(2008-04-23) Olpc Turmoil

The OLPC project seems adrift.

I like this Four P Framing for Third World-targeted tech: Power (low-use), Performance, Portability (Mobile), and Price.

Apr24: interview with departing Walter Bender.

• I think it's pretty obvious and was obvious from the very beginning that it's a lot easier to cater to people's comfort than to be Disruptive. Nicholas had that wonderful quote in Business Week about a month ago - that OLPC is going to stop acting like a terrorist and start emulating Microsoft. If you read between the lines, the idea is to stop trying to be disruptive and to start trying to make things comfortable for decision-makers. And that's a marketing strategy, and one that I think has been adopted by many laptop manufacturers. Personally, I think that the customer is not always right, and that a role that a non-profit can play is to try to demonstrate better ways of doing things and let the market follow them.

• When we started to do this, I tried to build the solution based on three very simple principles about what makes us human. Because I knew this had to be something that worked everywhere, with every child. The first of the three things is that everyone is a teacher and a learner. Second, humans by their nature are social beings. Third, humans by their nature are expressive. I decided those would be the pillars of how we design the User Experience for the laptop. The other thing is that I was very much influenced by Seymour Papert and his constructionist theories, which can be summarized in my mind very efficiently by two aphorism. One is that you learn through doing, so if you want more learning you want more doing. The second is that love is a better master than duty. You want people to engage in things that are authentic to them, things that they love. The first is more addressed by the Sugar UI technology; the second is more addressed by the culture around freedom.

May15 update:

• Microsoft is now officially on board. The pact with Microsoft is not an exclusive agreement. The Linux version will still be available, and the group will encourage outside software developers to create a version of the project's educational software, called Sugar UI, that will run on Windows. Will they bundle it, if Microsoft doesn't endorse it?

• Ryan Paul summarizes an essay by Ivan Krstic about the project. As far as I know, there is no real study anywhere that demonstrates constructionism works at scale. There is no documented moderate-scale Constructionism learning pilot that has been convincingly successful; when Nicholas points to "decades of work by Seymour Papert, Alan Kay, and Jean Piaget", he's talking about theory... But most of us who joined OLPC believed that the educational ideology behind the project is what actually set it apart from similar endeavors in the past. Learning which is open, collaborative, shared, and exploratory - we thought that's what could make OLPC work. Because people have tried plain Lap Top learning projects in the past, and as the New York Times noted on its front page not so long ago, they crashed and burned.... The core mistake of the present Sugar UI approach is that it couples phenomenally powerful ideas about learning - that it should be shared, collaborative, peer to peer, and open - with the notion that these ideas must come presented in an entirely new graphical paradigm. We reject this coupling as untenable... While I'm unequivocally enthusiastic about Sugar UI being ported to every OS out there, I'm absolutely opposed to Windows as the single OS that OLPC offers for the XO... I'm trying to convince Walter Bender not to start a Sugar Foundation, but an Open Learning Foundation. For those who still care about learning in this whole clusterfuck of conflicting agendas, the charge should be to start that organization, since OLPC doesn't want to be it.

May20 update:

• next-gen device prototype announced. Two touchscreens, instead of physical Keyboard. This gives some cool flexibility, but really sucks for typing. (Maybe they need external Chording Keyboard heh.)