[dundee] OLPC Videos...niiiiiiiiiice!

[Robert McWilliam]

On Tue, Jan 22, 2008 at 01:16:59AM -0800, Gary Short wrote: > 

> If the OLPC is designed to help those in especially rural areas,
> with little or no contact with more populated areas, how does OLPC
> software get from the hard drives of those in the more populated areas
> to the hard drives of the people you speak of? I know the OLPC has
> peer to peer network capabilities, but the software on the hard drives
> of your peers is always going to be a (very) small subset of the total
> software available. What do you do if you want a title that your
> reachable peers don't have?  >

Same way the device itself gets there. You send it preloaded with
useful stuff. Rural doesn't have to mean completely cut off from the
rest of the world, you could have internet connections, or whenever
someone is going into the more populated areas they take a disk of
goodies back with them. I remember reading about a scheme in, I think,
India where email was collected from and delivered to a bunch of rural
villages via someone on a motorbike driving round them, and the local
server forwarded stuff to the computer on the bike. There is always
TCP via carrier pigeon too. 

> True, but raising money for teachers must be easier than raising
> money for laptops. How do I know? Well, take any subset of the
> population and its got to be much easier to explain to them how
> teachers will help improve education than it is to explain how
> laptops will improve education - intuition is on your side with that
> arguement. 

Why not do both? Raising money isn't a zero sum game, OLPC raising the
profile of helping education will probably increase the funding to
other education schemes. The people who think they get the best bang
for their buck funding teachers do that, those who think the
technology route can improve things more fund that. And those of us in
the camp thinking some mix of the two will get best results sit on the
fence and give some to both. 

> Having said that, we have an OLPC scheme, we dont' have a
> teachers sans frontiers scheme so its right that people support it.

There are schemes to send teachers to developing countries (it is a
common gap year activity).

________________________________________________________
Robert McWilliam     rmcw at allmail.net    www.ormiret.com

What if the Hokey Kokey IS what it's all about?