[Its.an.education.project] Ivan's latest blog entry on OLPC

[Antoine van Gelder]

On 13 May 2008, at 21:07, Christoph Derndorfer wrote:

> http://radian.org/notebook/sic-transit-gloria-laptopi
>
> This is definitely a must-read!


Delicious.


+1 to a strategy of Open Learning


-1 to a strategy of Open Learning Foundation. Rather brush up on your  
Karl Popper and put together a funding proposal that is compatible  
with the strategic goals of the Open Society Institute. (Well,  
actually this is not to say that it might not end up being called the  
OLF, but I think what I'm trying to say is that it needs to plug into  
'up-stream' because a lot of what would constitute an OLF is already  
covered by OSI in a manner which is philosophically compatible with  
what has happened in Sugar land so far. :-D)


+1 to a strategy of "sugar the learning & collaborations API for  
creating educational applications along constructionist lines"  vs  
"sugar the yet another window manager theme"


-1 to a strategy that involves expending energy or resources on  
anything that's going to be shipping without kernel sources.  
Basically, my two big arguments are: from a kid's perspective the big  
gain of having the source is not becoming a kernel hacker but rather  
a) the life-long knowledge that kernels are written by mortal men and  
here is the source code to prove it so you don't have to waste the  
next fifty years of your life fighting those who would have you think  
otherwise and b) it places strict limits on the interference of  
state&big business in schools by limiting covert interference with the  
operation of computer operating systems used in education. [1]   
Another way of saying all of this is that:  "Countries don't have a  
constitution because folk are going to be using it on a daily basis to  
decide judgement for jay-walking or littering."


+1 for a strategy of tapping someone for funds to write a web-based  
deployment management app and other supporting software systems. pref.  
someone like Carla Gomez-Monroy is the decider on what gets written  
and not the person who is providing the funding. (one would really  
think that this was so obvious one wouldn't have to make it explicit  
huh ? :-D)


-1 for a strategy that leaves deployment as a constructivist  
educational activity for volunteers.


+1 for coming up with a strategy for how to ensure that we have libre'  
firmware and drivers on the next iteration of XO hardware. (Hi Mary  
Lou!)


-1 on wasting even one more second talking about Microsoft, Windows  
and whether nn or rms is the devil. This is a free market in an open  
society. Let everyone have their market share. We prevail not because  
we want to see folk with different histories and different  
philosophical approaches to us fail but because we are too excited by  
the chance to prove that our ideals can work much better to waste even  
a day on living in the past! We've got a roadmap to a future in which  
computers have helped ensure that every child in the world will get a  
chance to have an education! So let's start walking!


+1 for coming up with a strategy to promote policies in education  
departments and schools that favors vendors who produce educational  
hardware with libre' firmware and drivers.  [2]


  - antoine



[1] e.g. http://craphound.com/littlebrother/  Quis custodiet ipsos  
custodes? Answer: ALL OF US!

[2] Let me be explicit here for the benefit of the competition: If I  
promote a policy to favor open source software then you can make an  
anti-trust case against me. But if I make a policy to promote hardware  
with open firmware & drivers then those machines will run a lot better  
in the FLOSS ecosystem for the simple reason that you only have one  
hardware driver guy and your hardware guy is MISERABLE and pissed ALL  
THE TIME because no one knows who he is and no one understands the  
immense value and the immense difficulty of the work he does. So maybe  
I also only have one hardware guy (Hi Mitch!) but my hardware guy has  
a horde of kids following him around on #olpc listening to every  
morsel of wisdom dropping out of his mouth so he is HAPPY. And happy  
engineers write better code, faster than unhappy engineers. Go figure!