The OLPC project seems adrift.

I like this [FourP] 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 Disrupt Ive. 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 technology; the second is more addressed by the culture around freedom.

May15 update:

• Micro Soft 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, that will run on Windows. Will they bundle it, if Micro Soft doesn't endorse it?

• [Ryan Paul] summarizes an essay by [Ivan Krstic] about the project. Very skeptical of Construction Ism. The core mistake of the present Sugar 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.

May20 update:

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

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