July 23rd, 2008 Benjamin Horst
A 2008 International Design Excellence Award was given to the OLPC XO laptop in honor of its hardware, software interface, and overall project design.
Ryan Eder, on behalf of the contest, explains: “Brilliant design for an even better cause. From the physical design to the sociological impact, every element of this laptop is exemplary of true innovation. This product is immensely practical and beneficial to all users across the globe. Design at its best!”
I imagine that as it receives more exposure and real-world use, OLPC will continue to collect accolades like today’s IDEA award.
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June 23rd, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Erwin Tenhumberg is (sadly) leaving Sun and this may be his last blog post there. It looks like he’s following a good opportunity at another company, and he hopes to continue blogging about open source in some form.
Today, he points out a number of ODF and OpenOffice.org successes, such as a download average in 2008 of 1.2 million copies of OOo per week (with recent weeks averaging closer to 2 million). He also writes:
“In addition, Asus, Acer and HP are now shipping laptops with OpenOffice.org pre-installed, and more and more organizations deploy OpenOffice.org in a large scale. Finally, according to Google file type searches like this one and this one, ODF is still clearly the market leading editable XML document file format. Thus, I’m sure ODF and OpenOffice.org have a bright future!”
All this he reports in the context of an “ODF Workshop” Microsoft will hold at its headquarters in the near future. Skepticism is healthy with Microsoft, but if they implement ODF honestly and completely (with none of their “embrace, extend, extinguish” behavior), this really is the victory bell for the ODF format.
Posted in GNU/Linux, ODF, OLPC, Open Source, OpenOffice.org, Uncategorized | No Comments »
June 16th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
The OLPC project has an active community right here in New York City. This past weekend they held a “Grassroots Jam” event including a code sprint to develop a new server for the platform:
“According to LXNY secretary Jay Sulzberger, the server will provide “automatic backups, end-to-end encryption and authentication of email, extra processing power for individual and group tasks, convenient Bitfrosting (working with the default OLPC security platform), and [working] with programs which today do not yet run on the XO-1 [laptop].”
See more information on the Grassroots Jam at the OLPC wiki site.
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May 30th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
The BBC reports “Colombia Signs Up for XO Laptop.”
Initially, 65,000 children in the Caldas region will receive XO laptops, while the project will be expanded to other regions later.
BBC writes, “In a statement announcing the deal, OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte said the organisation was starting to get “good traction” from countries keen to sign up and buy the distinctive green and white XO laptops in large numbers.
“Currently each machine costs $188 and OLPC has sold about 600,000 of them.”
Posted in Free Culture, OLPC, Open Source | 1 Comment »
May 16th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Benjamin Mako Hill writes a post called “Laptop Liberation” on the importance of Free Software as the platform for the OLPC project.
Mako writes, “I gave a talk at Penguicon called Laptop Liberation where I talked about why I thought that OLPC’s use of a free software operating system and embrace of free software principles was essential for the initiative’s success and its own goals of education reform and empowerment. I’ve been saying similar things for some time.”
He points out the similarities between the OLPC’s educational philosophy of Constructionism and the way the Free Software world itself functions–they’re largely identical:
“Constructionism and free software, implemented and taught in a classroom, offer a profound potential for exploration, creation, and learning. If you don’t like something, change it. If something doesn’t work right, fix it. Free software and constructionism put learners in charge of their educational environment in the most explicit and important way possible. They create a culture of empowerment. Creation, collaboration, and critical engagement becomes the norm.”
Keeping control over one’s technology means keeping control over one’s destiny. This is the promise of open source/free software, and of the OLPC project.
“We can help foster a world where technology is under the control of its users, and where learning is under the terms of its students — a world where every laptop owner has freedom through control over the technology they use to communicate, collaborate, create, and learn.”
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May 13th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
While OLPC’s XO laptops have been appearing around the world, it wasn’t a part of the original plan for them to be used in developed countries. However, the XO’s child-centric design and constructivist learning paradigm are certainly well-suited to students here, as anywhere.
It’s exciting to see the OLPC XO being adopted in Birmingham, Alabama schools.
“The Birmingham City Council in March approved spending almost $3.5 million to buy 15,000 laptops for schoolchildren and to upgrade technology at city schools. The computer program is being piloted at Glen Iris [Elementary School], which has almost 800 students but received about 1,000 laptops, Principal Mike Wilson said.”
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April 8th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Geek.com has a great article titled “Hacking the XO Laptop.” They cover both hardware and software hacks, building and using cool new external devices, installing new software applications and making use of online services like XOChat.org that have been set up by others. Full of pictures, screenshots and detailed instructions, this is a great, informative post.
Author Joel Evans writes, “I took advantage of the G1G1 program and have had one for a while now and recently had a “geek” session with Brian Jepson of HackZine and O’Reilly. Brian is a seasoned geek and a quality Linux hacker, so we had a good time playing around with the XO. I should also mention that we generated some interest in our local Panera as we completely took over an area by a fireplace and had some strange gadgetry flying high.”
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April 3rd, 2008 Benjamin Horst
MIT’s Technology Review discusses the largest project implementation to date: Peru rolls out 400,000 OLPC XOs to 6,000 schools.
“Success of OLPC now depends largely on frontline teachers and, of course, parents and kids. Peru’s effort, if successful, would be a model for other nations. In the training now under way, teachers must become versed not only in how to operate and maintain the laptops, but also in how to do their jobs within a newly laptop-centric educational model. The laptops will contain some 115 books, including textbooks, novels, and poetry, as well as art and music programs, cameras, and other goodies.”
The majority of sites will not have internet access, so teachers will update content the old-fashioned way.
“In these villages, any updated content will be delivered to the machines by what OLPC president Walter Bender calls “sneaker-net.” Each month, when the teachers visit regional education offices to pick up their paychecks, they will have the ability to tap Internet connections to load new content onto thumb drives and bring them back to their classrooms.”
What an exciting implementation this will be!
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February 14th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
The Sunday Times Online (of Sri Lanka) announces Sri Lanka will join the OLPC project and distribute 2 million XOs to its school children.
To my knowledge, this is the biggest roll-out to date. Further, it is being organized as a collaboration between the Sri Lankan government, world institutions, and private entities. From the article:
“This is being launched by One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), a US based organisation in collaboration with the Education Department and several local and foreign financial, technological and academic institutions… Director OLPC Europe, Middle East and Asia Matt Keller, in an interview with The Sunday Times FT, said the World Bank has stepped in to fund a pilot project to introduce laptops as an educational tool in nine provinces in the island.”
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February 8th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
There are at least two revolutionary new portable computers on the market, each of which has the potential to sell several million units, and because each ships with Linux and an open source software stack, together they may change the personal computing landscape more than we have seen in decades.
Groklaw provides a photo gallery comparing the XO and Asus Eee (and some other ordinary computers to give scale).
“One of the happy buyers of a One Laptop Per Child XO laptop is Groklaw member Jerry van Baren. He asked me if it would be useful to show a comparison between the screen sizes and keyboards of the XO and the Asus Eee PC. I thought that was a grand idea.”
The new form factor they share is ultra-portability, and along with it, their success can be attributed to their extremely affordable pricing (each machine is cheaper than Windows or Microsoft Office by itself). As predicted by the theory of The Innovator’s Dilemma, a traditional market is once again being upset by cheaper competition from below. These machines, and others that will follow, are providing a strong beachhead for open source on the normal end user’s personal computer. This trend is only going to accelerate from here.
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