Whether the issue is e-reading software or general ease of use by kids who aren’t future hackers, One Laptop Per Child needs to shape up.
Here’s a snippet from a new BusinessWeekly article, mentioning a Peruvian student: "His teacher had told the class to search the Internet for information on the environment, but the boy was stumped. ‘I was trying, but I couldn’t find anything,’ he explained. He seemed to think the Net was something contained within the machine."
Needed: Less worry about turning kids into Papert IIs
I’m pro-OLPC but wish the group could connect better with nonhackers and nonacademics. A smart civilian I know has given up on the machine for e-reading—a problem that the right e-reading software would have solved.
She is an adult, not a child. But the idea is the same. Once she was was talking up OLPC; will she do so in the future if the XO is unusable for her? Or for nonhacker children? Students should be able to get through school without being hackers, and the above example shows the challenges ahead. More focus on ease of use, please—and a little less focus on turning typical kids into hackers or Papert IIs. Here’s to balance! Meanwhile, no, the problem isn’t just software-related: the laptop needs to be better integrated with local schools, by way of thoughtful curriculum-develop and improved training for teachers and students.
The good news
The good news is that physically the XO-2 machine seems from afar to be optimized for e-reading, at least when you use it in the portrait mode. A sign that the software will reflect that? The present kind is too PDFcentric and too pokey.
Related: Some earlier TeleBlog items complaining of OLPC’s e-reading software bungles.
Image: CC-licensed photo from Curiouslee, aka Mike Lee, leader of the OLPC Learning Club D.C.
