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Phigure wrote:its remarkable because despite never having experience with technology like this, they managed to learn enough independently in order to do something like that. obviously the whole "omg they hacked it" thing dominates the headline, but the really important thing is that there's immense potential for educating kids with nothing more than a relatively low-cost device. you don't need a school, you don't even need a teacher.

Just to give you a sense of what these villages in Ethiopia are like, the kids (and most of the adults) there have never seen a word. No books, no newspapers, no street signs, no labels on packaged foods or goods. Nothing. And these villages aren't unique in that respect; there are many of them in Africa where the literacy rate is close to zero.

Hedley King wrote:Why didn't they sell them on? And how do they get internet connections? Why download English language apps when they don't speak English? Call me a cynic but this looks a bit like advertising.

MIT Technology Review wrote:The devices involved are Motorola Xoom tablets—used together with a solar charging system, which Ethiopian technicians had taught adults in the village to use. Once a week, a technician visits the villages and swaps out memory cards so that researchers can study how the machines were actually used.

After several months, the kids in both villages were still heavily engaged in using and recharging the machines, and had been observed reciting the “alphabet song,” and even spelling words. One boy, exposed to literacy games with animal pictures, opened up a paint program and wrote the word “Lion.”
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Elaborating later on Negroponte’s hacking comment, Ed McNierney, OLPC’s chief technology officer, said that the kids had gotten around OLPC’s effort to freeze desktop settings. “The kids had completely customized the desktop—so every kids’ tablet looked different. We had installed software to prevent them from doing that,” McNierney said. “And the fact they worked around it was clearly the kind of creativity, the kind of inquiry, the kind of discovery that we think is essential to learning.”

fractal wrote:tbh hacking anything android is incredibly easy. you don't need to know anything other than how to use google.

big up those kids tho

Phase Down wrote:^ what a comparison.. you learning how to change spark plugs and Ethiopian using and changing a device they never used while not being able to read or write

alphacat wrote:

Hedley King wrote:Why didn't they sell them on? And how do they get internet connections? Why download English language apps when they don't speak English? Call me a cynic but this looks a bit like advertising.

OLPC is not a corporate-sponsored effort. Branding is not really the point so far as I can tell since they have no explicit connections to any tech giants; the mention of specific hardware details is just there for the inevitable "what are they using" questions.

read: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Educators

I'm not sure about their network capabilities; it sounds like much of it was pre-loaded in some way.

More...

MIT Technology Review wrote:The devices involved are Motorola Xoom tablets—used together with a solar charging system, which Ethiopian technicians had taught adults in the village to use. Once a week, a technician visits the villages and swaps out memory cards so that researchers can study how the machines were actually used.

After several months, the kids in both villages were still heavily engaged in using and recharging the machines, and had been observed reciting the “alphabet song,” and even spelling words. One boy, exposed to literacy games with animal pictures, opened up a paint program and wrote the word “Lion.”
...
Elaborating later on Negroponte’s hacking comment, Ed McNierney, OLPC’s chief technology officer, said that the kids had gotten around OLPC’s effort to freeze desktop settings. “The kids had completely customized the desktop—so every kids’ tablet looked different. We had installed software to prevent them from doing that,” McNierney said. “And the fact they worked around it was clearly the kind of creativity, the kind of inquiry, the kind of discovery that we think is essential to learning.”