Amazon sponsors round 2 of OLPC program

I learned about the new Give One, Get One program of the One Laptop Per Child Foundation the same way most people will--from a TV commercial sponsored by Amazon.com, which is handling order fulfillment for the new program through this page on Amazon's Web site.

Like last year's program, which I wrote about here before and after I bought one myself, the deal is simple: you buy two laptops for $399, and you get one. The other goes to a deserving student somewhere in the developing world. (This is why I sometimes call it the Buy 2, Get 1 program, or B2G1.)

The XO-1 laptop from the OLPC Foundation

(Credit: OLPC Foundation)

The laptops themselves are the same XO-1 models offered last year, not based on the XO-2 prototypes I wrote about here last May. I wrote about my XO-1 in some detail when it arrived, but since I never really found any good reason to use it regularly, I never got around to writing a full review.

But there is something new: version 8.2.0 of the XO software, which works just fine on last year's hardware. I installed this on my own machine last week so I could offer some personal comments here, and the short summary is, it's a significant improvement.

The new software is more reliable, more capable, and better organized. I hope to find time to give a better review of 8.2.0 here; it has some nice features that could reasonably be adopted in more mainstream Linux distributions.

With Amazon's support--especially the TV commercial, which I've seen several times during major network broadcasts, including, perhaps oddly, football games--the new G1G1 program is likely to achieve better results than last year's effort, which resulted in the sale of about 167,000 units.

Even with the new software, the XO-1 is really just a proof of concept showing that laptops can be used in an educational context. Educating young children, however--whether in the U.S. or Rwanda--isn't about learning to use a laptop but rather about learning language, math, history, and other more fundamental facts and skills. Certainly, a laptop can be used to teach these things--but that requires a lot of software that simply hasn't been written yet.

Because the OLPC project runs mostly on volunteer labor, the best way to get that software is to get a lot of systems out there, and Amazon's sponsorship of this year's G1G1 program could do more to achieve that goal than all previous efforts put together. We'll see.

[sanenazok]

Pete: Hahaha you come so close and then miss the point. You say "Educating young children, however--whether in the U.S. or Rwanda--isn't about learning to use a laptop but rather about learning language, math, history, and other more fundamental facts and skills." Ain't that the truth...the latest gizmo isn't going to do much...just like the digital divide discussions from a few years back. Of course your conclusion that education needs would be met with the right software is wrong. Kids in developing world don't need new software, they need stable governments, food and most importantly teachers.

[Peter N. Glaskowsky]

I think computer-assisted education is a potential benefit, and I don't think anyone places a higher importance on laptops than food or freedom, but you're welcome to your opinions. I'm glad you got a laugh out of this, anyway.

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[coughlin_jason]

"but since I never really found any good reason to use it regularly, I never got around to writing a full review."

and "and the short summary is, it's a significant improvement."

and "I hope to find time to give a better review of 8.2.0 here"

Do you actually get paid for this lazy crap?

[Peter N. Glaskowsky]

Sometimes it takes a lot of work to establish that there isn't a lot to say. And I don't like rehashing work other people have done elsewhere.

On the other hand, how many 2,800-word blog posts have you seen? I wrote one a couple of weeks ago. I use enough words to say what I want to say.

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[Simputer Evangelist]

Actually, we find that the laptops have quite extraordinary impacts even without all of the software and rewritten textbooks we are working on. See, for example, http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Academic_papers#Ethiopia_Implementation_Report.2C_September_-_December_2007 and http://radian.org/notebook/astounded-in-arahuay.

We offer students a way to collaborate on homework from their often isolated homes, and we offer them the information riches of the Internet. Software for the XO laptops already includes powerful tools that can be used for many subjects in conjunction with existing textbooks. Students are doing physics experiments by combining videos made with the built-in camera, and simulations that even third-graders can program in Turtle Art or Smalltalk, or by observing sound input in either time or frequency domain in the Measure activity--effectively a digital oscilloscope. If you would like to know more of what is going on in schools with XOs, and about our educational research and development plans, you can write to me, [e-mail].

PS I am no longer the Simputer Evangelist. I founded Earth Treasury to fill in the gaps left in the OLPC and Sugar Labs missions, such as electricity and Internet for villages, and pushing ahead on writing interactive textbooks and improved curricula to make full use of the available hardware and software capabilities.