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Will the OLPC interface ruin computing for millions of kids?
If you've been following the development of the One Laptop Per Child project, you know that a lot of unconventional thinking has gone into it. The goal is to help bridge the digital divide by producing low-cost, durable computers and selling them in large quantities (the minimum order is 1 million) to governments in developing nations. The hope is that the next generation of school children in those countries will grow up knowing how to use computers and having the same skill sets as children in wealthier nations.
Enough background. The laptops run on Linux, and the "Sugar" user interface is designed to be easy to use. The thing is, it's rather unlike the interface of any Windows, Mac, or Linux machine that you've ever seen. The entire operating system has been retooled, probably to work well on a small screen, and to work well for people who may never have used a computer before. Take a look:
It's pretty cool looking, until you start to wonder whether it wouldn't have made more sense to include a Gnome or KDE desktop. As Harry Brignnull at 90 Percent of Everything points out, kids who learn how to type and research and program on these computers will be getting used to unlike anything they're likely to encounter on any other computer system.
Of course, it's also possible that if enough countries distribute these laptops to children, the Sugar UI could one day become the dominant user interface.
Comments
43
Subscribe to commentsMario CalderónJan 2nd 2007 12:38PM
As much as I notice by the video, Sugar and Linux-downstripped-distro put into this laptop make it work more or less like a Palm... And like such gadget, you can take for sure that there'll be a torrent of little and big innovations and additional capabilities (applications) once the millions of computers are "in the field"... And if the're let to fall in hands of those who _really_ need a rugged, "all terrain" computer (rural techers and phisicians, ingeniers, etc), you'll see it soon driving the OSS and IT Third World. Hey! My son is 7 years old and oly with his intuition can cope perfectly with Windows, Macintosh, Kde and... PalmOS 3 to 5: the address-bar and windo-less OS (like Sugar)... If I can't buy a little green laptop for myself and other for my kids, at least I want Sugar in my Palm!
Vintage ComputerJan 17th 2007 7:01PM
Pollyanah.
Give medicines.
For what.
To live in poverty longer with greater populations yet to feed and starve.
Technological tools used within a framework of their society ( not ours imposed on them) can help these societies develop out of their stagnation and doldrums.
Otherwise the best and brightest of these communities are "exported " to the primary industrialized world leading to more of the same.
Innovate rather than provide bandaid solutions to keep them in the past.
convergerJan 23rd 2007 5:36AM
A couple of stories from the dinosaur age...
Twenty years ago, I got my first developer job at WICAT, a foundation-funded company formed to do precisely what OLPC is trying to do. Yeah, the original target machine had one ten-thousandth the memory and data storage, and a target price point roughly five times higher, but it was *exactly* the same idea. The big difference, and one of the main reasons I am skeptical of OLPC's prospects, is that WICAT spent a lot of time and resources successfully developing some excellent, visually oriented small-footprint (it all had to fit in 48k of memory, after all) software. OLPC is punting on educational content, Google isn't talking about it, and the rhetoric around content that I have seen thus far is, frankly, lame. This has to change. Hopefully, as we get closer to rollout, it will.
WICAT overreached in the mid-1980's. The technology just wasn't there yet to build the target machine. But in retrospect, I think that even if it had existed, dropping $500 handhelds out of airplanes wouldn't have had the impact we wanted, because technology in isolation has never, ever, done much to fundamentally change things. There needs to be a minimal level of local capacity for setting up and maintaining the stuff. The truly cool low-tech that is sweeping the globe, things like cell phones, are what you want to emulate with OLPC. They have to not only be cheap, they have to be both durable and bonehead simple to implement and fix. But even more important, they have to be useful even if things don't work like you think they will. Any village can go rig a cell tower out of spare parts that are lying around, so villages everywhere go do that. Pervasive high-speed connectivity takes a lot more infrastructure - we don't even have it in most locations in the US, just the urban cores. Relying on internet connectivity for consistent content delivery will not work anytime in the next decade or more for much of the planet.
Fortunately, there's a robust alternative - use local peer-to-peer connectivity, which always works, and send along content on flash drives. A 2GB flash drive wholesales for about $10 right now, and a single flash drive on a single OLPC machine can deliver content for the entire PTP network. If reliable internet connectivity is there, great. If not, you can still do cool stuff. Again though, I'm not seeing a lot of discussion along these lines.
Finally, the end of the WICAT story is also relevant to the current situation. When WICAT realized they were in over their heads trying to deliver a reliable low-cost handheld with mid-1980's technology (again, the software worked fine, just not the hardware), they decided to scale back and target the hot machine that was sweeping the globe, the Apple II. Then, they abruptly decided that the Apple II was doomed, and rejiggered everything for the Next Big Thing, the...PC Junior. Then they ran out of money. IBM bought all of the educational software, and geared up to deliver a RISC education box that they could sell for about a quarter of what they were selling their business-oriented micros for, and give away the WICAT education content as part of the package. Then, just before the education box went to manuacturing, the business division of IBM got wind of the education initiative, quickly realized that it would cannibalize the business division, and killed the whole project. It's taken twenty years for the idea to resurface, albiet with much cheaper and more elegant technology.