Søndag 25 juni 2006 20:24, skrev José L. Redrejo Rodríguez: > At LinEx we have interest in this project, next Friday I'll have a > meeting with Jim Getty and will get more information to know if it > makes sense for us to work on it.
One of the interesting things about the OLPC is that it will be deployed from the pupils from the first day, and they will relay heavily on kids learning from each other. The "Hole in the wall" experiments lead by Sugata Mitra shows that this really will help kids getting better in English and math. The kids get more social and cooperative, and more interested in school. - News article: http://www.egovmonitor.com/node/5865 - Scientific articels: http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/docs/Paper06.pdf http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/Publications.html One of the challenges is to make the desktop as easy accessible as possible for pupils that cant read at all, and making the desktop "grow" when the pupils are getting older. On the technical part is quite a challenge, because it's gonna be suited for learning. Things has to be light weight and in the same instance be easy to use. I found this web page discussing memory usage: http://kegel.com/linux/comfort/ There is no memory that could handle OpenOffice.org on the OLPC-machine. Interestingly this is an advantages in lower grades. OpenOffice.org are made for bureaucratic work, and are suitable for headmasters and the office workers at the schools. It's not a learning tool made for teaching when the kids are 6-7 or 9 years old. They really hate that application. A simple and easy to use text tool with cool fonts and drawing capability is more in line for teaching purposes when using computers for pupils in their four fist years at school. Is also a factor that the length of the education in developing countries is often not more than 5-6 years, if the kids are lucky. At GUADEC 2004 a person from the Telecentros project in Brazil told that the kids really didn't get any school at all. It was no schools, and it was no teachers. So the effort on choosing good applications for learning is a difficult and probably the most important part of the OLPC project. The technical things are doable. Our experience as engineers says that. But to understanding the usability environment for lower graduates, it still science, as the the "Hole in the wall" experiments shows. > I think we could collaborate in points 1 & 4, as we have experience > in working with installers, and we have begun the project > Futura[1][2] thinking in the obsolescence of the computers we have > at our schools. Even if our hardware requirements are still far from > the OLPC machines, I think the same developments could apply pretty > easily. This is good. As you probably know I'm starting at Trolltech as a Community Manager in August. A lot for my work will be in contact whit the universities and university colleges to get students working with free software as part of their education. 14 student projects has contributed to the Skolelinux project since 2002. Professional engineers from the industry has contributed as external "customers" for the students. I believe subsystem in the OLPC is a excellent to make students both making something useful, and to get them to know free software. http://d.skolelinux.no/info/studentgrupper/index.html.en Anyway: I think we should we coordinate our effort on the debian-edu list and debian-custom list. :) Thanks Knut Yrvin
