The XO Laptop in the Third World

A presentation with fascinating photos and arguments about the benefit of bring the laptops to remote third world schools.

Sky High XOs?

I don't know what to make of this photo. Do you sometimes feel like you have come out of a bomb shelter, like in Blast from the Past, and are attracted by strange and inexplicable phenomena?


The full article is chock-full of interesting information, but does not explain why you would use XOs strapped to the ceiling...

Music and the XO

Well, I was sitting around playing Barbu and Friends with a Wizard deck the other night with some Math friends and had my XO handy. Having just seen the news about last.fm, I thought I would give it a try. I wasn't expecting much since I have been having troubles playing videos - getting no video, choppy sound etc. Anyway, the site played beautifully through Firefox with Flash installed and we enjoyed some music on the Colin James' Similar Artists channel. Too bad that Pandora is still unable to have Canadian users.

Then, on my trip home, I realized that I had not charged my iPod. I whipped the XO out and had it running on the passenger seat, with its solid state drive, and it charged the iPod nicely before "As it happens" was done.

I just found out about feh. It sounds like it can make the XO act like a digital picture frame. I am going to try it out.

Does anyone have any suggestions about a good .mp3 player application for the XO that will play music off a USB drive - with playlists, shuffle, continuous play etc?

The XO Laptop - An Education Project

So far, I haven't spent much time with the XO applications that ship on the device. My children have been dabbling with TamTam and some of the others.

I have been fussing with getting Firefox, Flash, Skype and OpenOffice.org running. In the meantime, I have been learning a lot and experiencing a fair degree of frustration. This frustration is probably similar to the frustration/crankiness/feeling-dumbness that novice computer users experience at one of my workshops about Sketchpad or Fathom or some other application. When they are unfamiliar with the keyboard, don't understand the file system and can't find the sample files they are supposed to load and it feels like the experience is flashing by them, it is no wonder that they might think the whole thing is stoopid.

I think it is often useful to put ourselves back in that learning mode to regenerate empathy. It is like when Math teachers try to get a CAS to do what they are very comfortable doing on the blackboard. They have trouble and it should generate empathy for their students who will have trouble with whatever approach to algebra is employed since they are new to it.

OLPC has an insightful response to the rather lousy review that the Guardian gave to the device (it's for the kids - stupid!). The reviewer sounds like he was trying to do a lot of the same things as I am. We talk about paper-trained teachers. Well I am paper-trained and Windows-trained!

Like the Possum Lodgers, I can pray "I'm a man, but I can change. If I have to. I guess." But it is not so bad yet that I have to invoke their motto "Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati", "When all else fails, play dead".

Little Inexpensive Computers

I have been following, with interest, the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) initiative and am looking forward to receiving one soon (Canadians were put on the back of the bus, it seems, for Give One Get One deliveries).

Then I saw Tim Hawes' Asus Eee PC, running CLIPS, and Ustream.tv and generally handling everything, except perhaps fat fingers, thrown at it during Will Richardson's workshop in London.

Intel, on and now off the OLPC board, has its own offering, the Classmate PC.

Today, in Vicki Davis' del.icio.us RSS feed, I found Kathy Schrock's post about Mobile Internet Devices in which she mentions the Everex Cloudbook.

Look at the specs for this computer, soon to be sold at walmart.com (do I really need to add a link?). I wonder if walmart.ca will offer it too.

9 Inches, 2 pounds, 5 hours of battery life. Surf, email, blog, IM, Skype, compute. Cloud computing makes it simple and easy for everyone. Based on the latest gOS Rocket operating system, the ultra-mobile Everex PC comes with popular applications from Google, Mozilla, Skype, OpenOffice.org and more. Find your $399 CloudBook at Walmart.com beginning 1/25/08. Additional Preinstalled and Linked Software Mozilla Firefox, gMail, Meebo, Skype, Wikipedia, GIMP, Blogger, YouTube, Xing Movie Player, RythemBox, Faqly, Facebook and OpenOffice.org 2.3 (includes WRITER, IMPRESS, DRAW, CALC, BASE) Hardware Specifications 1.2GHz, VIA C7®-M Processor ULV, 512MB DDR2 533MHz, SDRAM, 30GB Hard Disk Drive, 7" WVGA TFT Display (800 x 480), VIA UniChrome Pro IGP Graphics, VIA High-Definition Audio, 802.11b/g, (1) 10/100 Ethernet Port, (1) DVI-I Port, (2) USB 2.0 Ports, (1) 4-in1 Media Card Reader, (1) 1.3MP Webcam, (1) Headphone/Line-Out Port, (1) Microphone/Line-In Port, (1) Set of Stereo Speaker, (1) Touchpad, (1) 4-Cell Lithium-Ion Battery

Get involved with the Open Source community! Join Everex and FOSS partners gOS, Koolu, OpenMoko, OpenOffice, ZaReason, Zonbu and more.. Email customerservice [at] everex [dot] com for more info.

You get the feeling that Open Source is going mainstream and that small, connected devices might actually be closer to being commonplace among students. Now imagine if they were actually allowed to use them at school!