olpc become a Trojan in education.
olpc become a Trojan in education.
Posted Jan 10, 2009 17:31 UTC (Sat) by Alterego (guest, #55989)In reply to: Countries obligations to MS ? by dlang
Parent article: Changes at OLPC
>> you disagree with the target of the machines.
>> feel free to disagree, but recognize that others thing that there is far more value in teaching all the kids a bit rather then concentrating on the universities where you only get the ones who have already gotten out of the worst areas (or they wouldn't be in the universities)
Education for all, yes. Computer for all no.
You totally ignore socio-economy reality in Africa.
Roughly half the people are under 25 yo. 50% are analphabet.
A rather well doing country, Senegal, spend ~40% of its budget for Education.
They are concerned with computers for children education (they said that "IT-ignorant people are the 3rd millinenium analphabet"), but their efficient solution, is to have IT center in "home of the very smalls" (approximate translation for the very young children first kind of school), maybe one desktop for 30-100 children, not one laptop for each, which would be totally dumb, inefficient and expensive.
Don't forget the setup, running and maintenance costs: you must also count the energy price, the time (which is money) to teach to the teachers, and the huge logistical problem to transport 1 million of useless olpc when "only" 30 000 standard desktop would have done the trick.
>> non-standard hardware
>> what you don't recognize is that all laptops are non-standard, as are most of the brand-name desktops and servers. in all these cases you need parts from the manufacturer to fix the machine (or another machine for pieces)
Its very easy to remove one broken component from a Dell and replace it by a Toshiba one, and hopefuly they already know how to do it, and they take care of their machines and still have running pentium with 32 MB and 40 MB HD and a wired intranet if any.
The huge disadvantage of having only one non-standard model, is that statisticaly one piece will break before others and will determine the lifetime, and you will not be able to fix it. With various ordinary components, this is very unlikely to happen, the global lifetime (or MTBF) will be much better.
>> unknown software
>> while I am not a fan of Sugar (far from it, look at my posts)
ok
>> Sugar is open is linux under the covers and nowdays you can run several other linux distros on the machines (and the ease and ability to run the other distros is improving rapidly)
How many Sugar teacher do we have, to teach enough developers how to do their own suitable application ?
Oh good idea, to make a fork of olpc software and run a custom olpc with beta buggy debian-experimental or fedora-11 half baked olpc support !!!
>> it's also defiantly true that much of the money and time that went to OLPC would not have gone to other charities
I agree.
>> closed system now
Reread olpc-ms partnership http://wiki.laptop.org/images/4/4d/XP-on-XO.doc , they speak of "affordable content" not "free-content", and "the benefits of technology", not "benefits of education".
And there are very true concerns with the knowledge they aquire:
page 2: "Windows support on the XO device means [...] They will also develop marketable technology skills, which can lead to jobs"
What ? Sugar won't create jobs opportunities ? Standard Linux would have done the trick too, but MS skillful propaganda gots in, and the misguided olpc is becoming a MS plateform.
OLPC seems to have done some quite good job until now.
I still see OLPC as being wrong, misguided and the best MS trojan for Intellectual Property, DRM and non free content.
My hope is that XO2 + XP will be too expensive compared with other standard linux solutions, and that the knowledge and community acquired with XO1 will go back toward standard linux way.