One Laptop Per Child: Disruptive Technology and Synergistic Effects

1. One Laptop Per Child: Disruptive Technology and Synergistic Effects • Elijah WrightNovember 9, 2007 • Fall 2007 Friday Conversation SeriesSchool of Library and Information ScienceIndiana University, Bloomington

2. laptop.org involvement • Wanted to make sure some of my favorite tools run well on XO – mainly some R and some SNA code. • Wound up poking at / profiling X11 graphics code • Sugarizing DOSEmu – to run old, free DOS apps. • Working on interface (Xinerama-driven) for usb2rgb devices – so a ($180?) laptop can be plugged into the planned low-cost projectors. (Due to the very significant lack of VGA output on XO...)‏

3. Talk Outline • General overview of the OLPC project – goals, philosophy, recent dollar-value fluctuations, etc. • Hardware innovations – production, design, engineering, durability, maintenance, standards expectations • Software innovations – collab., end-user tools, etc • Educational strategy and goals • Discussion

4. One Laptop for Every Child • Overarching project goal – to put a learning tool in the hands of children. • Not about ”technology” in the sense of past laptop projects (Maine); instead, give children access to basic tools of creative expression and production • Fedora Linux (FC8) based, with additional mix-ins • Sees laptops as powerful tools, not office machines. • What does a kid of 2010 or 2015 want from a computing environment? Future-proofing.

5. Some answers, perhaps... • Working together / collaborating / communicating • Sharing – pictures, silly videos, jokes, music, games, selfmade and not, Creative Commons and not • Information – books, reference and otherwise • Tools in ”my own language” as far as possible • Not to be bothered about network details, malware, or technological blunders (patches)‏

6. What do kids largely not *need*? • Virus-laden, crashy-'fat'-DRM, Vista-Leopard-KDE • Complicated, inelegant system configuration. • High-end commercial 3D games • Highly inefficient first-world laptops that usually drink 90 watts of electricity, go 3h/charge • Heavyweight business / productivity software

7. Philosophical stance and underpinnings • Wide open. Code, software, drivers, everything. • Assume an intelligent, creative, curious user who will interact with the machine and possibly do unexpected things with it :-)‏ • Provide tools for creation of media, documents, programs, and previously unimagined ”stuff”. • Country, language, platform-neutral.

8. in loco parentis, XO • OLPC team focused on making good, useful, consistent software for first field release • Decisions made re: ”what's best for children” are hotly contested and debated. • Flexibility – the system is open enough, yet secure enough, that end users can deploy homemade applications on the XO without fear of 'destroying' the system. This includes KIDS.

9. Hardware innovations • bi-modal display (monochromatic and color, with differing power req. in differing modes)‏ • DCON and mesh controller, OFW, h/w OSS-driven • sealed, protected housing; maint. poss. by 10yo • drop tests, power tolerance, heat tolerance • ebook mode, camera, game buttons, mega touchpad • $100 projector, $1 microscope, other projects,ad-hoc USB sensor designs. Goodbye legacy serial!

10. Software innovations • Mesh networking – range mult. for IPv4/v6 access • Bitfrost, Salut ”tubes”, Activities, virtualization • Sugar UI; Squeak (Alan Kay) environment • Serious internationalization; Python source code written in Ethiopian is ”interesting...” • Kid-driven development and activity modification • Collaboration baked into every application

11. Software innovations 2 • Journal – nonhierarchical-filesystem data store. • The XO does have a standard filesystem at the lowest level, but applications should use Journal. • Enables self-tagging resources, additional metadata, simple sharing of in-process creations w/ other kids. • Distributed folksonomy – kids w/collections of tags. • Currently in a state of massive flux – not really finished just yet. FRS will happen first.

12. Educational strategy and goals • Controversial: constructivist learning 2da max! • Learning how to learn: straightforward enablement of self-teaching / hands-on / literacy. • Alan Kay and the Squeak team as representative of the expertise brought to bear: smart folks! • What is easy, hard to learn? Arithmetic, spelling, shapes, vs things like democracy, harmony, aesthetics, architecture. Extended discussions.

13. Education from bottom-up • Dewey :)‏ • Montessori, Suzuki • Unrestricted mashup culture – anyone can fiddle with anything that interests them. • Sound like home-/un-schooling, or like very bright kids with IEPs? Or both? :-)‏ • What happens when 30M+ kids used to an XO-like environment touch their first Windows-ish machine?

14. Culture jamming... • Cultural sensitivity – what will the differences in use and uptake be, in different countries? Chile and Nigeria as exemplars. How does culture influence children's activities and interests? Generalizability. • From our POV, what is the likely outcome of placing censorware-free laptops in the hands of a bunch of kids who live under repressive regimes, and of shipping a dump of wikipedia to each school?

15. Standard Critiques • Typically, 1W adults react extremely poorly to XO. Poor fit for their hands, vastly inferior to what they already have (display tech, speed, etc), doesn't use 'standard' WIMP interfaces, ”ugly green laptop”, feature minimalism, etc. • Ongoing severe violation of our assumptions about utility and style; it might be better to compare XO to a souped up handheld game (very popular – e.g. NDS) or the Alphawriter units used for NaNoWriMo.

16. Standard Critiques 2 • It can't run the SecondLife client! (which is open-source, but still slow/”fat”...) It can't Skype! (but it CAN do standard SIP VoIP... open standards FTW.)‏ • It doesn't have WizBangFrobNagle, kids (read:”I”) can't function without that! • Some of the critiques leveled at OLPC are quite petty, given the amount of interesting innovation and thinking being done within-and-without.

17. Research possibilities • There are folks doing ongoing usability evals of Sugar, less so of individual XO activities – much more expertise and manpower is needed. • ICT digital divide work; powerful opportunity for ethnographic fieldwork w/ kids and XOs. • Security and privacy research: OLPC isn't implementing much in the way of ”protecting kids from the big bad Internet”, instead leaving content filtering to participating countries. Thoughts?

18. More R&D possibilities... • Arduino support (the processing.org hardware)‏ • Adding Wiimote (BT) support to XO; the software is already available, but not integrated. Integration support for other bog-standard common USB gear. • Fleshing out ontological/metadata support in journal • CMC studies of how kids up-take chat/sharing funct. • ”Game jams” - weekend, goal of a jam usu. to produce one non-trivial, functional game Activity. • A non-trivial HyperCard/PythonCard clone

19. Synergies, Futurecasting • Ecology-building is a tricky business, and that's a very serious part of what's going on with OLPC. • Retro-inspired, in a sense: resets the compute environment to the historical norm of sharing-by-default, rather than commerce-driven • The XO ecology should be able to benefit from and contribute to the existing Unix/Apache/Python/Perl ecology that underlies much of Web/Lib 2.0

20. Inbuilt Biases / Conclusions • Tough for adults to prioritize what children will like or what they will use, particularly if we're firmly grounded by our prior experience • Educational time lag: ~50y from theory to practice. • Serious need to try to accelerate this, to put the best things possible in the hands of users/kids/whoever.

21. Discussion • Questions / thoughts / comments / etc?OLPC has minimal staff and grad students: much of the project is running on shoestring budgets out of people's kitchens or off unused corners of desks. :)