[dundee] OLPC Videos...niiiiiiiiiice!

[Tim Spencer]

off topic nope went to sleep at like 6 i had everything planned out for the
day from class to ms talk and had my asl shirt laied out but just couldnt be
arsed too tired

on topic

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

1. true but false. explaining concepts is not having ur foot in the door so
to speek. people donate money when they r tuched thats why u get to c so
many starvibng children on tele (leving out the sensationalsim) cause
otherwise poeple wouldnt care. apart from the buisness model of sides e.g.
selling to cuntries. this is the perfect geek fundrais i.e. u get a laptop
for 200 dollars. to get teachers u would have to thing of another angle

2. rural is now not nessecarly rural e.g. wifi antennas. i mean i like that
africa just shits on copyrigth and they produces it themselves even ms
products.

3. .net is nice but i cant imagine primy school children starting to use it
and compare the ouptut of 'linx' realted projects which dont cost anything
is insuficient for this kind of development

4. flash but that was explained

That's a neat idea but, unfortunatly, things are a little more complicated
> than that. Take Zimbabwe for example, it used to be the bread basket of
> Africa and a relatively prosperous country, and yet the current government
> there has totally wrecked the country's economy. So we can see from this
> example that pumping money into a country is not necessarily a good idea,
> you must ensure that political backing and stability are also in place. I'm
> not sure aid agencies have the cabability to do that and the current
> situation with Zimbabwe has shown that, often, other governments are slow to
> pressurise inginious governments to get to a place where the type of aid
> that you speak of above could be given.
>

5. thats a given but explain that to politicians they dont like what they
dont like and they have better ways of getting to it then everybody else
and they dont really care bout other people

6. a cathedral way for this project could never work and would take up far
too much money. ms platforms are alrigth but not custom designed at least
not to this standard

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?


7. dont forget that the original idea of book pc has changed an now they
also want t implements servers in each school to link them up. we are
discussing this project from a wwrong stand point

8. getting teachers is complicated and a long term investment. have to
educated people sned them to places and hope they dont fuck off because they
can get better paied jobs. the best i dea for that already exsists. but a
child as in u pay for the schooling

I don't think anyone on this list was criticising the OLPC project per se, I
> certainly wasn't. I don't think its a bad idea, just not the best use of the
> money.
>

9. how not. 100 dollar laptop is the cheapest and best of its kind i have
seen well ever


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

10. sweet but u would have to do it with finished educated teachers so i.e.
send them off for a year ehrn they could work in this country

Of course, but (hopefully) there will be new software added to the catalogue
> of available software at regular intervals. Very soon the first laptops will
> become "out of date" and after time, there will (again hopefully) be so much
> software that it can't all be housed on the hard drive of just one machine.
> At that point you have to have a process whereby new software can be
> cascaded down to even the most remote village. If you don't have such a
> scheme then you run the risk of creating a two tier community - those with
> access to the central repository (though this repository could easily be
> distributed) and those who do not.
>

11. yerah but hopefully they have some kind of backwards compatibility i.e.
u can still read .txt files on every machine i ever had. and as long as they
can read it they evolve

Unlikely in rural areas. The reason the OLPC is hand cranked is 'cos a lot
> of these places don't even have electricity.
>

12. there is electrisity but kids cant afford it. and parents dont need to
pay more


> This is a good idea and could form the backbone of the cascade process
> required above.


13. yup


> True!


14. that would have been better say with each laptop u pay 20 dollars for
teachers pay or somn like that but when u start there u need to pay school
uniforms cause some student cane go to school cause they cant afford one of
them and on and on. its not 42 but a start
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/dundee/attachments/20080122/db13f8eb/attachment-0001.html