OLPC not a failure (Score 2)

I bought an XO-1 from the first "Give One Get One" promotion many years ago. I was a bit disappointed with it, but I learned to write Activities for Sugar and eventually wrote a book on the subject which you may check out here:

https://archive.org/details/Ma...

I used my XO-1 as an e-book reader and was so pleased with it and all the thousands of free e-books available from archive.org and Project Gutenberg that I learned to create and donate books to these sites and wrote a book on that subject:

https://archive.org/details/EB...

I also wrote a few Activities for the platform. So did many others, including some children. You can check them all out here:

http://activities.sugarlabs.or...

You can also check out Sugar itself, easily. Your Linux distribution probably includes it. You can run it in a window in your current desktop or log into it as an alternate desktop.

You can say that the laptop was never as good or as cheap as we hoped it would be. You could say that it never got into the hands of as many children as we had hoped it would. That would be true. But you can't say it didn't work. The Constructionist method works. If I had a kid I'd want him to be educated that way.

Consider this: In 1969 intelligent people thought we might have a sizable moon base and a donut shaped space station with a Hilton and a Howard Johnson's by 2001. That year came and went and we still have neither of those things. We barely have Howard Johnson's restaurants on Earth these days. But no reasonable person would say that the Apollo program was a failure. A disappointment maybe, but not a failure. And manned space exploration on the scale shown in 2001 will happen. Not as soon as we would like, but it will happen.

You can say the same thing about using computers to educate our children. It's going to happen. There are bad ways to do this. OLPC showed us a good way to do it. It is still showing us that.