On the OLPC
miller-mccune.com
miller-mccune.com
Cites a bunch of studies that show that introducing computers into schools in a cack-handed manner doesn't help. Tends to suggest this is the computers fault rather than the people rolling it out though.
"The World Bank studied a program in Colombia that increased the number of computers in schools ... and found no impact on student outcomes ... it was clear that the teachers simply weren't using the computers"
Found the info about the rise of private schools in slums and the impact of deworming (in both Africa and the US) surprising and interesting but I'm not a big fan of "you can't provide computers/open source software/better government until you've done X". Why not do both? In fact why not do anything that's shown to help, and prioritise by ROI?
Also interesting to see one of the easy and effective education reforms (grouping by ability, not age) is referred to as 'tracking'. I recognize the buzzword because the 4th series of the Wire mentions in passing that this is politically frowned upon in US schools.
I agree. In fact I think the article would have been better if it hadn't been about the OLPC at all, or if it had only mentioned the OLPC in passing.
Yeah, but at least they know how to use computers while those without OLPCs do not.
So I don't see how your comment is relevant. Sure there are situations where an alternative interface is a good thing but not when you're stated goal is to teach kids how to use modern computers. When that's your goal you want to have an interface that resembles everything else that's out there and the simple truth is Windows, OS X and just about every variant of Linux have certain conventions (basically their shared Xerox Parc heritage) that aren't shared by the OLPC
The major things that Sugar lacks from the common UI experience is overlapping windows and text-based menu bars, which are not difficult to learn once you have a solid understanding of the other stuff.
(It's kind of funny: people argue for a traditional interface for OLPC to teach kids to use Office, while Office's new "ribbon" interface is arguably closer to the toolbar-based applications in Sugar than most other Windows applications.)
Let me ask you this: Other than "to be clever" what's the point of creating an alternative interface in a device that's supposed to be a teaching machine? When we teach people to drive don't we use real cars? Would it make sense to use a car that had the brakes on the steering column but was the same as normal cars in every other way?
Teaching isn't about inventing new things it's about finding a way to convey old things to people who don't understand them.
P.S. The ribbon does in fact suck, you'll get no argument from me there.
This places screen real-estate at a premium... Essentially all applications will be running maximized, so title bars and other window decorations are a waste of space, as is having a menu/launching bar at the top or bottom of the screen.
And due to the XO's high pixels-per-inch, all text needs to be roughly 2-3 times larger in pixels than on a traditional display. Many applications on existing systems do not cope well with this requirement; most of the X11 applications that have been minimally ported to Sugar have text that is illegibly small.
The device's display is closer to a hand-held device than a typical laptop, so OLPC decided it needs a different UI than a typical laptop. And OLPC is not the only organization to make this choice: There are a number of manufacturers who are releasing Android-powered netbooks in the near future, as opposed to using more traditional UIs.
Unfortunately, Android was not an option at the time the XO was being developed. I imagine Maemo or Qtopia were not chosen for either licensing or maturity concerns. Any of these options would probably have been an OK alternative to Sugar, but none of them is a traditional overlapping-windows interface.