You’ve no doubt heard of the One Laptop Per Child education project, whose goal is ‘to provide children around the world with new opportunities to explore, experiment and express themselves’. Today the education.au office has been graced by the presence of one of the recent versions of the OLPC, thanks to one of our network admins who has an aquaintance involved with the project. So here I am, 2000km away from the office, champing at the bit to have a play with it, but alas, all I can do is look at the photos you see here…
What is your opinion on the OLPC education project? Is this the right way to be educating children in developing countries? I think only time will tell, but my completely un-philisophical opinion is that the OLPC is the perfect conduit for allowing the world wide web to continue changing the world for the better. I welcome the new participants in the global online community and look forward to seeing the wonderment in the children’s eyes, through the OLPC’s built-in webcam no less!
Keep an eye on the latest OLPC news, check out the list of software currently available with the OLPC’s Red Hat based operating system, or watch one of the numerous video demonstrations. Take note of the number of games (educational of course) already available, more than any of the other software categories! I think there’d be a few of our technical staff (including myself) who feel that games played a big part in developing their computer skills. But where is Where is Carmen Sandiego?
Thanks to Karl for bringing the OLPC into the office (even though I’m not there), and to Alana for taking the pics for me.
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[…] Like many others I have been watching with interest the development of the $100 laptop. At work we were even fortunate enough to play with one for a couple of days. The olpc is a great initiative with a fantastic vision and it is interesting to see that there are now companies seemingly building on that to make very affordable laptops for broader markets. Here’s one with a claim to costing about US$150. The Medison Celebrity has a 1.5GHz Intel Celeron cpu with 256MB of memory running the Fedora operating system. As a Linux home user with children wanting computers for personal and educational use this sounds great but…. here’s the problem for me. At home, in the past, we have had a PC and laptop running Linux. We now have a PC running Windows XP and Open Office. Unfortunately at the school our kids attend they use Windows and Microsoft Office. Consequently, the kids just aren’t interested in Linux/Open Office. It’s Microsoft or nothing with them. They do use Open Office for some of their homework but don’t like the differences and also report back some problems with compatibility at school. It looks like I am stuck with having to find more expensive solutions that can support bigger footprint operating systems and applications until the school starts considering Linux. […]
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