One Laptop Per Child Review from the.Inevitable.Org/anism
Scott C. Lemon at the.Inevitable.Org/anism bought a XO Laptop from the One Laptop Per Child people. The first time I saw these was at CES 2007. They allowed me to play with a prototype, which is very similar to the original.
Back then, I found the keyboard completely unusable for my petite hands, but I was excited to hear Scott’s review of the product.
He didn’t mention the small keyboard, but he had lots to say about it’s “half-baked” status:
So what isn’t baked yet? Well … the XO Laptop can’t see any of the FIVE wireless access points at my house! Yes … I read the entire Start page on “connecting†… but that isn’t it. I can manually open a terminal, and use iwconfig and dhclient to get the networking working … but that is a hassle. I have taken the laptop elsewhere and it seems to detect the wireless APs of other places. I will admit that I have some unique SSIDs (that contain slashes) that might be screwing them up … so I might try to poke around the source code looking … 🙂
Other things are that they don’t currently support cut and paste in some places! I’ve been reading the wiki and getting instructions on how to do things … but then I can’t cut from the browser and paste into the terminal. Ugh!
The one thing that I will say is that Sam loves his new laptop. And we have downloaded a whole bunch of the activities, and he is already navigating through Sugar and playing with lots of them. I just got one that is a peer-to-peer game of Connect 4 … he and I haven’t played that one yet … but Andrea and I did … we each won one game.
My biggest problem with the OLPC initiative is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. You can’t advance up the pyramid of needs until the bottom layers are taken care of. The OLPC seems like an esteem need to me. It falls in the “achievement” category. Having a computer might seem like a basic need for survival to you and me, but in the thick of things, I would sell my computer for food. Children in the third world countries are a little more preoccupied with the lower levels of the hierarchy of needs, so OLPC turns out to be a valiant, but misguided effort. If you want to help kids in the third world, send them food, vaccines or help them build an adequate house. They can worry about OLPC’s when they have those basic needs met.