Photo: Walter shows me improvements to the Record activity at the Lima coastline, Peru.
I’ve been displeased with the quality of community discourse surrounding the recent OLPC announcement of moving to Windows as the OS platform. I decided to withhold comment at the time, and was swayed only by the half-dozen volunteers mailing me personally to ask whether all their work had been in vain. It hadn’t. And then I left to travel for a few days.
I just caught up with my mail and RSS feeds, and what I’ve read has moved me from displeased to angry. So I’m going to comment after all, and it’ll be my last OLPC-related essay for the foreseeable future. But first, some background.
The beginning
Throughout his life, Nicholas Negroponte worked with education and technology luminaries like Alan Kay and Seymour Papert. In the early 80s, Nicholas and Seymour ran a pilot program backed by the French government that placed Apple ][ machines in a suburban computing center in Dakar, Senegal. The project was a spectacular flop due to mismanagement and personality conflicts. In '83, barely a year after the experiment started, MIT's Technology Review magazine published its damning epitaph:
Naturally, it failed. Nothing is that independent, especially an organization backed by a socialist government and staffed by highly individualistic industry visionaries from around the world. Besides, altruism has a credibility problem in an industry that thrives on intense commercial competition.
By the end of the Center's first year, Papert had quit, so had American experts Nicholas Negroponte and Bob Lawler. It had become a battlefield, scarred by clashes of management style, personality, and political conviction. It never really recovered. The new French government has done the Center a favor in closing it down.
But both Nicholas and Seymour emerged from the ashes of the Dakar pilot with their faith in the premise of children learning naturally with computers intact. Armed with the lessons from the Senegal failure, it was perhaps only a matter of time before they tried again.
Indeed, Seymour tried again only a couple of years later: the Media Lab was founded in 1985 and immediately started supporting Project Headlight, an attempt to infuse constructionist learning into the complete curriculum of the Hennigan school, a public elementary school in Boston consisting mostly of minority students.
Fast forward almost two decades, to around 2000. Former Newsweek foreign correspondent turned philanthropist, Bernie "one-man United Nations" Krisher convinced Nicholas and his wife Elaine to join Bernie's program of building schools in Cambodia. Nicholas bought used Panasonic Toughbooks for one school, and his son Dimitri taught there for a time.
"Surely," the thinking went, "there has to be a way to scale this." And the rest of the story is familiar: Nicholas wooed Mary Lou Jepsen while she was interviewing for a faculty position at the Lab, and told her about his crazy idea for an organization called One Laptop per Child. She came on board as CTO. Towards the end of 2005, the organization left stealth mode with a bang: Nicholas announced it with Kofi Annan, Nobel Peace Prize winner and then-Secretary-General of the United Nations, at a global summit in Tunis.
The part that bears repeating is that Nicholas' constructionism-based computer learning project in Senegal was a complete disaster: modulo commentary on the personalities and egos involved, it demonstrated nothing about anything. And Krisher's Cambodia project, the one evidently successful enough to motivate Nicholas to actually start OLPC, used off-the-shelf laptops running Windows without any constructivist customizations of the OS whatsoever. (They did have some constructionist tools installed as regular applications.)
What we know
The truth is, when it comes to large-scale one-to-one computing programs, we're completely in the dark about what actually works, because hey, no one has done a large-scale one-to-one computing program before. Mako Hill writes:
We know that laptop recipients will benefit from being able to fix, improve, and translate the software on their laptops into their own languages and contexts. ... 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. It is the reason that OLPC's embrace of constructionist philosophy is so deeply important to its mission and the reason that its mission needs to continue to be executed with free and open source software. It is why OLPC needs to be uncompromising about software freedom.
This kind of bright-eyed idealism is appealing, but alas, just not backed by fact. No, we don't know that laptop recipients will benefit from fixing software on their laptops. Indeed, I bet they'd largely prefer the damn software works and doesn't need fixing. While we think and even hope that constructionist principles, as embodied in the free software culture, are helpful to education, presenting the hopes as rooted in fact is simply deceitful.
As far as I know, there is no real study anywhere that demonstrates constructionism works at scale. There is no documented moderate-scale constructionist 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. He likes to mention Dakar, but doesn't like to mention how that pilot ended — or that no real facts about the validity of the approach came out of it. And there sure as hell doesn't exist a peer-reviewed study (or any other kind, to my knowledge) showing free software does any better than proprietary software when it comes to aiding learning, or that children prefer the openness, or that they care about software freedom one bit.
Keeping that in mind, Richard Stallman's missive on the subject just riled me up:
Proprietary software keeps users divided and helpless. Its functioning is secret, so it is incompatible with the spirit of learning. Teaching children to use a proprietary (non-free) system such as Windows does not make the world a better place, because it puts them under the power of the system's developer — perhaps permanently. You might as well introduce the children to an addictive drug.
Oh, for fuck's sake. You really just employed a simile comparing a proprietary OS to addictive drugs? You know, ones causing actual bodily harm and possibly death? Really, Stallman? Really?
If proprietary software is half as good as free software at aiding children's learning, you're damn right it makes the world a better place to get the software out to children. Hell, if it doesn't actively inhibit learning, it makes the world a better place. The problem is that Stallman doesn't appear to actually give an acrobatic shit about learning, and sees OLPC as a vehicle for furthering his political agenda. It's shameful, the lot of it.
While we're on the subject
One of the favorite arguments of the free software and open source community for the obvious superiority of such software over proprietary alternatives is the user's supposed ability to take control and modify inadequate software to suit their wishes. Expectedly, the argument has been often repeated in relation to OLPC.
I can't possibly be the only one seeing that the emperor has no clothes.
I started using Linux in '95, before most of today's Internet-using general public knew there existed an OS outside of Windows. It took a week to configure X to work with my graphics card, and I learned serious programming because I later needed to add support for a SCSI hard drive that wasn't recognized properly. (Not knowing that C and kernel hacking are supposed to be "hard", I kept at it for three months until I learned enough to write a patch that works.) I've been primarily a UNIX user since then, alternating between Debian, FreeBSD and later Ubuntu, and recently co-writing a best-selling Linux book.
About eight months ago, when I caught myself fighting yet another battle with suspend/resume on my Linux-running laptop, I got so furious that I went to the nearest Apple store and bought a MacBook. After 12 years of almost exclusive use of free software, I switched to Mac OS X. And you know, shitty power management and many other hassles aren't Linux's fault. The fault lies with needlessly secretive vendors not releasing documentation that would make it possible for Linux to play well with their hardware. But until the day comes when hardware vendors and free software developers find themselves holding hands and spontaneously bursting into one giant orgiastic Kumbaya, that's the world we live in. So in the meantime, I switched to OS X and find it to be an overwhelmingly more enjoyable computing experience. I still have my free software UNIX shell, my free software programming language, my free software ports system, my free software editor, and I run a bunch of free software Linux virtual machines. The vast, near-total majority of computer users aren't programmers. Of the programmers, a vast, near-total majority don't dare in the Land o' Kernel tread. As one of the people who actually can hack my kernel to suit, I find that I don't miss the ability in the least. There, I said it. Hang me for treason.
My theory is that technical people, especially when younger, get a particular thrill out of dicking around with their software. Much like case modders, these folks see it as a badge of honor that they spent countless hours compiling and configuring their software to oblivion. Hey, I was there too. And the older I get, the more I want things to work out of the box. Ubuntu is getting better at delivering that experience for novice users. Serious power users seem to find that OS X is unrivaled at it.
I used to think that there was something wrong with me for thinking this. Then I started looking at the mail headers on mailing lists where I hang out, curious about what other folks I respect were using. It looks like most of the luminaries in the security community, one of the most hardcore technical communities on the planet, use OS X.
And lest you think this is some kind of Apple-paid rant, I'll mention Mitch Bradley. Have you read the story of Mel, the "real" programmer? Mitch is that guy, in 2008. Firmware superhacker, author of the IEEE Open Firmware standard, wrote the firmware that Sun shipped on its machines for a good couple of decades, and in general one of the few people I've ever had the pleasure of working with whose technical competence so inordinately exceeds mine that I feel I wouldn't even know how to start catching up. Mitch's primary laptop runs Windows.
Sleight of hand
But really, I digress. The point is that OLPC was supposed to be about learning, not free software. And the most upsetting part of the Windows announcement is not that it exposed the actual agendas of a number of project participants which had nothing to do with learning, but that Nicholas' misdirection and sleight of hand were allowed to stand.
The whole "we're investing into Sugar, it'll just run on Windows" gambit is sheer nonsense. Nicholas knows quite well that Sugar won't magically become better simply by virtue of running on Windows rather than Linux. In reality, Nicholas wants to ship plain XP desktops. He's told me so. That he might possibly fund a Sugar effort to the side and pay lip service to the notion of its "availability" as an option to purchasing countries is at best a tepid effort to avert a PR disaster.
In fact, I quit when Nicholas told me — and not just me — that learning was never part of the mission. The mission was, in his mind, always getting as many laptops as possible out there; to say anything about learning would be presumptuous, and so he doesn't want OLPC to have a software team, a hardware team, or a deployment team going forward.
Yeah, I'm not sure what that leaves either.
There are three key problems in one-to-one computer programs: choosing a suitable device, getting it to children, and using it to create sustainable learning and teaching experiences. They're listed in order of exponentially increasing difficulty.
The industry didn't want to tackle the first one because there was little profit in it. OLPC successfully made them do it in the most effective way possible: by threatening to steal their lunch. But industry laptop manufacturers still don't want to tackle deployment, because it's really, really fucking hard, isn't within a 100-mile radius of their core competency, and generally has a commercial ROI that makes baby Cthulhu cry.
Peru's first deployment module consisted of 40 thousand laptops, to be deployed in about 570 schools across jungles, mountains, plains, and with total variance in electrical availability and uniformly no existing network infrastructure. A number of the target schools are in places requiring multiple modes of transportation to reach, and that are so remote that they're not even serviced by the postal service. Laptop delivery was going to be performed by untrusted vendors who are in a position to steal the machines en masse. There is no easy way to collect manifests of what actually got delivered, where, and to whom. It's not clear how to establish a procedure for dealing with malfunctioning units, or those dead on arrival. Compared to dealing with this, the technical work I do is vacation.
Other than the incredible Carla Gomez-Monroy who worked on setting up the pilots, there was no one hired to work on deployment while I was at OLPC, with Uruguay's and Peru's combined 360,000 laptop rollout in progress. I was parachuted in as the sole OLPC person to deal with Uruguay, and sent to Peru at the last minute. And I'm really good at thinking on my feet, but what the shit do I know about deployment? Right around that time, Walter was demoted and theoretically made the "director of deployment," a position where he directed his expansive team of — himself. Then he left, and get this: now the company has half a million laptops in the wild, with no one even pretending to be officially in charge of deployment. "I quit," Walter told me on the phone after leaving, "because I can't continue to work on a lie."
It's not like OLPC was caught unawares, or somehow forgot that this was going to be an issue. I wrote in an internal memo in December:
We have multiple concurrent rollouts of differing scale in progress — Uruguay with eight thousand machines, G1G1 with potentially a quarter million — and with at least Peru and Mongolia on the horizon within a month from now. We have no real support infrastructure for these rollouts, our development process is not allocating any time for dealing with critical deployment issues that (will inevitably) come up, and we have no process for managing the crises that will ensue. I wish I could say this is the bulk of our problems, but I mention these first simply because I predict it's these deployments that will impose the heaviest burden on this organization in the coming months — a burden we're presently entirely unprepared to handle.
...
We still have not a single employee focusing on deployment, helping to plan it, working with our target countries to learn what works and what doesn't. Evidently our "deployment plan" is to send whichever hotshot superhacker we have available to each country such that he may fix any problems that arise on the spot. If that is not in fact our plan, then we have no plan at all.
That OLPC was never serious about solving deployment, and that it seems to no longer be interested in even trying, is criminal. Left uncorrected, it will turn the project into a historical information technology fuckup unparalleled in scale.
As for the last key problem, transforming laptops into learning is a non-trivial leap of logic, and one that remains inadequately explained. No, we don't know that it'll work, especially not without teachers. And that's okay — the way to find out whether it works might well be by trying. Sometimes you have to run before you can walk, yeah? 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 laptop learning projects in the past, and as the New York Times noted on its front page not so long ago, they crashed and burned.
Nicholas' new OLPC is dropping those pesky education goals from the mission and turning itself into a 50-person nonprofit laptop manufacturer, competing with Lenovo, Dell, Apple, Asus, HP and Intel on their home turf, and by using the one strategy we know doesn't work. But hey, I guess they'll sell more laptops that way.
Broken windows theory
I've tried to establish already that there's no evidence that free software provides a superior learning experience when compared to a proprietary operating system. This point bears some elaboration. Bernie Innocenti, until recently the CTO for the fledgling OLPC Europe, a few days ago wrote:
I myself wouldn't oppose a Windows port of Sugar. I would never waste my time on it, or encourage anyone to waste their time on it, but it's free software and thus anyone is free to port it to anything they wish.
Stallman similarly called a Windows port of Sugar "not a good thing to do". Here's the thing: such a port is only a waste of time if free software is not the means here, but an end. At Nicholas' solicitation, I wrote an internal memo on software strategy in early March. It was co-signed by Marco Pesenti Gritti, the inimitable Sugar team lead. I am not at liberty to reproduce the entire document, but I will quote the most relevant section with minimal redactions:
... We [argue strongly that we should] decouple the Sugar UI from the Sugar technologies we’ve developed such as sharing, collaboration, the presence service, the data store, and so forth. We may then make those services run well in a regular Linux desktop environment and redefine the Sugar activity concept to simply be any Linux desktop application capable of using the Sugar services. The Sugar UI itself could, optionally and at a later date, be provided as a graphical launcher, perhaps developed by the community.
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.
Choosing to reinvent the desktop UI paradigm means we are spending our extremely overconstrained resources fighting graphical interfaces, not developing better tools for learning. … It is most important to recognize that the graphical paradigm changes are inessential both to our core mission and to the Sugar core ideas.
We gain a plethora of benefits from detaching the technologies that directly support the mode of learning we care about from the Sugar UI. Notably, it becomes far easier to spread these ideas and technologies across platforms — our UI components are the hardest parts to port. If the underlying Sugar technologies were made easily available for all major OSes, we could leverage the creativity and work of the wider development community to build applications on top of our core offerings, creating a diverse ecosystem of powerful learning tools. Those tools could then be used by learners globally and on any computer, XO or otherwise. This should have been our aim all along. Many of the technologies we’ve built would be welcomed with arms wide open into modern Linux desktops, and a large number of developers would likely get engaged with them if we provided the possibility. In contrast to the current situation, such a model must be the direction where we take things: OLPC benevolently steering development which is mostly done by the community.
Finally, with regard to the politically-sensitive question of OLPC’s commitment to open source, we think there is a simple and uncomplicated answer: OLPC’s policy should be that all OLPC-developed software is open source and uses open standards and open formats. We don’t think a stronger commitment is necessary. Our preference for open source should stem solely from the conviction that it provides a better learning environment than closed-source alternatives. As such, having an open source cross-platform set of core technologies for building collaborative learning applications makes a tremendous amount of sense. But fundamentally, requiring that a particular UI or even OS are used seems entirely superfluous; we should be satisfied with any environment where our core technologies can be used as building blocks for delivering the learning experience we care so strongly about.
At the end of the day, it just doesn’t matter to the educational mission what kernel is running Sugar. If Sugar itself remains open and free — which, thus far, has never been in question — all of the relevant functionality such as the ‘view source’ key remains operational, on Windows or not. OLPC should never take steps to willingly limit the audience for its learning software. Windows is the most widely used operating system in existence. A Windows-compatible Sugar would bring its rich learning vision to potentially tens or hundreds of millions of children all over the world whose parents already own a Windows computer, be it laptop or desktop. To suggest this is a bad course of action because it’s philosophically impure is downright evil.
And hey, maybe a Windows version of Sugar gets kids sufficiently interested in computer innards to actually want to switch to Linux. Trolltech, the company behind the Qt graphical toolkit, was recently purchased by Nokia and announced it’ll be adding platform support for the mobile version of Windows, apparently to accusations of treason in the free software community. But Trolltech’s CTO Benoit Schillings doesn’t think that’s right:
Some critics are concerned that Trolltech’s support for Windows Mobile could limit the growth of mobile and embedded Linux technologies, but Schillings sees things differently. By enabling application developers to create a single code base that can seamlessly move across platforms, he says that Trolltech is making it easier for companies that are currently using Windows Mobile to transition to Linux, which he thinks will mean more adoption of the open source operating system in the long run.
The man speaks wisely.
Now, pay close attention: while I’m unequivocally enthusiastic about Sugar being ported to every OS out there, I’m absolutely opposed to Windows as the single OS that OLPC offers for the XO. The two matters are completely orthogonal, and Nicholas’ attempt to conflate them by calling the open source community “fundamentalists” (and watching the community foam at the mouth instead of picking apart his logic) is just another bit of misdirection. Not that anyone should really feel offended, since he’s made it a habit to call his employees terrorists.
OLPC should be philosophically pure about its own machines. Being a non-profit that leverages goodwill from a tremendous number of community volunteers for its success and whose core mission is one of social betterment, it has a great deal of social responsibility. It should not become a vehicle for creating economic incentives for a particular vendor. It should not believe the nonsense about Windows being a requirement for business after the children grow up. Windows is a requirement because enough people grew up with it, not the other way around. If OLPC made a billion people grow up with Linux, Linux would be just dandy for business. And OLPC shouldn’t make its sole OS one that cripples the very hardware that supposedly set the project’s laptops apart: released versions of Windows can neither make good use of the XO power management, nor its full mesh or advanced display capabilities.
Most importantly, the OS that OLPC ships should be one that embodies the culture of learning that OLPC adheres to. The culture of open inquiry, diverse cooperative work, of freely doing and debugging — this is important. OLPC has a responsibility to spread the culture of freedom and ideas that support its educational mission; that cannot be done by only offering a proprietary operating system for the laptops.
Put differently, OLPC can’t claim to be preoccupied with learning and not with training children to be office computer drones, while at the same time being coerced by hollow office drone rhetoric to deploy the computers with office drone software. Nicholas used to say the thought of the XOs being used to teach 6-year olds Word and Excel made him cringe. Apparently, no longer so. Which is it? The vacillation needs to stop. As they say in the motherland: shit or get off the pot.
How to go forward
Here’s a paragraph from one of my last e-mails to Nicholas, sent shortly after I resigned:
I continue to think it’s a crying shame you’re not taking advantage of how OLPC is positioned. Now that it’s goaded the industry into working on low-cost laptops, OLPC could become a focus point for advocating constructionism, making educational content available, providing learning software, and keeping track of worldwide [one-to-one] deployments and the lessons arising from them. When a country chooses to do [a one-to-one computer program], OLPC could be the one-stop shop that actually works with them to make it happen, regardless of which laptop manufacturer is chosen, banking on the deployment plans it’s cultivated from experience and the readily available base of software and content it keeps. In other words, OLPC could be the IBM Global Services of one-to-one laptop programs. This, I maintain, is the right way to go forward.
I’m trying to convince Walter 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. Having a company that is device-agnostic and focuses entirely on the learning ecosystem, from deployment to content to Sugar, is not only what I think is sorely needed to really take the one-to-one computer efforts to the next level, but also an approach that has a good chance of making the organization doing the work self-sustaining at some point.
So here’s to open learning, to free software, to strength of personal conviction, and to having enough damn humility to remember that the goal is bringing learning to a billion children across the globe. The billion waiting for us to put our idiotic trifles aside, end our endless yapping, and get to it already.
Let’s get to it already.
My thanks to Walter Bender and Marco P. Gritti for reading drafts of this essay.
Ben Schwartz said,
May 13, 2008 @ 8:34 pm
I agree with what you’ve written, more or less, but it all seems a bit silly. You’re attempting to walk an excruciatingly fine line. I think you have truly misread the discussion.
Nobody is really opposed to a “Windows port”. As I’ve now pointed out ad nauseam, I could use Wubi and the Ubuntu Sugar packages to get Sugar running as a Windows application in a couple of hours. This would work on any mainstream computer sold in the last six years. Wubi uses fast paravirtualization, so the system would be much quicker than on an XO.
When I’ve mentioned this to the OLPC engineers, their response has generally been “this argument is only about Windows on XO. We’re not talking about Sugar on Windows on other hardware; that’s a different issue.”. So my main problem with your essay is: I think you misinterpret the chorus of people saying they won’t port Sugar to Windows. (I think they failed to make this clear because “we are talking about the XO” is the reasonable default assumption for conversations at 1CC.) The OLPC engineers are specifically saying they won’t port Sugar to Windows XO. Their reasons are precisely the ones you’ve listed: technical inferiority, violation of the core philosophy, alienation of the community, etc. There’s also another reason often mentioned: any time spent removing Linuxisms from the Sugar system would be time not spent improving it. Given the universally acknowledged need for improvement, that seems like a bad idea.
I would be happy to argue with you about the precise meaning of constructionism in the context of OLPC, or about the larger purpose of education for humanity. I’d also like to argue that without unusually hard abstraction barriers, it’s extremely easy to get locked into one kernel, especially if that kernel is Windows. But these are philosophical discussions for another time. My key point is: I think you have misinterpreted what the OLPC tech team thinks about Windows, XO, and Sugar. Mostly, they agree with you.
“the OS that OLPC ships should be one that embodies the culture of learning that OLPC adheres to. The culture of open inquiry, diverse cooperative work, of freely doing and debugging — this is important. OLPC has a responsibility to spread the culture of freedom and ideas that support its educational mission; that cannot be done by only offering a proprietary operating system for the laptops.”
This is the key, and none of “us” would argue with it. However, I, and I thin many others, would say “that cannot be done by supporting a proprietary operating system”. If school systems wish to switch their XO’s to Windows, they are free to do so, but I will not support them. Neither should OLPC.
Manuel "Moe" Garcia said,
May 13, 2008 @ 8:36 pm
This is an amazing document. I wish you the best.
But I think the _process_ of open source on the Internet, is far more important, for education, than _any_ platform.
If global thermonuclear war destroyed *everything* except the _concepts_of distributed revision control and TCP/IP, we could reconstruct the rest from these first principals, to the benefit of human education. (I plead guilty to some hyperbole in this thought experiment.)
Hell, I bet 40% of all open source is done on Microsoft OS’s, the programmers are sly enough to make sure their bosses are kept ignorant of it. Because with the concept of open source on the Internet, the platform vanishes away in relative importance. And I really think the *true* educational experiences are facilitated best by the same tools.
Greg DeKoenigsberg said,
May 13, 2008 @ 8:52 pm
+1.
Wayan said,
May 13, 2008 @ 9:17 pm
Your deployment fears are my implementation nightmare - one that started for me when i first heard about OLPC, powered the birth of OLPC News, and came to fruition first with G1G1 and now this description of Peru. I wonder how many laptops will actually get deployed there, or will G1G1’s 81K be the largest distribution, ever?
For me, I’m thinking more and more about the class of 4PC’s as a whole, with the XO being one of many options. In that light, I agree with you completely - the future is in services, not laptop manufacturing. IBM led the way. May we all follow.
Manuel "Moe" Garcia said,
May 13, 2008 @ 9:47 pm
> “a focus point for advocating constructionism, making educational content available, providing learning software, and keeping track of worldwide [one-to-one] deployments and the lessons arising from them”
> “I’m trying to convince Walter not to start a Sugar Foundation, but an Open Learning Foundation.”
I want *you* to start an Open Learning Foundation. Your post, above, is the most concentrated distilling of decades of results of technology aided education I have ever read. I have never read anything like it before.
Unfortunately, I think reliable Internet connectivity (read: Web 2.0 ready) will be, at the very start, a prerequisite for deployment sites. Right there you have made the deployment problem an order of magnitude easier, because of instantaneous feedback. The platform is the browser. Imperfect, but ubiquitous.
After a body of positive results is accumulated, the model can then be taken off-line.
Andrew L said,
May 13, 2008 @ 10:17 pm
Great read, Ivan. The “coup de grace” for me reads:
“OLPC should be philosophically pure about its own machines. Being a non-profit that leverages goodwill from a tremendous number of community volunteers for its success and whose core mission is one of social betterment, it has a great deal of social responsibility. It should not become a vehicle for creating economic incentives for a particular vendor.”
Here’s to hoping this won’t actualize.
Gian Pablo Villamil said,
May 13, 2008 @ 10:25 pm
This post sums up with better information, and more clarity, some of the issues that I commented on in March: http://www.villamil.org/?p=101
In particular, the unnecessary attempt to develop a new GUI really strikes me as a major handicap.
It would have been so much more productive to develop a cross-platform suite of educational programs, and then provide the OLPC as a low-cost (but not exclusive) platform for it.
Jeff French said,
May 13, 2008 @ 10:38 pm
Well, if you really believe the words you are saying, then build an Open Learning Foundation. Do it yourself, and rally those who understand the difference between building another laptop, and the social altruism of creating a generation of children who can educate themselves as they see fit, with the aid of wifi enabled internet capable laptops.
Javier Rodriguez said,
May 13, 2008 @ 10:44 pm
Thanks for your honest words. I suspect many issues that you talk about but now all makes sense about what we (me and other people) is seeing in Peru.
But, don’t lost faith. We, the peruvians, will find a good use for those little green marvels (XOs), with or without open source, with or without construccionism. 240,000 computers will make many things. Maybe not the intendended ones… but something will change because, with your honest words, you have confirm something send to the peru mail list some time ago: we must be prepared to work with this Linux/Sugar or with the next Windows/Explorer stuff, our teachers must be prepared, our kids must be prepared. Working with Windows stuff (any flavor) won’t be a problem for teachers or kids (it´s everywhere).
The project will not reach the poorest children, with the most open sourced programs, with the most energy efficient device, and with the biggest and most focused content for our peruvian children. And I complaint about all these bad happenings. But, in the end, some change will happen. Not the intended one. Keep faith. Keep in the battle.
Regards,
Javier Rodriguez
Lima, Peru
Travis Ayres said,
May 13, 2008 @ 10:46 pm
I echo the amazing document line.
As a student who’s fully on board with open source textbooks, and is constantly screwed by texts that are hundreds of dollars (needlessly), the sooner we get things to an understandable, and flexible, position, the better.
Is there a will to do this? There are multiple open textbook/open learning options available, but none that are sufficiently well rounded and funded.
I’m on board.
Phillip Rhodes said,
May 13, 2008 @ 11:35 pm
Call me a F/OSS zealot of a fundamentalist or whatever you want, but I still believe that it is doing the world a dis-service for OLPC to make any move to support proprietary software where F/OSS works today. Maybe most children won’t care about kernel hacking, or software development in general… but for the kids who are tech-inclined, there’s just nothing better than a system based 100% on free software with source code that can be examined, studied, modified, and reused. A linux system with compilers interpreters, source packages and associated tools is a freaking gold-mine to anybody who has the hacker mentality. And that mentality, IMO, is something we should be trying to encourage.
The world needs more people who want to explore, tinker, learn, disassemble, rebuild and create, and fewer people who simply accept what they’re (given|told|taught) as “the truth” and are willing to leave it at that. And I personally believe, even if I can’t prove empirically, that F/OSS is an essential part of an ecosystem that helps develop mindset.
Avery Morrow said,
May 13, 2008 @ 11:43 pm
I agree with you that the “philosophical” impurity of packaging Sugar for Windows is a distraction from the end goal. But I disagree that the question of switching out Linux for Windows is only about office tools. Bundling Windows with the OLPC is part of a monopolistic and greedy practice which the OLPC could render impotent were it to stick with Linux for its worldwide rollout.
Yes, Windows can perform as well as Linux in terms of computer learning. But Stallman’s concern, as impolitic as his drug analogy may be, is that Windows does inhibit learning in terms of learning how a computer works at both the hardware and software levels. Don’t pretend that kids aren’t interested: Linus Torvalds was programming a computer when he was 6, and I began programming myself at that age or earlier. Windows actively inhibits tinkering because the solution to a Windows problem is not to fix the OS but to purchase a third-party ad blocker, antivirus checker, and firewall. Let’s not get bogged down in semantics: replacing naturally reproducing corn with Monsanto sterile corn, or tap water with bottled water, or Linux with Windows is the same crap in three different fancy labels. You turn something the individual naturally owns and controls into something he cannot supply for himself which you can then sell to him.
But the OLPC project isn’t thinking that way in the first place. You are not in the “creating a new generation of hackers” learning business. You are in the “learning things with computers” business. For you, the computer is only a means to an end; anything which stifles its smooth use as a tool should be eliminated. For the most part that’s a sensible and legitimate goal. This is the reason that I, like you, abandoned Linux for Windows when it got too much for me. I think the reason the noise about Linux has died down is because the operating system is now a mere platform which we are using to run Web apps and word processing– there is no longer much achievement to be made on the OS side, and if Microsoft has secured one part of that overall system it’s no longer such a big deal to worry about.
Except it is something to worry about, because the continued success of Ubuntu in particular shows that the operating system is something which can be open and free. The need for replacing Linux with Windows to make things simpler lessens every year with the improvement of Linux’s quality, while the loss of the ability to share, tinker, and improve remains exactly the same as it has always been. And that’s why I recently switched back to Linux.
Mitch Skinner said,
May 14, 2008 @ 12:10 am
Nice to see someone close to events synthesizing it all for the rest of us. And it’s very nice to see someone picking apart Negroponte’s logic. +1.
Also, I’d definitely contribute to the proposed Open Learning Foundation.
Sammy said,
May 14, 2008 @ 12:11 am
All that happened here is that your project got hijacked by commercial interests. I don’t like Stallman but his drug analogy is only a little extreme in this case (certainly saner than dressing up like a saint to make a point).
Get kids hooked on paying large companies big amounts of money to get usable software and they do become reliant (addicted) to doing so. It is harmful, and eventually such utilitarianism allows you to sell out to the point that you are willing to put a proprietary OS on an OLPC just to get them out there.
Sam Brubaker said,
May 14, 2008 @ 12:19 am
I Agree. There is nothing to be lost from from enabling an open-source launcher to work in a proprietary OS.
In fact, it would still be a win for free software “fundamentalists”– the operating system is always secondary to the applications that run on it, and even if a child uses Sugar in Windows, I think I know what will happen when he or she finds out that it runs just as well under a *free* OS.
Anand Srivastava said,
May 14, 2008 @ 12:44 am
This is an amazingly good article. I had read some disparaging thoughts about you. But this article totally demolishes them.
I am a fan of Richard Stallman. If you look at how you have ended the article you will find yourself agreeing to RMS. He was insisting on OLPC to be true to free software, but that doesn’t mean that he wouldn’t agree to porting Sugar to Windows.
He has been doing whatever he can to get Unix technologies ported to Windows. He is critical of adopting proprietary technologies on free software, which I think makes sense sometimes. He is thinking is not appropriate everywhere, but he is providing an ideal. Ultimately we will want that ideal. So we need somebody who remains uncorrupted, and to show the path. That is the Utility of RMS to us. He is very important, although he might sometimes sound totally nuts ;-).
Now to Sugar. I was hoping to get OLPC for my son. But that dream is getting more and more hazy. I guess I will have to do with some cheap (not so durable, good etc) laptop designed for children. But the real problem is that Sugar is the most effective in a collaborative mode. It will work best only when there are multiple children in my son’s neighborhood using Sugar. It is not possible to ask the children’s parents to adopt Linux and use it as their base OS. But I could convince them to install some collaborative software.
I hope that you will be able to convince Walter to start an Open Learning Foundation and create constructive learning components that can be used on all OS’s. I also hope that some laptops will be created with the complete breadth of hardware technologies present in OLPC.
Best of Luck.
Daniel Wolk said,
May 14, 2008 @ 2:16 am
It is bittersweet to say that I am glad that I purchased a G1G1 unit while I had the chance.
I still believe that the fundamental issue is learning. Certainly OLPC showed the world that making a cheap effective laptop is possible when all the manufacturers had been playing tricks to keep them as expensive as possible. OLPC even did more by showing that real technological and design advances can be made in a laptop instead of just moving the desktop experience to your lap.
There are so many more hurdles to overcome to provide the kind of powerful learning technology that is right now at our fingertips. Building a “diverse ecosystem” now instead of focusing on monolithic ideals seems like the clear way to overcome political boundaries and the desperate need to teach the teachers.
I have been concerned with how XO units could be funded and deployed in areas where the government or citizen groups will block the deployment because the XO might be used to teach children anti-government, racist, fundamentalist or even terrorist rhetoric. I hope the project can find a way forward so it can get to the point where we will be working on these bigger problems.
In the end, it is people that will make this all happen and not just a box full of chips sitting in front of a child. I was lucky enough to have a home computer put in front of me in 1984 but even luckier to have friends who fanned a spark into a flame. We can find a way to do this for more children. Luck comes from hard work.
James A. Donald said,
May 14, 2008 @ 2:32 am
@#$%^&* the children.
That the end users were powerless was in the end bound to result in delivery of bad product. Charity is not only cold, it is also user hostile.
Laptops and the internet do not educate children in the sense that educationists define and intend education. This indicates not that the goal of getting children laptops is useless, but that the education system is useless.
It logically follows that system for delivering laptops to children based on the state apparatus is unlikely to deliver very satisfactory results.
Neil Strickland said,
May 14, 2008 @ 2:38 am
I wanted to believe in OLPC, but I couldn’t. The claim that “it’s an education project, not a laptop project” never seemed remotely credible. Writing good educational material is HARD. If they were serious about it, the OLPC website would have been chock full of draft textbooks, voices of real teachers, detailed discussion of pedagogical principles, analysis of the actual conditions in the target countries, a real hunger for evidence about what would work and what would not. But there was never anything remotely like that. Also, I have written plenty of software including some educational software, but when I tried to set myself up to experiment with writing for the OLPC I found the level of support for casual developers to be extremely poor. In that context, the choice of operating system is pretty irrelevant.
Nick Ogden said,
May 14, 2008 @ 3:59 am
Sounds like a pretty good match to KDE.
- Run natively on any platform. (As of 4.1)
- Familiar UI paradigm.
- KDE-EDU is one of the best suites of educational apps around. (http://edu.kde.org)
- All source code publicly available.
If sugar is useful as an application launcher then it could still be used as an option.
Jeremiah Foster said,
May 14, 2008 @ 4:58 am
Your essay is well written, clearly reasoned, and timely. Thanks for publishing it.
Peteris Krisjanis said,
May 14, 2008 @ 5:19 am
Ivan, your article is very open and nice to hear details what a hell happens with OLPC. Thanks.
But I disagree with you. That’s fine, because we all entitled to have different point of views. Maybe I can agree that lot of open source guys have cried too loud. But there is a hint for people to avoid that: DON’T LIE TO THEM.
That’s it. If NN really wanted to do just that - distribute laptops - believe me, ubuntu or fedora would have rolled in and did good. Then it would have two options to do that. ALL what was required to do was to TELL that to COMMUNITY.
People have fully wasted 2 years of their lifes to create one, really open laptop with educational means, and everyone almost agree that Sugar rocks. And suddenly - NN doesn’t want that.
It was bound to create confusion and anger; you can be displeased or angry too - but it doesn’t change a fact that Nicholas and OLPC have huge communication problems and so this whole situation was created. There was zero official annoucements, nor PR clues.
Personally for now all I see that NN is against whole OLPC thing - coders, testers, doc writers, implementers. Why doesn’t he simply resign? Opinions change, beliefs shatters - that’s all fine. But how he expects anything to move forward without taking OLPC as it is now down? And it is really worth that?
And yes, I think current design and Sugar is coolest thing on Earh and it can educate pupils. Wow, sales people could not sale it? BECAUSE THEY SUCK. And they will usually find excuse not to move their sorry ass and convince people, but instead let’s screw up devs.
It is sad and it is a shame that as usual, marketing and some money talk again win.
Markus Hitter said,
May 14, 2008 @ 5:45 am
Two things sprang to my eyes:
First, do you really think it matters wether a successor is given the name “Open Learning Foundation” or “Sugar Foundation”? Nobody stops you to make “Sugar” simply a synonym for open learning.
Second, I’m not convinced it’s wise to split Sugar’s software algorithms apart from it’s GUI. Allowing Sugar to be ported to various OSs is fine, but the software should keep it’s user interface. Maybe even hide parts or all the OS’s standard UI. The human interface is _the_ important thing for a computing experience and stuffing e.g. an easy to learn calculator into a Excel-like interface won’t cut it.
Dr Ndidi Nnoli-Edozien said,
May 14, 2008 @ 5:45 am
Dear Ivan,
If you haven’t yet, please read ‘The Bottom Billion’ by Paul Collier. I agree entirely that ‘the goal is bringing learning to a billion children across the globe. The billion waiting for us to put our idiotic trifles aside, end our endless yapping, and get to it already’.
So, whats the plan?
Ndidi
Robert said,
May 14, 2008 @ 6:36 am
Deployment is not difficult. Deployment while not losing money is the issue here. People have smuggled Bibles into China, they can sure get laptops into Costa Rica. The question is, how bad do you want it? bad enough to do it yourself? Bad enough to hire a reliable conglomerate to do so? Because of you want to do it fast, cheap, and accurate, guess what. It ain’t happening.
As for loading Windows, that is a disgrace. These people in third world countries already have famine, pestilense, disease, corruption and natural disasters, and now we are going to give them the Blue Screen of Death? Shame on Bill.
fred tam said,
May 14, 2008 @ 6:37 am
good to see someone tell the truth instead of repeat the nonsense uncritical puff pieces on the olpc that constantly flood the media. the magic bullet idea that technology+children=education is rather absurd.
Marcus Brinkmann said,
May 14, 2008 @ 7:09 am
Thanks a lot for your careful and honest thoughts on your experience. I can relate to a lot what you wrote. I have one point of criticism, though. The main argument in favor of free software for users is not that users can change the code. This is a common misconception, and focusing on that aspect is a logical error that is correctly refuted by you. Richard Stallman demands four, not one, freedoms for the user: The freedom to run the program for any purpose, the freedom to share the program with others, the freedom to make modifications, and the freedom to share these modifications with others. None of these freedoms is granted by proprietary software. The sad truth about computers in schools today is that the skills taught are skills in using a particular application, Microsoft Word or Excel usually, and pupils never learn the underlying abstractions that allows them to switch to other, similar (or different) applications easily. Thereby they are locked into a particular program, sometimes even a specific version of a particular program. If they leave school, or want to use it at home, they need to buy the program for themselves. If they want to share their skills or work with others, these other people need to buy the program as well. When they become employed, the employer needs to buy the same program or retrain them. When they have a problem, only a very narrow group of people can help them who have to enter expensive agreements with the program vendor for modification rights, if such rights are granted at all. The company I work for develops a plug in for Outlook that allows the user to use GnuPG with Outlook. The plugin interface is not sufficiently specified to implement all functionality correctly the way we would like it to be. It is not only the user who can not make the necessary modifications to the software, nobody who is willing to make them can. The comparison with addictive drugs is not inappropriate because substances are not involved, the same is true for gambling addictions, but because use of proprietary software is not compulsory. It is rather without convenient alternative, because of certain economic factors.
Lee Dowling said,
May 14, 2008 @ 7:50 am
What worries me the most about this (very well written) article is the fact that, as a relative outsider (an IT manager who works within schools - Linux nut, freedom advocate) with a casual interest in the potential of the OLPC program to deliver education to the masses, I have heard next to nothing of the most scary details up until now. It’s now my perception that the OLPC project was nothing more than a commercial exercise and/or a “reputation enhancer” for the top people involved.
All the time, OLPC seemed to promote nothing but “we have everything in place and we’re gonna change the world”, whereas in fact what they’ve done is dump hundreds of thousands of unsupported, unreturnable, relatively incompatible and “unique” laptops into a poor foreign country and left them to it, running with the money.
I admit that I don’t follow things closely enough to judge the personalities of anyone involved but I regularly hear of and even distribute news of the project to my fellow comrades out of professional interest and yet such poor planning in the distribution never reached my ears. I was always doubtful of the use of the Sugar project, finding it to be reinventing an unnecessary cog in a vast machine. I always casually assumed that, somewhere, someone was testing it in a real educational environment. I also assumed that someone, somehere, had made Sugar what it was for a reason other than “It’s new and cool”.
It now seems that many people have played up the importance of getting laptops out there, because everything else “would fall into place”, when in fact nothing of the kind could or would ever have happened (the “exponential difficulty” increases alluded to).
All OLPC seems to have managed is to take money from some poor countries for some computers, the equivalents of which are now being sold the world over for roughly the same prices (we won’t mention the $100 number at all) and of greater utility. OLPC seems to have left the computers on the doorstep, without instruction manuals, and told the governments of those countries to “get on with it”.
Naive that I am, I assumed that the vast majority of the behind-the-scenes work WAS the logistics of the project, boring as they are to ordinary people, and not the actual building of a cheap laptop. I assumed that vast field tests were being done on a small scale with teachers, schools, students in tiny remote villages actually working out how to get the thing to them and how to use it once it’s there, rather than a massive manufacturing exercise. Something in me believed that the increase in figures being talked about over the last few years was actually due to the realities of getting those machines into people’s hands and teaching them how to use it.
I can understand under-estimations but from the sounds of it, it’s more sheer incompetence, a lack of care, and some mythical “higher plane” of people who know better and that everything would work.
The greatest shame, though, is the damage to the reputation of such programs. Now any future similar program is going to be met with “Oh, yeah, like the OLPC did?”.
Getting some basic computer hardware (the more basic the better, hence the use of terminal servers, EEE PC’s etc. in educational environments), with the potential to provide access to an nigh-infinite resource of educational material from around the world is the aim and reality of almost every developed-world school today. There’s talk of replacing classrooms with computers, replacing teachers with “assistants” aided by vast banks of free educational material and “getting everyone online”, even in the poorer areas of the countries.
And the developing world were going to be falling behind until the idea was extended to their use. Except now, despite the potential reality of such a project being greater than ever, the only project that was supposed to be serious about the education turns out to be an enormous con. There is no other word for it. It’s ill-planned, ill-supported, ill-managed and yet someone, somewhere has made money from poor governments by doing it.
I can’t help but think that someone, somewhere, had this in mind all along.
Simone Deponti said,
May 14, 2008 @ 8:24 am
I think this document exposes some interesting ideas, however I do think that the problems of the OLPC project stems at its root.
I might sound a bit “fundamentalist” but truly, the only thing that matters for learning is documentation: shipping a PC that is able to connect to the Internet even when the infrastructure is quite limited is about all you need.
“View Source” is nice, but not really fundamental, as to actually get a grasp of what’s going on you should probably walk through a basic course/howto on programming. And at that point, you could just download the source of open source program X and do the view source yourself.
I think the OLPC should focus on “bootstrapping” education rather than developing a comprehensive, monolithic platform for it.
I also would like to add something about the OS (and yes, I use Linux exclusively): nor Linux, nor OS X, nor Windows are any good to learn how an OS works.
They’re too big, too complex, too bloated (for a reason).
It’s like if we had a revision control system instead of “Hello world”: we would have 90% less programmers than we have nowadays. It’s completely useless to worry about what OS gets shipped to kids: and even the “let’s just not use only Windows” argument doesn’t hold: we could ship the OLPC with just Windows and that wouldn’t cause any harm at all. Any decently literated computer user can easily switch between operating system, as the paradigms are the same for all (mostly).
But if we really plan to give an insight to someone on how an operating system works, well them give ‘em minix, or any other microkernel.
Noah Kantrowitz said,
May 14, 2008 @ 9:01 am
All I will say is this: +1
John Nowlan said,
May 14, 2008 @ 10:43 am
I am an idealist. I bought my young daughter an xo through G1G1. I wish that program still existed because I think it offered a viable path to a sustainable ecosystem from early adopters to a thriving community developing and spreading what they learn. Together.
There are many people who have taken a ‘wait and see’ approach, not sure of the projects long term chances at success. Their lack of participation is disappointing and perhaps self-perpetuating, but people want some leadership. Keep going.
John Wilson said,
May 14, 2008 @ 11:05 am
While it’s somewhat discouraging to see the FOSS vs Proprietary debate continuing here you are perfectly correct. A child in Peru or subsaharan Africa is not likely to care if the OS is Linux, Windows, OSX or DOS. The point is a platform from which to engage the children to learn and their teachers to teach.
Philosophical and ethical debates are the priviledge we have in living in places where the next meal isn’t a problem. Where education is a reality.
In this atmosphere let Stallman and Gates retire to another room to debate their world views as important as they are. The debate has no place here and is a distraction to the mission of educating and engaging children in places that are in desperate need of both.
Sugar was a distraction though there was no KDE 4.x when you started and, as yet, isn’t ready for prime time. It soon will be and will run on top of any OS it’s compiled for.
Arguanbly what Marcus Brinkmann said about the 4 freedoms of free software are important here.
There are a billion children waiting. What are we waiting for?
ttfn
John
Paul Boddie said,
May 14, 2008 @ 11:18 am
The thing that riles some people up, of course, is that Stallman is quite often shown to be right once events have followed their course.
The argument that “no-one should need to hack their kernel” (or “word-processor” as it has been presented previously) is a distraction typically conjured up by proprietary vendors with a “great price” to offer you on their software (or a monopoly to protect). However, what’s more worrying for anyone with a prior investment in proprietary solutions is just being able to read the output of your word-processor a few years down the line, after the vendor has either lost interest in selling you upgrades and want you to buy their new product, or has instead gone bankrupt.
Some proprietary vendors emphasise open standards to address this, even proper ones (as opposed to non-standards like OOXML), but being able to run those old programs is also quite convenient (and an issue conveniently avoided by those vendors). Besides, you can’t really encourage a community of people working on their own time or out of their own pocket to take on board the unfashionable jobs in improving proprietary software. The community around OLPC wouldn’t have formed around proprietary software - it’d have been an “all NDA” affair and we wouldn’t even be talking about it any more. Thus, to start introducing proprietary dimensions to OLPC is at best deception and at worst a betrayal of the community.
As for that “overwhelmingly more enjoyable” OS X experience: it might be sustainable as long as the man at the top wishes it to be so, but it’s no coincidence that old Macs quite often end up running Linux if they aren’t being dismantled in the developing world or lying in a landfill, thanks to the gadget fixation of the developed world where people simply must buy the next generation of shiny new stuff because there’s no economic interest in keeping the old stuff running or even building that old stuff to last beyond the ever-shrinking warranty.
JamesU said,
May 14, 2008 @ 11:21 am
An Open Learning Foundation is a great idea.
Jason Young said,
May 14, 2008 @ 11:22 am
I have kept up as much as I could with OLPC since I first read about it and its potential excited me greatly. I see now that the project’s goals are unlikely to be accomplished due to apparent mis-management, which saddens me. I do have a question for you though. Why did OLPC not hire someone with a proven track record from the non-profit or NGO sectors to run and manage the project? Such a person would not have to have technical expertise, although such managers do exist who I believe would possess enough technical knowledge and have experience with learning projects in under-developed countries. I was pursuing a career in the area of international non-profits/NGO’s until some personal issues came up in my life that have delayed (and possibly changed) this pursuit for me.
It seems like what OLPC needs is better management and a solidification of its goals. Programmers and engineers while incredibly intelligent and capable people are not always well-suited to dealing with the wishy-washy politics necessary to eventually accomplish goals of this sort. If you want to pursue a Sugar/Open Learning Foundation I recommend that you get people involved who do that sort of thing for a living and not just people for the technical side of things. I’d offer my assistance but I’m not sure how much help I could be except for a few contacts I have with the Clinton Foundation in Arkansas.
James Simmons said,
May 14, 2008 @ 11:42 am
As a Sugar activity developer and a lurker on the Sugar mailing lists I have to say that a large part of the value of the XO laptop is in the Sugar interface. I am fully aware that it is not perfect, and in fact I could lecture you on its shortcomings at great length. However, it has some real strengths that make it ideal for children. First, children don’t need to learn about files and directories to use the computer. That is an enormous hurdle to get over, and the XO spares them from that. Second, installing and removing activities is really easy. Third, collaboration is supported by nearly all Activities, and Sugar makes those features really easy for the child to use.
I like Sugar enough that I hope that one day it will be a robust product that can be installed on any computer running any distribution of Linux. The Sugar team is definitely working on that goal, and will get there in time. It is a fairly challenging task. I myself run Sugar test environments on an Xubuntu box and an openSUSE box and neither one is 100% functional.
As for putting Sugar on top of Windows, I can see the benefits of that but I can also see that it would be an enormous amount of work that would not benefit the XO at all. An XO has one gigabyte of flash drive. The installed software takes a little over half of that. An XO has 256 meg of RAM and NO swap (because swapping would wear out the flash drive). Linux can fit into that space nicely. Windows XP cannot, and forget Vista. Also Windows would not be able to take advantage of all of the features of the XO hardware like aggressive power management. So while a sugar layer on top of Windows might be a good thing to have out in the world, for non XO computers, it cannot be a priority at the moment. Much OSS gets ported to Windows: GIMP, MPlayer, etc. If someone wants to port Sugar to Windows there is nothing to stop him. It would be a hell of a lot of work, from what I’ve seen though.
Finally, I have been very impressed with the selection of Activities for the XO, and the thought that goes into how the XO will be used to improve a child’s education. I wish I had one of these as a kid.
Dave Neuer said,
May 14, 2008 @ 11:49 am
“As one of the people who actually can hack my kernel to suit, I find that I don’t miss the ability in the least. There, I said it. Hang me for treason.”
You don’t miss the ability, right now, because you bought a machine that works out of the box (right now) the way you want it to, and have a mostly responsive vendor that built a large percentage of their platform on free software. Your vendor stops being responsive, or the machine stops working the way you want “out of the box,” you may well end up missing it after all.
And ironically, one of the ways that Apple achieves that “out-of-the-box” niceness is by controlling the hardware in their machines. You can achieve a similar stability with Linux, by buying only hardware which is well-supported by Linux.
And with regard to the rest of the users, “[t]he vast, near-total majority of computer users aren’t programmers… [o]f the programmers, a vast, near-total majority don’t dare in the Land o’ Kernel tread,” guess what? Proprietary software makes it harder to increase the percentage of users who are programmers — not impossible, not even exponentially harder, but harder nonetheless.
Furthermore, proprietary software inhibits the users who _do_ care and _do_ dare to tread in kernel-land — or any other land (all the software your vendor provided isn’t in the kernel, is it?) from doing so. And proprietary software obviously obliterates completely the possibility for users who can to fix problems their vendors simply won’t.
I know that bashing free software wasn’t at all the point of your rant (why else would you write “OLPC should be philosophically pure about its own machines”) and that you merely meant to advance what you felt should be the real goal of OLPC, namely, getting open _learning_ software widely deployed into the hands of children.
But please: do you really think that bashing Linux helps advance that goal? Any putative development of Open Learning Foundation or Sugar Foundation software will depend on the volunteer effort of members of the free software community, many of whom don’t like being indirectly called fanatical, naive, stupid, or any of the other things your rant implies about people who care about software freedom.
Finally, do you really think allowing Microsoft, who has literally no interest in fostering constructivist education, to co-opt the largest-ever deployment of computers to children around the world doesn’t actively _harm_ that goal? What single more enthusiasm-sapping event could you imagine than the MS takeover of OLPC for people who might have contributed to the cause you’re advocating? Why should anyone devote any volunteer development effort to software projects which indirectly contribute to the bottom line of a convicted-in-multiple-jurisdictions Monopolist (since no other large-scale deployments of Open Learning Foundation software seem to be on the horizon)?
Guido van Rossum said,
May 14, 2008 @ 12:32 pm
I’ve thought for a while that sending laptops to developing countries is simply the 21st century equivalent of sending bibles to the colonies.
Edward Trager said,
May 14, 2008 @ 12:35 pm
Thanks, Ivan, for your bitingly honest critique of the OLPC project. Ever since Nicolas Negroponte refused to allow OLPCs to be tested side-by-side with other vendors’ PCs in a “bake off” (as he called it), I became convinced that Negroponte is his own worst enemy. The project could have been better managed in so many ways, sparing many people a lot of grief, and leading to a successful project. Unfortunately, the outcome did not happen that way. It sounds like OLPC is dying a painful death. I had interviewed for a position at OLPC, then never heard back from them. I tried to find out what was going on many times — literally for months. Other people began offering me alternative opportunities, so it was painful to wait on a non-responsive OLPC organization which obviously did not have its shit together. It finally got to the point that I made a unilateral decision that I would refuse OLPC’s offer if they ever got around to making an offer. A few days after that I heard back from OLPC that they had chosen another candidate … and now I can say thank goodness I didn’t get tied up in the OLPC mess. I like your idea of an Open Learning Foundation with broad goals to find out –empirically instead of egotistically– what works and what doesn’t work. Most likely laptops would end up *not* being central to such an Open Learning Foundation, although they could be one facet of a much broader vision. My own *in situ* classroom experience –trying to teach middle school kids the basics of XHTML and CSS– is that the computers in the classroom are, sadly, addictively *distracting*. Way too many kids end up checking out ESPN sports scores, downloading pictures or music, or updating their BuzzNet or MySpace sites instead of focusing on the learning task at hand –even when that task (learning basic XHTML and CSS) could be quite fun and colorful and creative. I decided that I could better teach kids the basics of XHTML and CSS with just a few paper handouts and a white board, no computers necessary, while reserving separate hours — either lab hours or homework hours– for self-directed creation of their own web sites. My little slice of experience in this realm demonstrated to me that a lot more remains to be learned about how to best use computers in learning environments for children.
Ecks Cero said,
May 14, 2008 @ 1:16 pm
I completely agree Ivan, Sugar may have been a mistake from the very beginning. The thing is, without Sugar we wouldn’t have Bitfrost. Sugar’s interface is dull and gray, and children like my nephew who have already been introduced to Ubuntu (KDE), OSX and Windows tend to ignore the laptop unless I’m using the camera activity.
Just for once Wayan could you please not schill your crappy rumormongering website.
Benjamin Mako Hill said,
May 14, 2008 @ 2:13 pm
In responding to me, you seem to assume that the benefits of free software that I am referring to are technical ones. Interpreted that way, my statement is certainly unsupported. But that’s not what I was saying. One can benefit in several ways and the benefits I was describing — the ones quoted by you in the rest of the paragraph — are primarily about empowerment. You not may believe that this is a benefit, or that in particular situations it is outweighed by other factors, but that is what I meant.
Sergiu Dumitriu said,
May 14, 2008 @ 2:18 pm
How does Curriki ( http://www.curriki.org/ ) compare to the Open Learning Foundation idea?
If I remember correctly, this whole “switching to Windows” idea was started by the fact that some Flash based sites don’t work in the included flash player (and that some “investors” apparently didn’t want a linux-based computer). Then why flush down the toilet so many hours of voluntary effort, because of one small component? Instead of putting a lot of effort into porting the whole Sugar code to windows, irritating a lot of developers and supporters, delaying more the next version of the laptop, and making a more expensive product, why not invest a bit of effort into the flash player, or try to convince Adobe to move faster on the Linux version of their player? If Adobe doesn’t care about the (increasing) 1% of linux users, then maybe it cares about millions of poor children all over the world.
Manuel "Moe" Garcia said,
May 14, 2008 @ 2:28 pm
Guido van Rossum’s and Edward Trager’s comments are important.
The low state of evidence-based, technology-aided learning is such that we don’t even know if we are doing more harm than good, by bringing computers in contact with children.
I trust *you*, though, a lot more than I trust open-source zealots, software/hardware businessmen, and self-aggrandizing academic “superstars”, when it come to helping with children’s education. I wish you much luck.
Jack Spaar said,
May 14, 2008 @ 3:06 pm
Interesting essay, for this outsider.
Thought 1:
I wonder if OLPC wouldn’t lose relevance and leverage if they stopped making hardware and focused only on software to run on whatever machines the market might provide.
If OLPC stopped making hardware, they would be joint-marketing some vendors’ machines in order to get Sugar out to the world. And so OLPC would be stuck with hawking Sugar on ClassmatePC or the like. Many children could be reached with such a machine, many could not.
Only the XO has the potential to be usable by any kid anywhere on the planet, and the free market will not provide an equivalent. If the XO happens to run Windows as an option, so be it. If Sugar runs on Windows, so be it. Without the XO, the realistic potential to reach kids in remote locations without electricity and Internet is simply gone.
Thought 2:
Isn’t the real problem for OLPC a bootstrap issue? That is: they don’t (yet) have the money to hire all the people to work on all the aspects that would make the education mission a total success. So they have to get the ball rolling in order to get the success that will attract the funds, and so on, as with any startup.
Perhaps partly due to this, OLPC’s current model demands a *large* role from the receiving countries, and in some ways that’s a good thing. If Peru, e.g., develops its internal resources instead of depending on OLPC, so much the better. They must have skin in the game to succeed.
And perhaps partly due to bootstrap issues, OLPC has had to make new choices about where to focus its resources and where to find outside help. This results in angst, even more than in a commercial startup because of the highly political nature of OLPC. But is it really a betrayal of the mission?
–
PS - I wish NN had not publicly put the knife to FOSS advocates. FOSS itself is not OLPC’s mission, but that community has provided a lot of initial support to OLPC.
amir hirsch said,
May 14, 2008 @ 3:19 pm
I once created a class laptop but neglected the Deployment Plan too. My interactive REPL gave me this error:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “”, line 1, in
AttributeError: class Laptop has no attribute ‘DeploymentPlan’
see you around
Radoslav Dejanović said,
May 14, 2008 @ 3:40 pm
I have to say that I am dissapointed in what I thought of as a revolution. I thought that this might be a great way to give poor children a ticket for nightfligt to their counterparts in developed world (as this really IS about education, not the hardware or the software). It turned out to be something completely different: a business revolution in the field of really small and still usable, yet cheap notebook computers. My Asus eee testify that.
However, that’s just sad. Something that started as a really great idea, something that attracted lots of great young minds like you, it blew like a dot-com bubble, leaving nothing but a desire to spread as much cheap laptops as possible.
Ok, this still is a noble cause, because this will surely help third world countries to cross the digital divide, but that is just a shadow of what could be done for those kids.
And then - opening door to Microsoft to deploy the soon-to-be-discontinued product on those laptops is bad for two reasons:
1) giving discontinued products to kids in third world is.. umm.. rude? insulting? primitive?
2) priming kids for later use of newer products from the same company is not a good deed - that’s simply sinister. And if it is done by giving them leftovers - I doubt that this might benefit anyone, including the company that is so eager to “help” those kids.
OLPC is going to fail greatly and loudly. Not because of Microsoft, after all they do have a right to do what they think is good for their business, but because of the exodus of great minds. You can’t have a half decent hardware to run Windows on it. It is, yes it is going to suck because people would compare experiences from “real” laptops. The keyboard sucks, the CPU sucks, memory sucks, the only great thing about OLPC with Windows on it is the display - and that can easily be implemented in any other commercial laptop. (in fact, I’d really like to see that happen, for the display is superb).
Time for me to get some of those OLPC laptops for my old computer collection, they’re surely goint to be remembered in the history books. As a big flop, it seems. But XO did start a new business model, quite ironic for a nonprofit project. :-)
Dragan Trninic said,
May 14, 2008 @ 4:03 pm
Thank you for the entertaining and illuminating read. As you can imagine, many of us interested in science and mathematics education have followed the developments of OLPC for some time now.
Like you, I agree that - currently - it has many characteristics of a colossal missed opportunity. The fact that it will almost assuredly provide some benefits and (hopefully) inform future actions in this direction seems a distant consolation prize.
Good luck to you in your work; I’d enjoy chatting with you about an Open Learning Foundation someday in the future.
James Armstrong said,
May 14, 2008 @ 4:13 pm
Aren’t you being a bit harsh on RMS?
“To suggest this is a bad course of action because it’s [a bad course of action] is downright evil.”
Is that so?
You are, of course, free to believe that RMS is only espousing some trivial dogmatic quibble.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake. You really just employed a simile comparing a proprietary OS to addictive drugs?”
Could be he did not have crack in mind.
He might have been thinking about “COFEE”.
Kevin Cole said,
May 14, 2008 @ 4:21 pm
I did not have any Unix-like background before Linux, though I had used several mainframe and minicomputer OS’s before arriving at the PC. What drove me to Linux was not the philosophical angle, but the fact that slowly, things that I previously had been able to do simply were either being made difficult or impossible, and I couldn’t find work-arounds. The community of users at universities and other places where I had previously sought help were also increasingly in the dark. The other motivating factor was that I kept hearing about how the PC was so much more powerful than the mainframes that supported hundreds of users simultaneously. Yet my oh-so-powerful PC couldn’t successfully support ONE person. Where did all the power go?
Although over time, I’ve become considerably more zealous about F/OSS, I think I’m essentially still a pragmatist. When my less technical friends said “You really like Linux. Should I switch?” I would tell them with great reluctance “No. I cannot become your full-time tech support.” (That’s changed in recent years, most notably with Ubuntu and Fedora.)
I *think* I correctly remember the keynote by NN at the National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) in San Diego a few years ago, where he said that Microsoft and Intel fought the XO every step of the way, and indicated that some of the reason that people said a $100 laptop was impossible was due to the fact that the licensing cost of software was outrageous, and the fact that most commercial software was so inefficient that it required a lot of hardware just to make it work. (I’m not defending (nor prosecuting) that opinion, merely stating what I remember — perhaps incorrectly.)
I’m not necessarily opposed to less-than-open-source, but Microsoft has had such a bad history with the community I know and love. Steve Ballmer often seems completely psychotic. FUD has become a common acronym largely because of Microsoft. Their corporate philosophy seems to be “steal what you can, dis what you can’t, and then, as a last resort, write code.” Apple seems to play nicer. (Maybe deep down they’re just as bad and I haven’t paid attention, or they’re better at protecting their dirty little secrets.)
So, it’s not moving away from Linux that scares me. It’s the fear that somehow, some way, just as with Office Open XML (OOXML) they will find a way to create a perverted version of Sugar et al, and then make it the “industry standard”. Newcomers to the technology will just assume that viruses, reboots, etc are the natural order of things, and nothing will convince them that some of us install software without rebooting, and haven’t used anti-virus software in 15 years.
It reminds me of a joke I heard:
Q: “How many Microsoft engineers does it take to screw in a light bulb?”
A: “None. Bill Gates just declared Darkness (TM) the industry standard.”
Technology aside, I’m not an educator, and don’t make any claims to know what works best. Personally, I think I learn best when I can take things apart and put them together again, and my interests fall along the technical and scientific side. I see history, music, and language in a similar light: knowing something about grammatical structure, the frequency ratio that make up the twelve-tone equal tempered chromatic scale, etc are ways to dig deeper. But like you, I no longer thrill over the thought of hacking something to get it working when all I want is for it to “just work”. Teachers and kids who are not exploring the finer mysteries of how to fix hardware or how to program, may also get a wee bit frustrated with non-working computers, to say the least, regardless of the open or closed nature of the beastie in question.
End ramble. ;-)
Doug said,
May 14, 2008 @ 5:36 pm
Ivan,
Definitely some enlightening statements regarding where this all started from, where it was headed and were it could go. Thanks for that. As far as proprietary software goes, your mention of in this blog seems to read as if proprietary software == Microsoft and so all of the opposition to Microsoft is opposition to proprietary software. I believe there are many who are not so one-way about it but do know the nature of Microsoft and because of that history, we see any work with Microsoft as the beginning of the end of the project. Nobody survives a Microsoft attack if there is an organization requiring monetary income to continue to exist. Also, there are alot of unknowns getting tossed around regarding what is going on with Microsoft so imagination goes wild. Some of us have seen the nasty things they do to get their way and to protect Windows market position. The stuffing of ISO ballots for OOXML approval shows they are the same Microsoft we’ve known for a long long time.
After hearing the story of Negroponte’s previous attempts at constructionism via laptops, I was wondering why OLPC didn’t work on Sugar for US schools first. Prove it all while running on Linux or Windows or whatever and then move to the ruggedized XO laptop for the rest of the world. It’s one thing to hand out wooden blocks to kids and a completely different thing to hand out laptops with full featured desktops and all the junk that brings with it. It’s as if he believes in it so much he’s willing to jump on a rocket straight to the moon without first doing all the work to validate the vehicle and the life support facilities first. It is very risky to say the least.
In hindsight, we all see better and as such, I really like you comments on Sugar Services on any desktop and then the option of plugging that into a Sugar Desktop. With Sugar Services, a Journal-like metaphor could be implemented in a single directory and later on have that moved to a database or some other journal-like mechanism. I do believe the Journal concept should continue as part of the Sugar Services so it is transparent to the apps/Activities no matter what is under it.
It just makes so much sense to build the software layer to enable the learning concepts. Get those out on new or old PCs, on thin or thick clients and even handhelds. Build the Activities and build the curriculum around the Activities. THEN, put it on a robust platform like the XO for the rest of the world. And if all the software and learning infrastructure was already there, wouldn’t it make deployment that much easier? Non-prof’s and even commercial ventures could already be up and running around the Sugar Services concept and pick up XO deployments for OLPC.
And I’m not sure Walter Bender really has to call it something other than the Sugar Foundation. They can still do more than just work with Sugar as it currently is and surely work toward deployments of hardware using it if they so please. I don’t think enough really know what Sugar is to pigeon hole it if the name is used.
Ace Suares said,
May 14, 2008 @ 5:36 pm
Is the open source movement finally growing up ?
It seems that more interesting and smart people now dare to start criticize the open source movement and it’s products then ever before. And yes, that is a good thing. Thank you for this essay.
Brendan Miller said,
May 14, 2008 @ 9:38 pm
This is probably the most insightful article about the OLPC project I’ve seen. +1
The comments from Stallman are particularly maddening. It’s amazing to me how blinded by zealotry that guy is. As if the primary form of good and evil in the world have to do with software licensing, and concerns like education, hunger, and tyranny all come second.
What a dick.
sengan baring-gould said,
May 14, 2008 @ 10:21 pm
Hi Ivan,
I worked on the Geode CPU (debugging tools) and was happy to see the OLPC project adopt it.
I would actually like to see it run all 3 OS’ (Windows / OS X / Linux) because they all offer something that is unavailable on other platforms. However, OLPC didn’t accept Steve Jobs’ offer to port Mac OSX. Do you know why not?
Sengan
John Daigle said,
May 14, 2008 @ 10:54 pm
Okay. Let’s start an open learning foundation. Not just for computers, for everything… open textbooks, open journals, open minds. Let’s bring wikipedia to rural Mississippi, they could use it.
OLPC was the wrong project from the start, because it focused on the thing, the laptop, not the creation of a culture of learning.
Raffy Mananghaya said,
May 14, 2008 @ 11:59 pm
Still reading you despite our differences in the past (concerning the use of Puppy Linux for the project).
Hey, I’ve kept with the goals you discussed here, so you have a ready partner in this part of the world (Asia/Philippines). I hope that you, Walter&Co and us can be colleagues in this endeavor.
BTW, our external funding for this = $0. But we are now writing a teacher’s manual (read that: teachers writing a manual [for teachers] in deploying low-cost elearning).
(Any education-oriented publisher reading this? :) )
Regards to all.
Jacob Beard said,
May 15, 2008 @ 3:26 am
+1
Tim Post said,
May 15, 2008 @ 3:44 am
Ivan, thanks for writing this. There is a considerable amount of misinformation circulating about the events that you mentioned, at least now some facts can be separated from fiction.
I am a long time GNU enthusiast. I may get tarred and feathered for saying this, but I am not directly opposed to Windows XP shipping on the OLPC. If I want Microsoft to keep their agenda out of the learning process, I must be prepared to do the same.
What concerns me is DRM. It looks like you are putting effort into shifting the focus back to the learning process, which of course requires free learning materials written in open formats. I think that is a very good use of your time. Such a project would not only benefit OLPC, but anyone who wants to learn or teach.
I also really enjoyed your descriptions of the logistical nightmares surrounding getting the XO units into the hands of children in very remote places. I like your ideas, too bad they were not implemented.
I had to read this twice to fully digest it, but doing so was well worth it. Good luck!
Kushan Mitra said,
May 15, 2008 @ 6:27 am
I’m a journalist from India, where OLPC tried to get its message across. One can argue that the central Human Resources Development Ministry under which the Department of Education resides is beholden to MS, but the HRD Ministry thought it would better spend money getting schools and teachers out there rather than make a massive investment on computers. many of the countries OLPC targeted did not have basic educational infrastructure. A computer, no matter how cheap is still a ‘luxury item’ across vast swathes of South-Asia, burgeoning middle-classes and ‘IT-superpower’ and all.
Of course, Negroponte’s reputation out here was also in mud following the dramatic collapse of MIT Media lab Asia which he established in 2001. The story goes that in 2003, when India’s new IT Minister took over Negroponte tried to bully some opinions through him, the man, Arun Shourie was equally pig-headed and the rest is history.
markus kellermann said,
May 15, 2008 @ 7:42 am
‘And you know, shitty power management and many other hassles aren’t Linux’s fault.’
To be honest, I am using Linux since 5 years already. But I dont agree with you in this regard.
To me, there is too much influence of companies in the “community”. They basically decide what will happen and what won’t. I am sure about this for several reasons, one is the constant uphill battle a small distribution must fight. (And distributions ensure that they STAY INCOMPATIBLE with each other. Try to make them switch to an install scheme like on Mac OSX - that is a futile job. Try to make them stop using shell scripts, in favour of ruby or python. That will not succeed for the big distributions.)
The situation is extremely frustrating about key projects like glibc or gcc but also the linux kernel itself. It generates server income. Who cares about desktop stuff? Xorg?
Har har, they pissed on individual people when they switched to modular xorg and providing insufficient documentation. It used to be easy and straightforward to compile modular xorg, now its a LOT more difficult and really annoying.
I think the biggest problem for the _desktop_ world is xorg. It is old. It is slow. It is horrible.
Xorg should learn from projects like KDE. That is how one builds up a community.
I can only encourage communities to get rid of programmers that are only representing their boss. Ultimately I am an optimist and I think in some time we will have a “real” distribution _empowered_ by the community, not dependent on upstream.
Dan Weinreb said,
May 15, 2008 @ 9:51 am
It actually is true that some people do modify the kernel to suit.
For example, the Google File System experts do this. I agree that the
idea that lots of kids using OLPC would do it is preposterous.
On the other hand, some fraction of OLPC kids might get to the point
where they could read some of the sources and learn from doing so.
Maybe a very small fraction, but the hope was to have a very large
base, so even that fraction is nontrivial.
And maybe one or two wizards will make kernel modifications that can
provide some big benefit to many, many OLPC users.
And the older I get, the more I want things to work out of the box.
Amen.
Because people have tried plain laptop learning projects in the past,
and as the New York Times noted on its front page not so long ago,
they crashed and burned.
Well, you have to look at the details.
– Kids downloading porn. Do those porn-censorship things work?
– Kids hacking into local businesses. Hmm, it’s not clear
what to do about that one, unless you want to cut off the
Internet entirely.
– The network “freezes” when load is high. That sounds like
some technical problem that could have been fixed.
– “Scores” of laptops break down every month. Gee, how many
do they have? What forms of failure are they seeing? I
don’t think of laptops as being all that failure-prone.
Maybe they’re being physically abused, e.g. dropped on the floor.
Again and again through the article, we hear that the laptops
break at a very high rate. Why?
– The goal was to “close the digital divide”. Well, what does
that mean? Train them to use spreadsheets? Expose them to
Wikipedia? What was the curriculum designed to do what goal?
– “The box gets in the way. It’s a distraction to the educational
process.” It sounds like they did not have an effective
curriculum or pedagogy. I wonder what the kids were told to do
with the laptops?
– They “did not fit in with lesson plans.” I think you have to
make some big changes to lesson plans in order to use laptops
effectively. And, again, it makes a big difference if you are
doing Papert-like stuff, or just teaching secretarial skills.
– Northfield Mount Hermon (I used to do summer school there gave
up on laptops “after it found that more effort was being expended
on repairing the laptops than on training teachers to teach with them.”
It was FOUND? They DISCOVERED that they were not training the
teachers? Gee, I would have thought they’d decide on that, not
discover it.
– “But it is less clear whether one-to-one computing has improved
academic performance — as measured through standardized test
scores and grades — because the programs are still new, and most
schools have lacked the money and resources to evaluate them
rigorously.” So nobody knows. And was the original goal
of the laptops to raise grades? And how exactly was that supposed
to happen?
– “…received five phone calls from parents saying they were concerned
that their children would not have technological advantages.”
I.e. we don’t know what we’re doing with the laptops, but
placing them in the students’ backpacks will give them an
advantage later in life.
I have a strong suspicion that a lot of these schools started off with
“let’s get laptops for everyone” rather than starting off with actual
goals. Tossing technology over a transom never works.
At least the original putative OLPC concept dealt with a lot of these
issues. There was a fairly-well-stated theory of the goal and how the
computers would be used. They were designed to be reliable. Lesson
plans were supposed to be radically different, keyed to the overall
concept. At least that was the vision, regardless of whether there
was a plausible plan to make it happen.
Decoupling the Sugar presentation, graphics, and finder from the
underlying technologies is obviously the right thing to do.
However, I’m not sure that reinventing the desktop GUI is irrelevant
to the mission. A lot of the existing paradigm is hard to use. I
have seen lots of people who are very smart, but not trained in math
or computer science, who just cannot understand nested folders
(hierarchical file system).
Mike said,
May 15, 2008 @ 12:08 pm
Very nice and well tought-out piece. It really sets things in its place, open source being fine for certain things, but not so fine for others. I once (and only once) did a full-steam effort to switch from Windows to Linux (tried using SuSE and RedHat), and it became futile. I had to search endless hours through forums and mailing lists for solutions to problems as stupid but deal-breaking as hitting the ‘a’ key on the keyboard and seeing ‘aa’ on the screen instead, or getting the full resolution on a laptop display, or getting particular hardware to work. And then came the search for alternative applications, which brought in a new barrage of problems. Less than a month into it, I gave up. I have switched to Mac almost two years ago, and I could not be a happier person.
Regarding OLPC…has anyone *bothered* to ask all these schools in developing countries if what they need is actually laptops? Are the teachers computer-literate enough to use them, and teach children how to use them? I think they probably need a uniform set of curriculum-tailored textbooks before a computer. You can learn the same on a computer, but paper doesn’t need electricity.
Good luck!
Glenn Fleishman said,
May 15, 2008 @ 1:17 pm
I was very pleased to read your lengthy critique from an insider’s position, because I have looked with frustration over the last decade–the period I’ve been most aware of the problem–that laptops for kids is seen as a universal panacea in the developed and developing world. None of the programs I have seen have a solution for how to use computer-assisted education as a real tool in improving the knowledge, critical skills, and employability of the kids who get them.
The Papert crowd has, as you note, never proved its theories, despite decades of trying. Every failure is a special case. (See Todd Oppenheimer’s The Flickering Mind for a lengthy account of those failures [ISBN 0812968433].)
Everything that Cliff Stoll wrote in Silicon Snake in 1996 [ISBN 0385419945] still proves to be true today. There is a tendency to push technology as a solution without any specific sequence that would involve a solution.
Look at Maine’s laptop program, in which an entire grade of middle-schoolers received a laptop. Over years of efforts, the state and its agents were never able to present any comprehensive quantitative results for spending tens of millions of dollars. The same money could have been spent to reduce class size, improve arts and science education, and other well-known methods by which students are more engaged, and do better both in school and in life. But it’s relatively easy to raise money for tech, because it’s sexy.
I’ve been laughing sadly at OLPC since its inception because it had precisely the same lack of articulation about how to achieve goals. I think that if the statement had been simply, as you note in some ways, we’re just trying to get affordable computers into these countries and want other people to figure out how to make an ecosystem with a lot of variety, I would have supported that. It’s an interesting goal to provide more access to computers, and then that could be paired with free and paid OS’s, with training programs, with specific adult and child education goals (adults: learn to use a computer and the Net to reduce middleman arbitrage over crop prices, as has been shown to work).
But that’s very different from OLPC’s “every kid a hacker” approach.
LuYu said,
May 15, 2008 @ 1:27 pm
This is a response to John Wilson’s comment and to some degree the original post.
John said:
Okay, think quite a few people are missing the broader issue. It is not only about Free Software, but about Free Speech and Free Access to information. One of the (principle) ways in which OLPC is supposed to be driving down costs is by replacing books in the classroom. This means that there is an expectation that not only the supplied programs but a wealth of other information is supposed to be available to the children as a result of receiving one of these computers. Just as it would be absurd to expect the children or even the schools to pay for text bo