The XO: One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) experience
December 30, 2007 by cynthia
The mystery package that Fedex dropped on my doorstep last Saturday morning turned out to be my thank you gift from the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) foundation: my XO laptop.
I’m a firm believer in the the advantages of information access in emerging countries. OLPC proposed–to much fanfare–creating a $100 laptop that could be distributed to children in poorer parts of the world, one that could be hand-powered in case the village lacked electricity, but which could network with other laptops and potentially access the Web. The final cost is closer to $200, but it’s still a cool idea, and machine.
Yeah, I know in several countries the leaders have suggested that feeding children should come before giving them MySpace accounts, which is true…but ultimately, the ability to dive into the global information pool is what will make people self-sufficient.
Anyway, I had my first really cool new gadget in months and so naturally I dove in to take a look.
OLPC offered a Give One, Get One program that I jumped on. For $499, they send one XO laptop to a child in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Haiti, Mongolia or Rwanda, and send a second laptop to a child in your family. (If you’re interested, the program ends on December 31, 2007, so you’ve got one day to get in on it.)
I figured my young nieces would get a kick out of it, and I’d get a look at one (probably more than just a look, since I’m the tech support person for my extended family). At the moment, my sister has declined, saying she doesn’t need one MORE Web-connected device to monitor for potential child-nasty stuff, but I’m working on her.
In the meantime, I’ve named the beast Xander. Buffy the Vampire Slayer not withstanding, it’s a diminuitive of the name Alexander and sometimes thought to be the intimate nickname of Alexander the Great, who brought both great intellectual unification and cultural destruction to some of the same areas that OLPC now serves.
First impressions: Wow…it’s TINY. Miniscule. I’ve had mousepads bigger than this thing. It’s also cute to the point of near-unbearability, in a rugged white rubber case with heavy texture, the OLPC logo in blue and bright-apple green edging, antenna and keyboard. Text, appropriately enough for a child’s system, is kept to a minimum.
If the rest of the box doesn’t make you think “kid’s laptop” the keyboard surely will; compare it to the quarter in this shot:
It is definitely NOT for touch-typists. My very short hand can span the entire keyboard quite easily.
Xander isn’t your typical laptop; he runs Linux, not Windows or the Mac OS. He comes with a whole host of applications, called “activities” in XO-speak, primarily in the educational software space.
There’s an impressive array here, that includes chat, art and music creation, a word processor, a video editing system (Xander has a built-in videocam), an RSS newsreader, “Measure,” (an electronic lab book for children’s experiments), and programming environments for Python and Logo.
Yup. The video camera works. 
Xander came with built-in speakers (a bit tinny, but serviceable), a slot for an SD memory card, USB port, and speaker/mic ports. The design is clean and very elegant, about what I’d expect of a Negroponte MIT project.
Xander runs “Sugar,” a new type of interface that reminds me of Sesame Street for some reason. While *I* wouldn’t call it friendly–you select with a LEFT mouseclick, not a right, for example–people who aren’t used to conventional computer interfaces probably would find it very friendly.
Sugar. Ahhhh, honey, honey…never mind…
The display swivels around to turn the unit into an e-book, with nice (if tiny) paging controls. Xander’s documentation is buried and the short printed instructions are just about as vague as an Apple Mac’s. The idea, apparently, is that the discovery of how to use and support the machine is as much of the teaching tool as the machine itself. I don’t doubt it, but I’ll bet that it drives the computer-savvy adults crazy.
You can head online to the OLPC wiki for laptop owners which is extensive and very tied into the Open Source community. That also means it’s not necessarily kept current, BTW. And OLPC makes it pretty clear that you’re on your own with this laptop (that “you learn more if you have to figure it out yourself” thing again, besides the fact that this is a non-profit and therefore the help desk is probably a bit skimpy).
What’s exciting me most about this machine, actually, is the use of a mesh network. This laptop’s theme should be “reach out and touch someone,” because there are so many ways that the XO should be able to spontaneously build networks and collaborate with other XOs that it’s a bit dizzying.
First, the XO lets you look around and see all the other XOs within shouting distance, wirelessly speaking, and connect with them at will. It’ll also find WiFi connex, or the WiFi connex that someone else found if you’re out of range of anything.
The idea is that, even if you’re in an area without power or an Internet-connected WiFi, you can bucket-brigade your way to a computer that *is* connected to the Internet. OLPC is setting up “School Servers,” i.e., a server system usually based in the local school. Given the capabilities of a meshnet, XOs and one School Server should be able to broadcast and deliver Internet service to an amazingly wide area, very inexpensively.
Today, Xander instantly found three “simple mesh” networks, and connected to them quite easily (I wonder if that means there are three other XOs in the neighborhood). None, apparently, were Web-connected, because although the Mozilla browser was operational on internal files (you quickly learn that browse doesn’t just mean the Web on this computer), he couldn’t see anything else.
Disappointingly, because I’ve got enough wireless connections around here to regularly cause traffic jams, Xander also couldn’t see any of my 802.11 access points. At the moment, therefore, he’s blind as far as the Web is concerned. I’m going to dive down into the support wiki to figure out why.
Also, in the manner of ancient kings bent on world domination, Xander doesn’t play well with wireless rivals. He’s jamming my Leapfrog unit (the A/V wireless transceiver I use to send whatever’s on my office TV down to my studio). Took me awhile to realize that the irritatingly regular “blipblipblip” I was getting on the downstairs TV matched the signal pulses coming from the XO. None of my other wireless devices (and there are many) so far have an issue with the Leapfrog.
So…this is just a first report. All in all, I’m kinda thrilled with this little machine and anxious to put him through his paces. I’ve got an offer from some IT guys (who also have an XO) to bring Xander over for a playdate in the datacenter. Their Linux servers are managing a few million events and terabytes of datastreams every hour, and supposedly Xander’s brother is quite easily tapping in and managing part of the stream. Be interesting to see what we can get up to.
Great report, Cynthia. You’d almost think that you used to work for a computer magazine!
That “computers vs. books” argument is an old one. We tussled with it back in the late 70’s when we brought PLATO to South Africa. Did the kids in Soweto really need computer based education? While you’ll never find me saying computers are better than books, there are instances where computers and computer-based education do (does) have an edge. In South Africa the CBE was colour blind. The computer didn’t know if the user was Black, White, or Coloured (old S. African classifications). And, as such, it just merrily went along dishing out education without prejudicing the educational interactions with preconceived notions about the recipient. As I see it the XO is in the same class. It will dish out its stuff regardless of who is pushing buttons. That’s the real beauty of it. The kid in some back-of-the-world camp that’s got the chops can shine and progress without the burden of an educational system that says “you are incapable of this.”
GcB
Well, working for a computer magazine was always an ambition of mine.
In 1993 I was sitting in a picturesque Greek cafe, listening to Greek folk music and watching a bunch of old Greek guys playing checkers in front of a whitewashed wall. It was a scene out of a movie, and I thought about how tranquil it was without all the technoworries of modern civilization.
Then the old guys got louder–arguing over the checkers game, I thought benignly–and one of them suddenly burst out “NO! H-T-T-P-colon-slash-slash!”
Right then I realized that information had gone global, and that we needed to change “teach a man to fish” to “teach a man to Web…”
