Comments on: Alan Kay at WSIS

By: Work To Be Done : EphBlog

Work To Be Done : EphBlog — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 21:04:04 +0000

[...] Zuckerman ’93 provides an update on the One Laptop per Child project to be provide $100 laptop computers for all the poor children [...]

By: …My heart’s in Accra » One Laptop Per Child: Just what sort of content do you load onto these puppies?

Mon, 22 Jan 2007 22:30:31 +0000

[...] (To get a sense for just how strongly constructionism has influenced the OLPC project, try referring to the laptop as a “teaching tool” within the OLPC offices. The phrase tends to inspire the sort of embarrased silence that you generally hear in the wake of someone loudly passing gas.) [...]

By: Media @ LSE Group Weblog » Blog Archive » The much-promised MIT $100 educational laptop

Fri, 09 Jun 2006 22:21:28 +0000

[...] Ethan Zuckerman also frets about one key aspect the Fonly Institute and others highlighted: the optimistic forecasts by the laptop’s designers that students will spontaneously fiddle with and create with them. [...]

By: EphBlog

EphBlog — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 12:00:20 +0000

Work To Be Done

Ethan Zuckerman ’93 provides an update on the One Laptop per Child project to be provide $100 laptop computers for all the poor children in the world. In my earlier talk with Negroponte about the device, he suggested that one…

By: Juan Freire

Juan Freire — Thu, 24 Nov 2005 00:44:17 +0000

This is one of the first posts or news discussing the real problems of the project (the teaching model and the “business model” of the fabrication, distribution and funding). I have commented more in depth in:
http://nomada.blogs.com/jfreire/2005/11/el_prtatil_de_1.html

By: Steven Brewer

Steven Brewer — Mon, 21 Nov 2005 17:54:07 +0000

I saw Alan Kay talk a couple of years ago and thought his talk made Squeak and eToys looked like The Greatest Thing Ever. Then I used it for teaching. Programming with eToys is a lot like using one of those claw machines to type. It looks simple — and it is simple for certain kinds of tasks. But it’s very cumbersome as well and you quickly find that under the simple interface, is the dark underbelly of Smalltalk. Here’s the blog entry where I rubbed up against that. I ended up having two students who used Squeak for their final project. It worked — sorta. But it was a real challenge for them — and for me to try to mentor them.

By: Emergent Chaos

Emergent Chaos — Mon, 21 Nov 2005 02:52:51 +0000

More on “Freedom To Tinker, Freedom to Learn”

In “Freedom To Tinker, Freedom to Learn,” I made some assumptions about the user interface for the $100 laptop. In “Alan Kay at WSIS,” Ethan Zukerman explains that Alan Kay will be doing much of the user interface design work:…

By: David F.

David F. — Sun, 20 Nov 2005 17:32:32 +0000

Newsnight on BBC 2 had a report on the $100 laptop last week. They interviewed a representative from a charity (can’t remember which one) who said that money should be spent on the basics first — putting roofs on classrooms, buying pencils, buying textbooks, etc. — before charities or aid agencies start putting laptops in African schools. He also said that, while $100 doesn’t seem like much in the West, in developing countries it can go a very long way and pay for things that dozens or more students will be able to use.

They also interviewed a woman from MIT, who wasn’t able to give any specific examples of how the laptop could be used. This seemed to be one of the reasons why the charity man wasn’t keen on the idea — she simply said that the laptop would take the place of every textbook and would allow children to discover things for themselves, and he obviously thought that it wasn’t worth paying $100 just for that. I got the impression that the schools he was thinking of don’t spend anything remotely near to $100 per head on books.

By: Cloudy Thinking by Ron K. Jeffries » Blog Archive » Thinking vs. Survival

Sun, 20 Nov 2005 15:40:58 +0000

[...] Ethan Zuckerman reports (from Tunisia) this quip by Alan Kay: [...]