First Thoughts on OLPC
I bought my daughter an OLPC for Christmas. The original idea my wife had was to get something like the Barbie B-Smart laptop but looking at that, it seemed like it would be an interesting toy for a kid who likes toys that make noise when you push buttons, but my daughter isn’t really that kind of kid. She goes through reams of paper doing drawings and paintings, she’d happily spend all day reading and doing crafts. So part of my thinking was that she seems to respond better to “creating” than “interacting”. I’d thought about buying an OLPC last year after reading Bill Clementson’s posts on OLPC, but at that point I didn’t think my daughter would get much out of it – she just wasn’t that interested in computers. That’s changed in the last year, now she and her little sister fight over access to the computer. So little sis got the Barbie laptop, big sis got the real deal.
First the positives: the laptop seems to be quite rugged. The keyboard is sealed with a rubber cover. The keys are small, for my 6 year old’s hands, they should make touch typing a real possibility. The screen is small but resolution is very, very nice. There’s a nice array of programs installed; some don’t have an obvious utility (there’s a focus on peer-to-peer networking that I find puzzling), but on the plus side, there’s a few games, a simple but not totally bare bones word processor, and a photo/video/audio recording program. I really like the inclusion of a scaled down Wikipedia. It’s a fantastic thing to have a hypertext encyclopedia right on the machine.
The negatives are few, but serious. The effective battery life seems to be only about an hour. The machine is slow – application load times run about half a minute, and the local version of Wikipedia takes on the order of minutes to load a page sometimes, which really decreases the usefulness of having instantly available information. On top of that, it’s very easy to be left with several applications running; give the limited processing power at hand, that can quickly bog down the machine. The mousepad varies between being totally insensitive and extremely touchy. I’m thinking that a regular USB mouse would be a good addition.
There are the unknowns as well. I’d like to have a copy of the chat program on my PC – there don’t seem to be any XO’s in the neighborhood, but there’s no reason I couldn’t chat with her from my computer. The XO has an impressive variety of music related activities: a couple of music composition/editing programs and a synthesizer interface, but the documentation for these doesn’t seem to exist and the TamTam Edit program, in particular, is both tantalizingly powerful and punishingly difficult to use (especially with the jumpy mouse). Most interesting is the user community around the XO. It seems like it would be useful to have a user group for kids to show each other what they’re doing with the XO, but there doesn’t seem to be much of that going on right now – there are no user groups on record for Colorado, for example.
The social aspect of the whole OLPC project is an interesting aspect. I was inspired by this story on NPR, thinking that if these kids could do neat things with the XO, then my daughter would find it rewarding. The comments touch on some of the same criticisms that came up years ago. I tend to agree with Dare’s take from 3 years ago: simply because people are poor doesn’t mean that they can’t find technology helpful. Still, given the battery life, I can easily believe that access to AC power is a serious problem in Vicho and places like it. It does feel good to feel like you’re contributing to something larger than just my child’s enrichment, and the NPR stories are very interesting, but I’m very curious
— Gordon Weakliem
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The chat program is just jabber; you should be able to sign up with other apps. Otherwise, get the VMWare image and run it on the system.
— Steve Loughran · 30 December 2008, 05:35 · #
I was thinking it was likely Jabber, I’ll have to try that out.
BTW, I cleaned the trackpad with mild dish detergent today and it works much better -simple solution though the fact that its so sensitive to being dirty isn’t encouraging.
— Gordon Weakliem · 30 December 2008, 19:02 · #
the Jabber/XMPP chat probably uses link-local XMPP. I haven’t found any confirmation for this, or any literature on chatting with XOs from PCs.
On your PC, you need Bonjour for Mac & Windows, avahi-daemon for *nix, and an XMPP client supporting link-local messaging. In Pidgin 2.5, it’s a seperate protocol called Bonjour.
Link-local XMPP is part of the peer-to-peer spirit: noone has to setup an XMPP server for the machines to chat.
— hdh · 31 December 2008, 07:39 · #
@hdh – you’re absolutely right, it’s Bonjour. I installed pidgin along with the Bonjour Toolkit and It Just Works – as I expected my daughter thinks the IM is great.
— Gordon Weakliem · 3 January 2009, 09:21 · #