Um, no. Education != job training, K? HTH, HAND.

If that’s all you think education is about then you need to go back and get some more. Any nit can be sat in front of a screen and taught MS Word in a few hours, or days at the worst. This is not the school’s job.

Better that they leave school with the skills to learn quickly, efficiently, and independently. THAT is the point of education and you don’t get that from learning Office.

Well, yes, because once they *leave* the confines of school, they will be confronted with that the majority of the business world uses. They do intend to get jobs, right?

This is not an endorsement of the Classmate, just my attempt to tamper down the XO-as-Xanadu enthusiasm.

Robert, my question was specifically about the screen technology, not how the XO handles ebooks (which I’m sure will be many future posts from the in-love-with-his-XO Rothman). If she intends to commercialize that screen tech, I can immediately think of one company that might want to use it to enter the e-reader fray with their own device: Microsoft. So, is it superior to eInk, David? In what ways and how so?

has me convinced that Mr Negroponte is a great visionary and promoter of his vision, who is only fairly good as a salesman (he can get interest but can’t close the sale) and a poor manager and hopeless businessman.

I can only hope that Jepson’s departure leads to a shakeup at Laptop.org, and that Mr Negroponte is “promoted” into a position of ‘founder and senior visionary’ and that they get a good, hard-headed, practical businessman manager to actually run things, and that he will have the power to shut Negroponte up and tell him to go sit in a corner and cool off for awhile.

We don’t know what Negroponte’s view of the split with Intel might be. It might be that Intel was telling Negroponte, “If you want our chips you must cut off all contact with AMD,” and Negroponte responded with, “Fine, I will drop AMD if you will drop the ClassmatePC, is it a deal?” And Intel said, “Stick with AMD if you want, and we will bury you just as we promised from the start.”

But even if the above hyopothetical is true, it doesn’t suggest that Negroponte is a shrewd negotiator or able to live with the big boys upon whom, in the end, his dream depends.

Sad, really. The XO is a fantastic realization of the Constructivist dream, and a lot of very talented people, including Jepson and Negroponte, have worked long and hard to make it a reality. Version 2.0 should be the real deal and Intel Silverthorn chips, circa 2009, would be a great addition.

In re: the interface, the OLPC is a task metaphor UI, not a document metaphor UI (all desktop-like GUIs such as Windows, OS X, and most Linux systems use are actually document metaphor UIs). Plenty of task metaphor UIs exist in the world–in fact, most things are task metaphor UIs.

The OLPC OS brings a new twist to the task metaphor–the Journal, which is much more than simply a record of task history. It’s also version control, record of collaboration, and a taggable and searchable database of system activity. You want to see that document you worked on last Thursday? Hit the Journal, run back to Thursday, and there it is. Then you can look by activity and see all the times you worked on that document, with who, and investigate all the changes. Very powerful, especially in a school environment; students and teachers have an instant record of things they’re doing. Think, for example, of what you can do for homework management: start a task in class–say, a paper on local insects. Since it’s not finished in class the student can add the due date & the assignment details as Journal metadata, flag it as important, and come back to the Journal later that week and pick it up right where she left off. Wow.

Try that with Windows.

It’s always been interesting to me that the document metaphor has persisted for general computing when time and time again it’s demonstrated that people tend think in tasks–”What am I doing?”–more naturally than in spatial terms–i.e., “Where is what I am doing?”

The XO interface is astounding in it’s simplicity. It is extraordinarily intuitive for young minds. (Older ones like mine have some problems). The fact that is freely available will help this machine stay cheap and accessible.

Contrary to being a threat, I think that Microsoft, Apple, Intel, and other computer manufacturers stand to make some big long term gains as all those young minds reach out for more functionality and accessibility.

Mike, as an XO owner I believe the display is great! But there are problems opening ebook files and especially problems with PDFs. The process for doing so is not intuitive. Also, the buttons on the display don’t really help in tablet mode when reading pdf or web surfing. I think these things are fixable over time. The interface is better suited to reading web pages than binary files (even if you have FBREADER installed).

I expect we’ll discuss this further in greater detail.

One trick by the way is opening up the browser in file:/// so you can browse through the files on the file system.

One is the OLPC, the other is Windows. Can you tell which is which?

I’m sorry, but having had hands on the Sugar-based system for a while now, and having had hands on the OLPC hardware itself for a bit, there’s no question in my mind which is superior as an education tool. Negroponte is right to seek to dissuade Intel fro poisoning the education well with Windows-based systems like Classmate. I’m sure he’d have no objection to different hardware platforms running the OLPC OS–but that’s not what Classmate is.

Having multiple hardware platforms running an education-designed system is a good thing. Feeding Windows machines to kids is a bad thing. All they’d learn on Windows is how to run Office–is that a good thing? Versus learning how to *think* with computer aids, how to collaborate with peers using computer tools, and how to *argue* with computer models?

In re: Jepsen’s departure: Note that the patents on the OLPC screen were assigned *by Jepsen* to the OLPC foundation, so her departure to commercialize this display is clearly done with full knowledge and consent of the OLPC folks. This is a good thing. The screen Jepsen has designed is freaking beautiful; I want one on every device I own.

It would be interesting to see if her screen would be picked up by any reading device makers.