OLPC marches on

By Wesley Fryer On January 11, 2007 · · 2 Comments

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Today’s BBC article, “$100 laptop could sell to public” includes some new details about the progress of the OLPC project.

One exciting development (which isn’t final but just under consideration) is permitting U.S. sales of the device to raise funds for units provided to students in developing nations. My own kids would love this! (Last summer my then 8 year old reported he’d already saved $30 toward the purchase of his own laptop!)

I was also interested to read the names of the first countries ordering and receiving laptops starting this summer:

The first countries to sign up to buying the machine, which is officially dubbed XO, include Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Nigeria, Libya, Pakistan and Thailand.

Google’s role in providing hosting space for read/write content published by students in OLPC classrooms is also exciting:

The OLPC project is working with Google who will act as “the glue to bind all these kids together”. Google will also help the children publish their work on the internet so that the world can observe the “fruits of their labour”, said Mr Bletsas.

Today Bernie Dodge at MacWorld was talking about interactive fiction, and the possiblity of creating “choose your own adventure” stories using tools like Writely, part of Google Documents. The creative possibilities for learning and literacy with one to one computing environments, ubiquitous Internet access, and read/write web tools are just mind boggling!

Technorati Tags: education, olpc

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