OLPC - More Hardware

New hardware, but same old plan.

This is the last time I will write about the OLPC for a while. I have to stop.

Whither OLPC

I haven't been keeping up with the little green laptop for a bit, with the flood of inexpensive (but not as cheap as the OLPC) laptops hitting the market. Machines like the eePC from Asus are not as clever in their design as the OLPC, but I think they may be much more desirable in the end, due to amenities such as faster processors and ram, and a user interface that are more like things people are used to.

This announcment that Walter Bender, one of the mainstays in the OLPC project has left -- because of the OLPC's move to Windows XP........exactly what many potential customers for the OLPC have been asking for.

I have picked on the OLPC project before. I think it is wrong-headed to get into the laptop business to begin with. True to form, the price point for entry level laptops is dropping just as happened with other consumer electronics. It is not driven by educational need but by the market, but education can directly benefit.

Maybe they can be focused on making their OS work on as many different devices as is possible. The world needs a nice, lightweight OS that has modern features, but can run on 5 - 10 year old hardware. I have run across old PII 233 mhz laptops for less than $50.00. That would be a great candidate for the OLPC OS, and would keep one more laptop out of a landfill.

As far as the grand theory of constructivist thinking driving OLPC -- perhaps the OS is the wrong place to start. Conceptually, having an OS that the end user can modify is interesting, but in the k-12 market, with strained resources and little time for training, it makes more sense to leverage what people already know, and let the technology act as a tool to expand on that knowledge. It is ultimately a myopic vision of the technorati to focus on open source philosophy at the expense of what the user needs. And, as past postings will bear me out, I fully support open source. But I care less about the underpinnings than the experience and opportunities that the technology affords me.

Why not spend time developing a simple programming environment that can run on top of any OS, and lets students create their own applications (even better, make it an interpretive language like Ruby, where the apps are web apps, and can run anywhere). Use OLPC's mesh networking, throw some multidisciplinary curriculum behind it (programming/design visual + motion/interaction/literacy/writing/math/science/etc) and some well designed curriculum and learning tools (good books, digital learning objects, good examples to copy and modify) that teachers can use to make use of this stuff. This is much less glamorous than building a cool green laptop, but will have much wider and longer impact.

Okay, it will be interesting to see where the OLPC project will be a year from now. I wish the project well. I like the discussion it has generated. I still think there is a lot of potential, but maybe not making laptops. Let others do that. Unlike the OLPC laptops, these new, small, inexpensive laptops will be devices that you and I will want to own and use daily, but the good news is that a 12 year old in kenya will want one too, for pretty much the same reasons.

Archive.org takes a big step into academia

I am constantly surprised by what is available at archive.org. For myself, it's a fantastic junk-bin of media, with a fair amount of it in the public domain. I have used many bits and pieces of content from archive.org in my own projects.

This announcement could be something important for academia. Zotero and archive.org have announced an alliance to allow academic papers, research, media to be searchable in ways useful for other's research. This includes, of course, the idea of metatagging etc, but also includes the ability to convert scanned documents into text via server-based OCR. Someone submits scanned documents, the server ingests them, and gives back searchable text. I am not certain as to accuracy of the conversions -- it may be low for damaged documents -- but I would guess there is a way to correct mistakes after the conversion. It is certainly better than nothing.

The plan has quite a scope. I just looked at Zotero, and it is quite nice. I have been using delicious bookmarks to handle tagging web content for research, but it appears to me that Zotero may be much better. I use the delicious bookmarks manager extension for Firefox, and Zotero is an extension as well. How convenient! I am installing it right now -- in fact, have to quit my browser to load it. That is enough for now then.

Second Life is Hype

Although I have a Second Life account, I rarely use it (I am Unh Oh in Second Life). To be honest, I have been quite underwhelmed with education's embrace of Second Life. Most of it consists of "virtual classrooms", unfinished experiments, or things that people won't really use on a regular basis, because Second Life as a whole can be sluggish, it requires specific thought to install and run (I have to go to my computer, open second life, log in, wait) -- it doesn't sound like a hassle, but given other lower-threshold tools at my disposal for communicating -- it is simply too much of a time drain.

I can (and will) write quite a bit about Second Life in the next couple of months, for it illustrates well some of the problems we face when trying to fit analog space into digital space. Assumptions about hierarchy. Assumptions about economy.

This MarketPlace story illustrates one of these critical points -- that it appears that companies are beginning to pull out of Second Life, after the gold rush. As one person succinctly puts it:

"Second Life is a world in which you can fly just as easily as you can walk. Maybe the idea of building a store doesn't make much sense."

I will extend that argument to educational institutions. Assumptions about hierarchies, how economies can work, gender roles, cultural assumptions, power structure. Wow. It is like a mirror at times that illustrates the flaws in these assumptions. It is a magnifying glass that illustrates some fundamental, underlying, bad assumptions about the role of technology in education.

I think (but have no evidence) that Second Life's population numbers are grossly inflated. I believe that not there are not that many people who use it regularly, compared to much broader services -- including myspace, youtube and facebook. It may not seem fair to compare these -- they are different things indeed -- but the cost of time -- what can I do in the next 3o minutes - I can wander around Second Life, or a I can create a blog post, update my Facebook account, check my email. It is an easy decision. One is a big blob, takes a while to load, and can take time to do stuff -- the other things -- specific, task driven, efficient.

All of this illustrates some bigger lessons about digital learning. I believe that we are seeing in Second Life can definitely be applied to LMS systems (WebCT/Blackboard, Moodle, etc). But more on this later.

1 minute on OLPC

Read this WSJ analysis on the One Laptop Per Child initiative
Read this Hardware comparison of the OLPC and the Asus Eee PC

A lot of smart people worked on the OLPC, but is it enough? Does it have a life span? Is it too clever?

Getting in the hardware business is always tempting -- building a ecosystem where you can control the platform. Make something that is in a box, you can hold in your hands. Wouldn't it make more sense to just open source the whole damn thing? Let anybody make them?

I think it is instructive to consider the role of conventional technology -- and how the cost of the mundane drops. $19.99 DVD players, for instance. Consider the complexity of a mechanism that uses a laser to decode bits of data on a disk, convert it back into video and audio, and throw in a modest amount of interactivity.

This is a model that really blows things apart. The hardware becomes secondary to the content. This is what has to happen with OLPC. The hardware has to cease to matter. The operating system and it's core functionality should run on almost anything that people have lying around, or are willing to make is the quantities of a $19.99 DVD player.

I don't really agree completely with the WSJ because of this. I do think OLPC will not be the specific device that fuels a revolution, but it will fuel something -- the next EEE PC will probably cost half of what it costs now - using conventional, off the shelf technology. It will run whatever OS someone wants. Including OLPC. That is a good thing.

The goal should not be to build little green laptops, but to make computing like that $19.99 DVD player.

--hal

The Microsoft Box

This posting in Engadget gave me a moment of pause. The Microsoft UMPC platform has only been around for a couple of years, but it seems that it never really caught on, and while companies are continuing to come out with new versions, that this device has dropped to over half of what one cost new in less than a year tells me that they simply aren't selling. It is a problematic device to be sure, something that Microsoft has concocted that is still in search of a market.

I think this is another example of imagined functionality. What I mean by this is that we imagine times where technology would be useful, but in reality that extra functionality is never really utilized. 4x4 SUV's in Florida, for instance -- there are only a small percentage of people that need that functionality in a state where it never snows. This device of course runs Windows apps, but none of these applications are optimized for a tablet experience. They use a 30 year old desktop metaphor that severly compromises user experience. We are stuck with an on-screen keyboard that cripples our ability to type as easily as a laptop. The small screen necessitates squinting at times, because the software that will run on these devices is designed for larger screens. Of course, we can hook it to a monitor or projector to get a bigger display, but with $400.00 solid state laptops, what is the advantage of this device? We can imagine all the ways we *could* use this device, but I doubt anyone here actually has put down cold, hard cash on one. That is because at the end of the day it doesn't really replace things we already have or expand opportunities. I have used my iPhone to check pricing and reviews on an item while shopping at Target. I can't see myself doing the same with this gizmo.

Microsoft is stuck in a box, and they simply can't get out. They take a form factor that has never caught on widely (the tabletPC), try to shrink it with some vision that people will take these everywhere, but I have never seen anybody with one. That is because given the cost of this device, and a slightly more expensive laptop, it is a slam dunk. One is a series of compromises with too big a form factor to slip in a shirt pocket (which means I will take it with me everywhere). The laptop is bigger, but is much more functional. There is a formula for functionality versus size, and Microsoft simply can't find it. Witness the failure of the Zune -- again, a bunch of technology pieces that don't add up to a coherent whole.

Luptonista

I went to a great presentation last night by Ellen Lupton. She is a academic -- typographer/ designer -- and half of her presentation was on abuse of typography -- the other half was on diy -- particularly crafts and pet peeves. She brought many "out of real life" examples about typography and drilled home a few critical points -- what bad things happen when we smash fonts (but sometimes it does look cool), spacing and more.

From my notebook:

diD YoU KNow that there is a thing called "Church of Craft"?
http://www.churchofcraft.org/

some more random notes

www.design-your-life.org
www.thinkingwithtype.com

Books
diy
diy kids

and others -- do an amazon search on ellen lupton.

She was awesome, and gave me ideas for something I am working on for next year's DE conference and maybe something a little more.