[Its.an.education.project] Sugar on the EEE PC

[Samuel Klein]

On Fri, May 9, 2008 at 4:36 PM, Stephen John Smoogen <smooge at gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Fri, May 9, 2008 at 1:23 PM, K. K. Subramaniam <subbukk at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > On Friday 09 May 2008 9:33:26 pm Eben Eliason wrote:
> >> > Even if you were to provide an computer exclusively to each child,
> they
> >> > are unlikely to be in use all day long. Programmers in IT companies
> may
> >> > spend their whole day before a computer, but children do have a life
> >> > beyond the keyboard :-).
> >>
> >> You bring up two points both of which, I feel, support the goals of
> >> OLPC and Sugar.  First, child ownership ensures that the kids get to
> >> take the laptops /home/ with them.
> > Access to computing should not be confused with ownership of laptops. Ask
> > anyone who used a laptop for more than a few hours away from a power
> > socket :-)
>

Subbu, this is a very good point.  The mechanisms of empowerment we talk
about are mainly access to knowledge, connection with others, and a creative
environment; and persistent access to one's own writing and creative works.


> Or that in some places a child can not own anything as they are
> effectively 'owned' by their parents until they are of age.
>

This is also an issue.



> > Ownership per se means nothing to them.   What they need
> > is access to a learning environment. Often, a village school is the only
> > place where they can learn.
>
< Education can happen even on entry level laptops in such schools. The
> higher
> > cost could be offset by sharing one laptop between two kids (OLP2C!).
>

A worthy if difficult exercise : identifying great learning environments &
games that can be effectively shared through a fixed-geography lab, through
a fixed-geo lab with another computer that sits at home, through mobile
laptops shared among a number of people (OLPnC), and those that only work
well in the case of saturation and olpc.

SJ
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