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$100 Laptop
在net2上第一次开blog
今天第一次上这个网站
Where can I find the presentations?
Where can I get the presentation that was shown this morning on 100$ laptop?
Partha
Too much good stuff
This is impossible to keep up with. Great session on the Media Lab's $100 Laptop. Michail Bletsas and Michael Brown. Highlights:
- 50% of the world's kids don't have electricity at home
- learning happens not just with teachers - learning happens with communicating and doing
- the internet was not meant to be mediated by servers (Shades of Mark Bernstein's puzzlement at educators' concern about hosting from edBlogger 2003. Is there never any progress?)
- main goal is to get the kids to create their own content
- teachers are the bottleneck - building a teacher infrastructure is a waste of time, they learn slower - best to get them out of the way
And OK, OK, once again the emphasis on hand-helds, on cell phones. I resist and resist and it's probably time to cave in and buy one. For what - spam students with news of new library books? spam staff with news of summer tech training opportunities? Hah!
Net2Con: $100 Laptop
What's next for the $100 laptop?
Improving the operating system (currently a linux core) and installing a wiki server on each laptop for the collection of information.
I love the idea of the wiki. The community can centralize its knowledge and make it available to others. What an amazing way to empower people that have to cope with survival daily.
Net2Con: $100 Laptop
I'm geeking out right now.
I heard the crowd give a hushed "wow"!
When the $100 laptop is closed it continues to act as a router for all of the laptops in the village. If one laptop gains a connection to the internet all the laptops gain access through the peer network. This means even when the laptop is "off" it is not really "off". It is running on a low level of energy to keep the network in tact.
If a woman or girl needs examples of how technology can have a postive impact on the world's people, this project is it.
Net2Con: $100 Laptop
The $100 laptop does not have a harddisk. The designers of the $100 laptop found that hd's are one of the first things that often break in a computer. To get around this problem they are using Flash memory.
Flash memory is a solid-state memory. In the most basic way that means it has no moving parts. The iPod uses it.
Over the last several months I've wondered why I have such a "big" hd on my laptop. I have 60 GB, but honestly I don't use it so often now. I put my documents on servers - at work, my isp, services like snapfish. Really all I need regularly is an internet connection, a browser and a place on the web I can lay my docs.
Why Should This Be A Priority?
Your name:
Mary Taylor
Your email address:
mktaylor@gmail.com
Your question:
While the concept of the $100 laptop sounds attractive in theory, I have to say that as a former ESL teacher and Peace Corps volunteer, I'm going to play Devil's Advocate about it (it probably doesn't help that I've just started reading William Easterly's The White Man`s Burden) and ask what's the point? Doesn't this assume a baseline of literacy in order to use the operating system and software?
I have no experience with Africa, but when I worked in ESL/literacy a lot of students from rural/marginalized communities where they'd never had access to literacy education and couldn't read/write in their native language, let alone International Standard English. So without really knowing very much about this initiative, my reaction is that you could give laptops to the students I used to work with, but they really wouldn't be able to use the software or be active users of the web because they couldn't read. As an aside, that's actually how I got into libraries (and do volunteer work for a really great organization, Read Nepal) - books can be expensive and scarce. Making those more available in order to promote and continue to foster literacy, seems to be more of a first step than the Internet or technology.
How does this impact eWaste?
Your name:
Marnie Webb
Your email address:
webb@compumentor.org
Your question:
I think the $100 laptop is a good idea -- it reduces the barrier of price from the access to technology. I do wonder though, if that barrier is reduced, how it impacts the waste stream. That is: has anyone given thought to what will happen to these laptops? Is recycling built into the thought process at this point?
Internet Access
Your name:
Mark Liu
Your email address:
mliu@techsoup.org
Speaker or Presenter:
Michail Bletsas
Your question:
How do you plan to address the problem of expensive Internet access?
Internet Access
How do you plan to deal with the problem of expensive internet access?
