Nicholas? [LWN.net]

Nicholas?

Posted Jan 7, 2009 22:03 UTC (Wed) by ngiger@mus.ch (subscriber, #4013)
In reply to: Nicholas? by BrucePerens
Parent article: Changes at OLPC

As far as I know OLPC did not change completely the direction or do you have any evidence about it? (see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_myths#The_laptop_will_run_...)

And the XO is a laptop for children 6-12 years old. Way too small for my fingers.

OLPC is still first an educational program. And convincing educational authorities that a new tool is good for your children (even if it breaks old teacher habits) is hard and takes time.

And OLPC (with all its defects) is not only the Boston/MA based foundation but also a lot of pilot/deployment projects and a lot of grassroot organizations spread over most of the world.

Look at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Deployments and see that OLPC made quite some progress in the last four years.

Let's hope that Sugar survives, as it is a good idea for childrens who never got in touch with a computer beforehand. But good ideas don't win always.

Caveat: I am a member of the OLPC Support Gang and OLPC Switzerland and therefore certainly biased.

to post comments

Nicholas?

Posted Jan 7, 2009 22:51 UTC (Wed) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (3 responses)

Getting Sugar deployed as a desktop option for standard linux distributions should significantly help with Sugar adoption. Sugar isn't tied to the OLPC hardware both Fedora and Ubuntu are working on making Sugar a desktop session option making it possible to put Sugar in from of kids (and adults) in places where OLPC isn't targeting any deployments.

I wonder how many of us who using a traditional linux desktop/laptop, could commit to using the Sugar environment for a month instead of our current desktop environment.

-jef

Nicholas?

Posted Jan 7, 2009 23:46 UTC (Wed) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link] (1 responses)

I tried it on Debian today, with the update packages since Debian unstable is frozen. It needs some TLC. There's no good way, as far as I can tell, to install an activity on Debian. The software installation control panel applet is missing. I can install them from the browser, but they sit forever pulsing their icons when I try to start them.

Nicholas?

Posted Jan 8, 2009 0:02 UTC (Thu) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]

I don't know the state of Sugar in Debian. I know people are working hard to make Sugar usable on Fedora. Fedora contributors have been publicly encouraged to help with the effort. There's even a Fedora Sugar live I believe:

http://www.mail-archive.com/fedora-education-list@redhat....

Greg has a series of blog posts talking significantly about the effort and his personal experience using Sugar exclusively...but since livejournal just cratered it seems...i can't easily reference them here. I don't want to hand over a set of google cache urls, I'm not sure if that's appropriate.

They've been working hard recently to get the presence server up and running so the collaborative elements of Sugar applications work.

-jef

Nicholas?

Posted Jan 7, 2009 23:55 UTC (Wed) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

I've got a few XO machines, I think Sugar is a big mistake and the sooner that there are options to not use it the better.

there are a couple of major issues to be resolved before Sugar can be an option on a normal machine (and these issues need to be solved for the OLPC project as well)

don't push things to hard or you will have people try stuff that doesn't work and turn into bitter opponents.

XO is a laptop for children 6-12 years old

Posted Jan 9, 2009 2:03 UTC (Fri) by Alterego (guest, #55989) [Link] (16 responses)

A better strategy to _really_ help developping countries would be to provide them :
1/ good infrastructure for universities, with enough working desktop computers in classrooms and fund to pay the teachers and the running costs (power and bandwitdh are very expensive in those countries, as are alarms, secured doors etc... to prevent the stealing of everything).

2/ provide IT center for schools for pupils near 12-18.

Many children leave scholar system near 10-12 years. They will nearly never use a computer during the rest of their life, as it would be too expensive, even in cyber center 1$/hour is too much. (300 million people survive with 1$ per day)

OLPC seems good idea, but it shows too much ignorance of reality in the targeted countries, not to speak of erroneous strategy...

XO is a laptop for children 6-12 years old

Posted Jan 9, 2009 2:26 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (15 responses)

you say that the way to help is to gie universities lots of desktops, but then you say that most people leave school around age 10-12

don't you see the contridiction between these two?

as for 'they never touch a computer again', if the area is flooded with computers (every kid in school has one), that may not be the case any longer.

connectivity is a problem, but even with very limited bandwidth things can still be done (what is the old saying? "don't underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon filled with tapes")

on the one hand we have people like you telling us that OLPC is a worthless plan, on the other hand we see stories about how the availability of cell phones is revolutionizing poor areas. I don't know how to break it to you, but cell phones require a lot more bandwidth to be useable than a XO laptop.

the truth is probably that there are areas where the OLPC's will not work, but there are also a lot of areas where they can work

XO is a laptop for children 6-12 years old

Posted Jan 9, 2009 5:10 UTC (Fri) by Alterego (guest, #55989) [Link] (5 responses)

what i mean is it would be more useful to provide computer to people who really need them now (universities) than to 6-12 yo children who will mostly never see one again.

Flood country with computers ! What is your planet ?
1 billion people are starving, they don't have money for food or drinkable water, electricity is lacking (regular power cut due to some king of round robin scheme to provide electricity to everybody in Dakar, capital of Senegal which is one of the best doing country in sub-saharian Africa).

I won't comment "with very limited bandwidth things can still be done", see Niger with 1MB/s backbone for the whole country some years ago, and probably still now.

The official site of NEPAD, the African continental plan to adress their problems:
I quote only 2 parts of the 3 pages worth to read document presenting ICT:
Aout Nepad > Priority areas > Human Development > ICT
http://www.nepad.org/2005/files/documents/30.pdf

"The connections cost in Africa averages 20% of GDP per capita, compared with the world average of 9%, and 1% for high income countries"

" Objectives :
- to double the teledensity of 2 lines per 100 people
- to develop and produce a pool of ICT-proficient youth and students from which Africa can draw trainee ICT engineers, programmers and software developpers.
- to develop local content software, based specially on Africa's culture legacy"

Cell phones revolutionize communications becauses billions of investments are done by companies because there is a market, and the cost of cell phone is far much lower than one olpc. Thats a real development,(improve infrastructure) fitting real local needs, not a charity done by more-than-gifted-but-ignorant-foreigners, and that why it works.
Cell phone are also a community effort, not one for each people, but one per business unit. Also, when there is no power in a village, there are no cell phones !

And i dont think that giving a cell phone to each 6-12 yo child would solve any problem.

I think its a good thing that olpc fails because it is based on misconceptions, and drains lots of resources that could be much better used elsewhere, for example in universities who really need computers.

OLPC is dead, let's go to OLPUS one laptop per university student, of course with open resources:
- open OS and software to permit them to study how it work, and adapt/build their own solutions fitting their real needs.
- open content (books, wikipedia...), which can be copied and modified, not ebooks with drm that will only cost a lot, and will mostly be inadequate occidental content.
This would work and provide a real help, that was the initial plan of olpc before the treason ;-) even if the targeted audience was/is wrong imnsho.

XO is a laptop for children 6-12 years old

Posted Jan 9, 2009 18:18 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (4 responses)

when OLPC deploys laptops to a country they give one to every kid in grade school.

in a few years we will see what happens when those kids leave grade school.

it may be that they give the laptops back, but do the schools really want 5-year old laptops to issue to new students? (which would be 10 years old when those kids leave school), or will they get new laptops for the new students and let the kids keep the old machines.

If the kids keep the machines they will continue to use them after they leave school.

just becouse 1B people are starving, that doesn't mean that educating the next 2B people who aren't starving.

and who knows, possibly by educating those 2B people the overall productivity of the world will go up and more food will be available to feed the 1B

XO is a laptop for children 6-12 years old

Posted Jan 10, 2009 1:25 UTC (Sat) by Alterego (guest, #55989) [Link] (3 responses)

I agree that educating the not so poor will later help the poorest.

OT: Wrt to food problem, the problem is not world productivity, it is agriculture subventions which allows US and EU to control food for a big part of the planet, and causes misery by preventing primary economy development. Fighting false ideas is very important for human development, that's why i insist so heavily on this, sorry :-)

XO is a laptop for children 6-12 years old

Posted Jan 10, 2009 2:19 UTC (Sat) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link] (1 responses)

We're getting pretty far from the topic of laptops for children. But before you pin the problem on agriculture "subventions" - which I guess means control exerted through capitalism on the production and distribution of food - you should also consider the Malthusian aspect. The major governors of population throughout history, and no doubt before, have been famine and disease. Even with the most efficient possible production and allocation of food, eventually the population would reach a point at which all would be hungry, if illness wasn't killing us off. I can't believe we could be very far from that point today. The only long-term solution would be for human beings to limit their own procreation to a level at which the ecosystem can sustainably feed us.

Bruce

XO is a laptop for children 6-12 years old

Posted Jan 12, 2009 5:33 UTC (Mon) by Alterego (guest, #55989) [Link]

s/subvention/subsidy/ in my posts (and s/subsidy/zero/g in US and EU :-)
The control is exerted by subsidies to the richest countries ! (cotton...)

Agreed.
And one good news is: the number of child per family decreases when people gets richer.

http://graphs.gapminder.org/world/#$majorMode=chart$is;shi=t;...

XO is a laptop for children 6-12 years old

Posted Jan 15, 2009 13:41 UTC (Thu) by forthy (guest, #1525) [Link]

IMHO this is silly. What's causing damage to Africa is the kleptocracy that's the dominant government form there. A country will get nowhere with a dictator who wants to stay in power even when the population dies due to the effort. You certainly will hear a lot of excuses that the help provided by outsiders is hurting the people.

If you look at other parts of the world, things go quite differently. Asia has developed very significantly during the last decades. There are still poor countries, there are still many countries where the political system is not up to western standards, but at least the dictators are benevolent. They don't kill their own people, like they did in the 60s and 70s.

However, I think the originator of this subthread is right: You should not concentrate on the small children first; if you only have a limited amount of founding, take the students first. The benefit there is higher. It raises the education of the elite, and whatever you think about equal democracy, it's always the elite who sets the direction of a country. When they are stupid, uneducated, and selfish, they will ruin it.

One problem of third world countries is the quality of teachers. Negroponte want to "solve" that problem by skipping the teacher. I don't think you can. By helping the students first, you can create sufficiently good teachers, and it does not really take that long. By the time the OLPC really is a billion unit product, you'll already could have a few million capable teachers.

countries bandwidth and internet access

Posted Jan 9, 2009 6:05 UTC (Fri) by Alterego (guest, #55989) [Link] (8 responses)

Based on CIA factbook:
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/int_int_int_ban_mbp_per...

Niger
International internet bandwidth: 30 Mb/s
Price basket for internet: 104 $month
http://www.nationmaster.com/country/ng-niger/int-internet

USA:
International Internet Bandwith: 970 Gb/s
Price basket of internet: 14 $/month
http://www.nationmaster.com/country/us-united-states/int-...

So i maintain:
1/ olpc is misinformed of reality when it speaks of internet access for children with their wonderful technology

2/ the only realistic solution to share our wonderful things is to provide local proxy, for example a (not so big) bunch of DVD with distro mirrors (10 DVD's) and wikipedia (10 DVD's), and tldp.org and other goodies (less than 10 DVDs), or a 100$ some hundreds GB HD.

countries bandwidth and internet access

Posted Jan 9, 2009 6:29 UTC (Fri) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link] (1 responses)

OLPC's concept of net access is mesh networking, more than connection to the global backbone. Kids can network to teacher's laptop. Teacher can get materals by sneakernet.

countries bandwidth and internet access

Posted Jan 9, 2009 11:06 UTC (Fri) by Alterego (guest, #55989) [Link]

True, mesh networking is a really good idea, maybe a short term low cost solution of using a wire/wifi would have been enought ?

I was refering to the OLPC propaganda:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMeX2D4AOjM
"connected so the child can access the internet" 42s-44s of the video.

This is unrealistic in Africa, which is nearly half of the developping countries.

The OLPC team of 60/32 people is probably more important than the team of Nepad working on ICT and education.
This is also one identified problem of development: foreign NGOs have more power than local governments (at least in Africa), and they do what they want, no matter if it is asked for, or at least adequate.

I can tell you: they don't care about high-tech for children, they just want normal (preferably low power) computers for universites and schools, they can tune and repair easily, like we do with ordinary exchangable components. And they need to part-time work as cyber-center, to cover the expenses (mainly teachers, power and bandwidth cost)

There are many very sad examples of great ideas leading to complete failure due to ignorance, eg contraception (translated as "barrier to children" which is opposite to culture whereas a local term "spacing sorgho plants" would have been perfectly understood and accepted http://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2009/01/08/l-aide-a...), agriculture (new food people don't eat, or which require very long cooking time so the energy budget explodes), in water management (destabilise the local economy balance and create international tension, or deep drill that fall apart after 2 years and force people to manually get water from 40m when before it was 10m) ... This only due to, let's say, the certitude of being Right, when one has only a very superficial knowledge of the situation.

Child education is very culture-dependant. So, we (highly tech developped people), can maybe provide technology expertise, or share university courses, but for child's education the content must be done by local people, or for sure it will be inadequate.

Let's say olpc had some great ideas, partly suitable, but went wrong, and need to travel in Africa to learn.

countries bandwidth and internet access

Posted Jan 9, 2009 18:44 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (5 responses)

the OLPC 'perfect deployment' is very similar to your #2

the laptops use the mech networking to talk to the school server, which is the proxy to whatever Internet connection there is, and also has a large store of content on it's local drive.

OLPC is deploying these systems out in the wild, they are working with people who are setting up point-to-point wifi connections over several miles to bring connectivity to the schools. they are _very_ aware of what the bandwidth limitations are.

countries bandwitdh and internet access

Posted Jan 9, 2009 20:20 UTC (Fri) by Alterego (guest, #55989) [Link] (4 responses)

Nice to learn this. I did not this on laptop.org. I'd be glad to have an url, ideally which explains the funding of the infrastructure too, and how OLPC fits a pre existing demand from the country.

On laptop.org, in press:
"# 2008-01-07
One Laptop per Child Giving Campaign Raises $35 Million in 2007"

for 100 000 xo, for rwanda, cambodia ...

I doubt that Rwanda wanted laptop for childs, but of course they accepted them when they came. It is just misused resources that fit no need, but the sponsors are satisfied, so why complain ?

35 million$ is 5% of rwanda budget !

Reread my rant against powerful foreign NGO that do unwanted things. I just hope they will take the olpc and put them where there will be more useful.

countries bandwitdh and internet access

Posted Jan 9, 2009 20:58 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (3 responses)

are you saying that all $35M came from Rwanda? and only got them 100,000 laptops?

they probably spent ~$200,000 or so on the 100,000 laptops for Rwanda (probably a bit more to account for infrastructure pieces)

the $35M is probably the entire budget for OLPC for the year (and in 2007 they were not distributing many laptops, they only hit mass production in october 2007)

where is your evidence that the laptops that were sent there have been misappropriated? if they didn't want them they wouldn't have spent the effort to work with the OLPC organization to get them, train teachers, and distribute them.

OLPC doesn't just load a crate with laptops, put them on the boat/plane and then declare success. a deployment team works on-site, with the teachers and watches that the laptops are being distributed to the kids. they also continue to watch after that, if for no other reason that they are looking for success stories to post, but also to help worth through problems.

your attitude that OLPC must be evil is doing a huge disservice to the people with the OLPC project that are on the ground in the countries working to make things succeed.

countries bandwitdh and internet access

Posted Jan 10, 2009 1:50 UTC (Sat) by Alterego (guest, #55989) [Link] (2 responses)

my post was unclear sorry.
I meant that OLPC fund rising for 2007 is equivalent to 5% of the budget of Rwanda !
And if we count $200 x 500 000 unit = $1 billion, the whole olpc budget is greater than Rwanda budget. (did you read what i wrote about powerful but ignorant foreigners NGOs ?)

Of course any as-poor-as rwanda country will accept some thousands of brand new laptop. The sad side of the story is that there, universities lacks computers, and all all these laptop would have been much more usefull to the country at the university than in the hand of 6-12 yo child !

And it seems obvious to me that knwoledge transmission must begin at university, then naturally flows downward in schools, as _their_ university also produce _their_ teachers.

Your attitude that OLPC must be *perfect* is doing a huge disservice...

Do you know people on the ground in some developing countries... ? I do, i m just telling what they explained to me, frankly, without any hope that i would come with $millions.

countries bandwitdh and internet access

Posted Jan 10, 2009 2:19 UTC (Sat) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

if you think that I consider the OLPC project perfect then you have missed my very heated criticism about them. I defiantly do not consider them perfect or anything close to it.

however, I do think that they are doing good things, and doing it in ways that are mostly orthogonal to other efforts underway.

saying that there are starving children so we should not give ones that aren't starving assistance is like the kid being told to eat his peas because there are starving children in china and the kid saying 'fine, send them my peas' the conclusion doesn't follow from the problem.

as I said earlier, it's not a zero sum game.

I disagree that knowledge must begin in the university. I think that starting from the bottom will help more people, and will end up generating higher average levels of learning faster than starting at the top.

earlier in this thread the argument was made that OLPC was junk because most kids leave school around age 10 and will never see computers again in their lives. If this is the case, where do these university students come from?

even in the US the percentage of people who have gone to college is relatively low, if you wait until that point you will miss most people.

I do know people on the ground in developing countries, and while they sometimes question the efficiency of this or that project, I don't see them arguing that the projects should be scrapped, I see them trying to take advantage of the benefits of those projects and to counter the failings.

University = starting point of knowledge transmission

Posted Jan 12, 2009 6:49 UTC (Mon) by Alterego (guest, #55989) [Link]

I agree mostly, except for where we can help.

Approximately 1 billion people in Africa, half of whom are under 25 yo, that represents 500 million people.

Lets say 250 million under 12 yo.
Do you think it is possible to send 250 million xo ? I don't.
That's worth $50 billions of hardware (not to speak of other costs).
Can _we_ (foreigners) send/help enought teachers for 250 million children ? no.

So 250 million child, lets say 25 million bachelor, 2.5 million at university.
1 machine for 10 students, that's 250 000 machines in several hundreds universities. This is possible now. (the number are certainly wrong, but not that much)

And from these universities, _they_ (developping countries) will "produce" their teachers/programmers/biologists/doctors/... which in turn will create their educational content, and educate the whole continent.

We can help in universities, because math are math, and there the teaching languages are spanish/english/french/... so we can directly share our educational content and tools. This is not the case for early education, which is very cultural dependant,