OLPC laptop blocked by “chicken feed” politics
By Matt Jansen
One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) aspires to put laptops in the hands of children around the globe. While pursuing this goal OLPC has endured feral competition from the commercial segment courtesy of Intel and Microsoft. Now the organization faces politicians with priorities elsewhere and limited interest.
Education in every country rests at a different water level and according to BBC News the education minister of Nigeria, Dr Igwe Aja-Nwachuku says “what is the sense of introducing One Laptop per Child when they don’t have seats to sit down and learn; when they don’t have uniforms to go to school in, where they don’t have facilities?”
That’s a sharp change from the previous administration’s intention to purchase a million laptops. Laptops would provide a way for children to participate in the fastest growing communication medium today, the Internet. Learning doesn’t happen only in the classroom, and it’s a veiled way for politicians to say they aren’t ready for change. They’d rather just keep eating the same old chicken feed.
Underneath all of their go-to-market woes, OLPC is pushing forward with some innovative features. The laptop, called the XO includes two antennae on the top of its screen. Those enable it to both pick up WiFi signals and transmit them. That means one connection to the Internet could easily be shared with other XOs and re-transmitted in an extensible and mobile mesh network.
It also ships with a “yoyo” device which allows the user to recharge the laptop with a pumping motion. OLPC estimates that 1 minute of pumping will provide 10 minutes of power for the XO.
Inside the green casing and white interior, the XO is powered by the Sugar OS. According to Wikipedia, “unlike more traditional desktop environments, it does not use a ‘desktop’ metaphor and only focuses on one task at a time”. It’s intended to make the XO an easy system to learn.
Here is a video overview of the XO:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfV7hZGyGlk[/youtube]
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