Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Monday, 25 August 2008 12:21
Opinion and Analysis
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The school children of the Island of Niue have been
the recipients of a technological donation: 500 XO OLPC laptops.
Fantastic, or folly?
It’s all over the news – the Island of Niue has decided to issue 500 OLPC laptops – one to every primary and secondary school student.
But unless I’m misreading the OLPC information and news reports, Niue didn’t buy them – they were a donation, as part of a plan to give 5000 OLPC laptops to the South Pacific.
According the the
OLPC Wiki’s page on Niue, this means that Niue is either already (or on track) to becoming “the first country in world to achieve 100% saturation of XOs”.
If you go to the Pipka.org
blog or the OLPC Wiki page linked above, you can see plenty of pics of smiling, happy children and even adults.
These computers are running the Sugar ‘open source’ operating system with its unusual graphical user interface. There’s a browser, book reader and other apps, including Journal, wordprocessor, RSS reader, Paint, "record" which allows the recording of photos, videos and audio, music composition software, a Logo "turtle art" clone, a calculator, programming languages, Speak, Cartoon Builder, Flipsticks, Colors, Scratch, Ruler, Stopwatch, Wikibrowse, Sudoku and much, much more.
And there are all those OLPC benefits, of which some include wireless mesh networking, a simple system to recharge, a case design that is relatively waterproof, dustproof and even kidproof.
The computers clearly aren’t designed to teach kids how to use Windows XP, they’re for education, replacing text books and giving all school kids access to the world of the Internet and all the information it contains, while also giving video conferencing capabilities, letting kids share a wireless network and all the rest.
That actually makes them good educational tools, which was the initial intention, after all.
And because kids are quick learners, the transition to using computers in the world of business will be easy, for the children in question will have, by that time, spent years using computers when previously they might only have had limited access.
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