up a little on Seymour Papert's publications because he is Negroponte's founding partner of the Media Lab and he is also one of the mental fathers of the education part of OLPC.

I read "The Connected Family, Bridging the Digital Generation Gap",1996, and a few of his subsequent short articles.

Short summary: The book explains a number of principles for more natural and therefore more successful learning all of which absolutely made sense to me in spite of my initial skepticism. It also gives hints how to implement these principles. However, these concrete hints are mainly aimed for application in the family at home rather than in school.

How to base a full school education on these new principles is unfortunately neither detailed in this book nor in Papert's subsequent articles that I read so far. Unfortunately Prof. Papert (age 79) suffered a serious accident last December in Hanoy. I wish Professor Papert all the best and get well soon.

In the mean time, his principles seem so powerful and general that it is worth trying hard to work out sensible school implementations of them and validate them.

Tags: Children's Machine | Connected Family | Mindstorms | OLPC | Seymour Papert | Technological Fluency |

Professor Seymour Papert's "The Connected Family" | Comment (151) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

Editor's Note: I originally published this article attributing it to Carlo Emmanoel Oliveira Ph.D. when it was the work of Edward Tse. The error is mine and I apologize to both Edward & Carlo. Thankfully, Edward sees the value in the commentary and humor in my mistake..

During the past Human Factors in Computer Systems conference in San Jose, California there was a lot of attention on the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project (see a video). The project goal is: "To provide children around the world with new opportunities to explore, experiment and express themselves." In the mission statement the website claims that OLPC has been "extensively field-tested and validated among some of the poorest and most remote populations on earth". While this could be used in conjunction with current teaching, part of the goal is to support self-exploration without the aid of formal teaching.

I personally feel that technology has a large role to play in the future of education (this is already seen with the exploding growth of companies like Smart Technologies that focus on the education market) but there is a need to understand how the technology fits within the ecology of education in developing nations.

This article, first published on The Future of Digital Interaction is not meant to condemn the OLPC project as its aims are focused on goal that would benefit society as a whole. Rather it asks: how can OLPC be improved? Is this the right approach? What other approaches could be used? Before massively deploying such a technology, it is crucial that we have this debate.

Tags: Carlo Emmanoel Oliveira | Ergonomics | Future of Digital Interaction | OLPC Content | OLPC Keyboard |

Top Ten Issues of One Laptop Per Child | Comment (14) |