Amazon will sell OLPC laptops

Starting in November, Amazon will sell the One Laptop Per Child XO laptop, a marvel of engineering and pedagogy, on a "give one, get one" basis: every XO you buy will also pay for one to be given to a kid in the developing world:

This year, OLPC teamed up with a Web retailer instead of running the program itself, said Matt Keller, director of Europe, Middle East and Africa at OLPC.
Amazon.com will start selling XO laptops under the Give One, Get One program in late November. Sales will likely extend through the end of December.

Amazon to sell OLPC XO laptops in November

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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mgfarrelly

I’ve used an OLPC with kids in a library setting and can say that it is a HUGE hit with pretty much any child. The whining about the design being “toylike” or goofy is EXACTLY the appeal. Most PCs are big boring boxes, especially the bulk purchase ones most libraries get, so something kid-sized, colorful and just plain different is really appealing. Working with kids who don’t have computers at home, or in the classroom, it can be a challenge to get them interested in anything other than games. The OLPC got them playing in the source code in under a half hour. I can’t enthuse enough about this little box.

I’m very happy that Amazon is involved, hopefully this will put more of these great machines out there for young people.
Enochrewt

I will get one just so one gets sent out to a kid. I can’t really see using it too much, but maybe I’ll start using it as a day planner and things will grow from there. OR I’ll give it to me 5 year old niece. She lives in Wyoming, it’s like a third world country.

#7 Airship: I’m sure that you could always take the one you got and give it to a toy drive or something. Maybe take a note from the Child’s Play organization and dontate it to the children’s ward of a hospital? Tis the season after all.
zikzak

#3 mmr:
It’s too bad that you didn’t like the one you got, but you’re dead wrong about the XO being “not a real computer”. It runs a pretty standard Fedora linux distribution, and so far has been able to install and run any software that I could on a commercial PC running Fedora. Since it’s a real computer, you can scrap Fedora and install other OSes too, like Ubuntu or even XP.

It’s true there have been some problems with the WiFi chipset when using certain brands of AP, but that’s just a driver problem, which they’ll hopefully fix soon.

It seems that your criticism should more accurately have been that it was too hard to figure out how to make it do the things you wanted. Which is a valid complaint, but much more easily solved by using some different software. Also, the things you wanted to do were probably not the things it’s used for in an educational setting.
back seat astronaut

Plus it trains ‘em early for the cubicles.
TraverJ

Good – I have been waiting for them to start the give one get one program again. I missed my chance last fall.
FoetusNail

Part of the problem with having only one is you can’t experience the Sugar interface as designed. Sugar is designed to create and facilitate collaborative groups. We wanted to get one last time, but the other families in our group opted out. You really need at least two kids working together to fully appreciate this computer.
EtaWat

Out of the box the G1G1 we got last time did seem pretty limited to us adults, I agree.

We had a browser, wifi (I tweaked my wifi at home and had no problem after that) and a writer plus a webcam.

But the other goodies that came with it would be of enormous interest to kids who

1) have lots of time to fiddle around with stuff
2) actually have patience to figure things out when given the time and not being rushed

After updating my G1G1 OLPC a few days ago, I had to reinstall the activity packs (programs) and after searching I found several ones that I installed in place.

You can easily switch to console and treat it like a small linux box, if adventurous you could even try and run it as your own webserver.

It’s a powerful little tool (it even has ÃžÃ†Ã on the keyboard! big bonus points for that!) and I’m tempted to get a 2nd one for my daughter to play with in a year or so when she’s old enough, I’m keeping mine even if it’s just a toy to me too.

As for those kids who have never encountered a Windows system or any sort of computer, of course its ground breaking! It’s not long ago I dreamt of a place where I could get any information any time I wanted instead of gleaming it from weeks old magazines that finally hit the stands.

Just getting football results from England took days and weeks in the old days (old newspapers and magazines), now I go online and see live updates.

Don’t dismiss the OLPC so easily, you are also forgetting that its made specifically for education, not just as a cheap laptop. Hence its superior engineering to avoid dust and other stuff interrupting it or ruining it.

Is it a fully blown PC like we are used to at work or home? No.

Is it a mind blowing tool for kids who live in grass or mud huts? Yes.

The sociological impact of the OLPC project will linger long after itself has vanished, be it due to failed business model or better products from others.

PS.
The G1G1 will again only be availble to US residents. A way around this is again to get someone in the US to order one for you.
hal2k

One correction: It is not as quoted a “a marvel of engineering and pedagogy”. It may be a marvel of technology, but OLPC is a perpetuation of the same mistake educational technologists have been making for the last 20 – 30 years.

While technology can foster opportunities to learn, it does not in itself create that opportunity. Drop shipping a bunch of laptops without a decent curriculum, long-term commitment to training of educators and a long-term view of *how* the technology can be used does not transform learning at all.

I have written about the OLPC project at length because it is a poster child for what is wrong with how we approach education. We seek technological solutions to problems that are essentially people oriented. History is littered with the abandoned carcasses of these projects.

In a way, I think OLPC has done a grave disservice to education in general. The team spent much more time designing the casing that designing meaningful curriculum and learning objects that can make use of the technology. The included suite of software is quite hum-drum and confused about what the aims are. It seems to me that educators that were not technologists never had any say in how this came out — perhaps at the very end.

I understand that curriculum and training are not sexy. You cannot dress it up in a sexy lime green outfit and get people excited. It has to be about stuff, and not real change. No one really wants to do the work that is necessary to effect real learning opportunities; it is hard because people are nuanced, and learning styles differ. It is not a box. It does not get a write up in BoingBoing, Slashdot or elsewhere. It slips by unnoticed by everyone except for those that are actually involved in teaching.
Danny O’Brien

The other thing to note is that they keep updating the software — the latest version is much better than the default that was shipped with the original G1G1.

It’s worth bearing in mind that if you’re a G1G1 user, you’re not the main audience — OLPC has something like 350,000 machines in developing countries, and works to support those, rather than individual machines. I’m lucky enough to know other kids with OLPCs, so you begin to see what it must be like in a structured teaching environment, with shared applications.
Stefan Jones

I bought a couple of XOs last winter.

I’ve used one of them on and off since then, mainly as a travel PC. During a trip from OR to FL last spring, I had no problem whatsoever connecting to airport WiFi services. On planes, I turned off the radio modem and used it as an eBook reader; the screen is wonderfully sharp and works great in non-backlit mode.

I had lots of folks approach me on planes and in airports wondering what the thing was. Most of them wanted one.

Here are some pictures of the case I made for it:

OLPC case 1

OLPC case 2

OLPC case 3

The Sugar interface is a bit of a pain. Just yesterday I brought the machine to work and in the space of an hour had it bring up XCFE instead; firefox is a bit cramped but I was able to read mail and the Making Light board just fine.
yatima

Big kid got one last Christmas / 5th birthday present (she’s a Christmas baby!) By New Year’s she was using Etoys to put together very simple scripts.

As far as I’m concerned, it’s the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer.
GBC

Hopefully Amazon’s involvement will not only raise the profile of the OLPC’s mission, but will mean that this next version of G1G1 goes smoothly.

OLPC were not prepared at all for the first G1G1 programme and it was an absolute debacle. They repeatedly missed delivery deadlines and kept those of us who participated in the dark about what was happening.

It was so bad that they managed to turn many of their supporters against the programme – the general consensus being if they couldn’t get the logistics right for a first world rollout, how are they going to manage it in less developed countries.

Despite that initial bad experience, I still support what they do and would gladly recommend the XO laptop if you are in the market for a “netbook”. Check the forums on olpcnews.com to see the sort of things that are possible with the laptops if you are curious.
back seat astronaut

Does this mean there’s gonna be an influx of starving African children on Facebook? Yay, progress!
imcampos

The gadget may well be a marvel of engineering, but no one can, at this moment in time, claim that it is a marvel of pedagogy. This may come as a surprise to many of you but, to this date, not a single experiment was made by the project authors to back up their claims about its pedagogical value. The US does not lack communities with the same characteristics found in emerging economies, therefore some validating experiment *could* have been attempted. But it was not. Instead, the OLPC project goes directly to government officials in developing nations, usually not tech savvy, and try to convince them to buy the gadget by the millions. I insist that validating the project’s claims about its pedagogical value would do wonders in conquering hearts and minds everywhere. At this point in time, it sounds like a highly talented and well-intended group of engineers created an exciting technical solution but do not know exactly which problem it solves. Their claim that it has pedagogical value, especially in poor communities, is so far baseless.
Lester

I’ve been on the fence about picking up a netbook or an ebook reader (Kindle/Sony Reader) thingy. I’ve seen the OLPC in action as a reader and it does just as well as eink IMO.

Would I be crazy to get pick one up for surfing/email/word processing/reading?

#17: guess I’ll have to stop gifting cupcakes. too cruel
mmr

I had one. It was ‘fun’ for a minute, but I had trouble with it out of the box. It was horrendously slow and never would connect with my WiFi network.

At the end of the day, you are better off spending more money for a NetBook which is actually a real computer. Not something that is crippled.

Granted, this computer was never supposed to replace the faster computers out there. But after playing with it I feel that children who gets these won’t really further themselves that much.

Kind of like how all the cell phone companies started making ‘kiddie’ phones for the younger generation. Well, the fact is, kids these days don’t need gimped phones. So they basically missed their mark from day one. This seems like the same thing. Just give the kids a real computer with the same functionality.
zikzak

#19, lester:
I love my XO, but I will admit that the keyboard is a little awkward for adult fingers. It’s not unusable, but definitely takes some getting used to – I still can’t type as fast on it as a full keyboard.

However for surfing and reading it’s been a dream. My favorite use is to load on a bunch of ebooks (you can run FBReader, a great open source ebook reader), turning off the backlight, flipping the screen into “tablet mode” and reading in sunlight or lamplight. The resolution is really good, and for some reason reading without a backlight makes it feel much more like reading paper rather than a screen.
shanealeslie

That is great news! I got one during the first roll out, and it almost never leaves my side. I’ve been able to get wireless everywhere but the secure building I work in (I even found free hot spots at my laundymat). I’ve had soooo may people ask where they can get one, and had too tell them that they couldn’t – it’ll be nice to tell them otherwise.
Hal

How about one Gameboy per child – that’s something the kids of the world could really get enthused about.
Enochrewt

#23: I never had any formal curriculum beyond learning how to type and play “Oregon Trail” in 2nd grade, and the basics of ip networking in 9th when the DOE gave our school computers and a T1 line (first school in the state, we were still using Fetch and Mosaic, no web yet). But I certainly fell in love. I did things like BASIC programming on the C64, learning POVRay on the school macs, and even finding an old AT&T 3B2 and teaching myself UNIX with it with no outside help besides the man pages. Sure there were a lot of late nights playing Ultima and Loderunner, but there were just as many nights of self-expansion in useful real world skills because I found something I really enjoyed. These OLPC don’t have to have a complicated learning system in place to do good, in fact I’d expect more kids to reject something like that because telling them what to know from these OLPCs instead of what they want to learn from these little green boxes. Just let the kids be, some of the best learning happens when you don’t realize that you’re actually learning.
the Other michael

Lots of comments pro and con on OLPC News and their forum.

NOTE: OLPC News is NOT affiliated w/ OLPC, they’re a pretty good critical source, although they obviously love the product.

NB: I couldn’t participate in G1G1.1 last winter, but bought one off ebay this spring. It’s an awesome li’l device. The Sugar interface is weird, but a good shock to my windows-addicted system. And since I can connect to WiFi (yeah, I’ve heard some people have trouble) and it can do everything I want in Emacs (yes, I’m one of THEM, too), the XO makes me a happy camper.

Running this via Amazon can only be good. I just wish a) this was wider spread than North America and b) happened sooner. 1 year is a loooong time in hardware, and the XO has really invigorated the sub-notebook field.
the Other michael

The weird thing is, the push behind OLPC hasn’t come from the engineers that are so maligned above — it’s all been from the education pedagogues and experimenters. This is all based on their work dating back to the.. er, 1940s, ultimately.

Negroponte’s specialty is in human-computer interaction, and his OLPC theories come from Seymour Papert (creator of the “children’s” programming language LOGO) who was a pupil of Jean Piaget.

Their pedagogical needs were the goad to hardware (make it smaller, make it cheaper, make it brighter, make it last longer), not the other way around.
airship

How about a G0G2 program, where you pay for one and they give TWO to deserving kids?
Sekino

#18 The gadget may well be a marvel of engineering, but no one can, at this moment in time, claim that it is a marvel of pedagogy.

I might very well be overly optimistic, but in my view, any tool or technology in the hands of children can become a marvel of pedagogy. Children can learn and apply knowledge quickly, independently and often more creatively than adults. Giving a child in a developing country a computer with internet access is indeed not direct problem-solving. However, I think giving a child- who might have otherwise restricted access to education- a window to explore the world as well as his/her own curiosity and abilities, it might help this child grow into a more knowledgeable, perhaps more confident person who is able to solve many problems on their own.

Give the child a fish to feed him that day. Give him the tools and he might come up with a way to fish on his own.

I think it’s worth hoping for.
imcampos

As I fully agree with HAL2K, I have one last comment: if the OLPC project were aimed at teachers, as opposed to pupils, it just might have had a chance of succeeding. I have been involved in (public school) digital inclusion projects in Brazil for a number of years, and there is one clear lesson one learns very quickly: teachers must learn how to use the computer *before* students do, lest they become insecure in the classroom and, as a consequence, resist their adoption in schools. Once this kind of attitude is established, it is quite difficult to undo the damage. Again, all this would surface in a trial project if only the OLPC people tried to validate their pedagogical claims. I won’t even comment on what I think will happen now that Microsoft has teamed up with the project and the original idea of open source OS and applications is doomed.
Sekino

I really hope that the laptops will work (no connectivity problems like MMR seem to have experienced) and be low-maintenance so that the kids can get the most of it. If technical/logistics problems can be ironed out, this program is such a terrific idea.

I was watching this talk on TED.com about how children were able to teach themselves (entirely without adult supervision or management) to browse on the internet, seek information and even learn a language if needed. The experiments were conducted in remote parts of India and it was exciting to see the huge learning potential of any child when exposed to technology and information.

This program is definitely something I’d want to put my money in. Children in developing countries can make great use of this.
Howard Wen

There’s now a $100 mini notebook scheduled for release next month:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKQbN6tpYXw
shanealeslie

@16

I totally agree with you on the Young Ladies Illustrated Primer comment – with enough of a community/collaboration the XO mesh network, sharing and chat could very well become a supplementary resource for children to learn from elders not normally available to them. Imaging the boon to a young child of a single working mother that spends a lot of time at home alone in a bad neighborhood. An XO per child or equivalent for all school age children would be the greatest thing that could happen to education (and could be easily paid for by the savings on printed textbooks).