The Fonly Institute

Seeking Stamp Collectors for OLPC

My brother Joe, who is famous in the world of population genetics, tells how for decades those working in his corner of biology (phylogenetic inference – the science of constructing inheritance trees) were scorned by the reigning molecular biologists as “stamp collectors”. While the molecular biologists pursued the secret of life itself, the stamp collectors puttered around with statistics and large data sets, working out how to make sense out of data patterns.

Then came the crowning triumph of molecular biology – reading the human genome. Note that I do not say “decoding the human genome”, as it suddenly became clear that no one knew how to make sense of gigabytes of gene sequence data. Who, the moleculars wondered, could make some order of all this data?

Then everyone looked at each other and exclaimed in unison, “the stamp collectors!” Joe and his colleagues were showered with money and attention. Their grant requests were now favored for approval, and at Joe’s university a brand-new Department of Genome Sciences was created which welcomed his august presence.

The parallel is this – the OLPC project is about as far as it can go without empowering its own “stamp collectors”, by which I mean those who have long labored in the field of experimental education. Yes, there are others besides Seymour Papert, and the official OLPC line on the topic, that the educational research had already been done and that the engineering was all that was left, was always blatantly untrue.

Not the Vision He Had

(A very slightly edited version of a comment posted to Wayan Vota's blog OLPC News upon the announcement that the OLPC laptop would be manufactured and sold in the industrial world).                               

A thought experiment - give an XO to an American kid and the question will be "what does it do?" The answers will have to be "No, it doesn't run Windows programs. No, you can't run games on it. And it looks like it's for kids because it IS for kids".

This seems to be a setup for most kids to reject it. There will be a few, however, who discover they can get into it and mess around, as well as communicate sending pictures without having to deal with the mobile phone bill and its consequences.

A whole lot more adult geeks will buy it and play with it, which is not a bad thing - I am all for play as a means of exploring the possibilities of technology. And, like the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons of the '60's, which were written to include some jokes with adult appeal so that kids would get the message that it was funny to older folk and thus not "just for kids", there will start to be leakage to lower age levels.

SuperHappyDevHouse

When I saw in the San Jose Mercury News that SuperHappyDevHouse was trying to "recapture the spirit of the Homebrew Computer Club", I knew I had to drop in on their event. Having designed the meeting process of Homebrew in 1975 and run the meetings until we closed up shop in 1986, I wanted to be sure that legacy was not being misrepresented. So, along with Lena, I turned up at the Hillsborough house June 23rd where the sesqui-monthly hacker play party was scheduled to take place.

I knew it was going to be a zoo, having been announced on the front page of the business/technology section of Silicon Valley's newspaper. What I wanted to see was what the zoo would be like. Checking on the web page earlier that day I saw that the count had peaked at 116, a new record.

One Computer Per Village - telemedicine

Ram Dhurjaty, posting in the OLPC News blog, raises the idea of the telemedicine application of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) "XO" laptop computer, which is currently in pre-production trials. I am inviting the readers of that post to use this space for the dvelopment of more discussions on this possibility, with or without the OLPC machine.

In 2005, when I raised my first public criticism of the OLPC program I had been pursuing the idea of "one telecentre per village", which I now modify to "one computer per village", or OCPV. I expanded further on the concept with a post that laid out the telecentre concept in more detail.

While my criticisms have had minimal impact on the OLPC project (so far as I can see, which is not very far), their active publicity function plus their great progress on designing hardware and software with the level of reliability and user-accessibility necessary for use in developing countries has captured the attention of a large number of computer-capable people around the world. One would be a fool not to make use of this interest.

My experience includes structuring the information-exchange forum that was instrumental in establishing the personal computer industry in Silicon Valley, and I see the need for such a forum in establishing a new industry (one which I call "Fair Trade Technology"). I would hope that this site could provide one of many manifestations of such a forum.

I suggest that people use the category "OCPV" to search for and categorize entries.

Makers

Today I spent a few hours at the Maker Faire, an event created by O'Reilly Publications which celebrates our human urge to put things together - things that amuse, delight and amaze others. Held at the San Mateo County Fairgrounds, the weekend event provides a venue for people to show off the things they have made and to meet people who are interested in those things. Lena and I wandered through several gloomy halls which were alive with all kinds of sound and light emitted by the devices being displayed, as well as the low roar of the attendees talking, children playing and exhibitors explaining. Their noise was punctuated by a robotic band with a set of drums and other instruments playing automatically.

The most inspiring thing for me was to watch the children darting about trying various things (there were many opportunities to sit down and try one's hand at putting something together, whether it be from paper , cloth, or wire). To provide an experience of enchantment with technology on the part of children is to do something most important. I grew up able to roam about a very good science and technology museum (the Franklin Institute Science Museum in Philadelphia) and benefitted greatly from that sense of enchantment. 

The exhibits could be quite simple, as one in which a past acquaintance of mine invited viewers to try their hand at soldering wires without using a soldering iron. This turned out to be accomplished simply by heating the wire (wrapped with solder) using a cigarette lighter. The point was to give the participants the experience of melting solder and seeing how it behaved. Like most exhibits, there was no commercial payoff to the exhibitor. It was there to increase people's familiarity with certain aspects of technology - even the low technology of creating solder joints.

There were various electric vehicles (including a ridiculous flotilla of oversized cupcakes which people could drive around with their heads poking from the tops - built around the individual electric carts which give mobility to people who cannot walk well), a steel giraffe that slowly strode along with people riding on it, demonstrations of "soft circuits" made with fabric and conductive yarn, a small catapult which tossed wadded-up T-shirts to be caught be groups of children, a 3-D TV system with the camera trained on the observer, and much, much more.

Some of the more absurd exhibits had been built for the Burning Man festival, and it was good not to have to brave a desert environment to see them. But the main lesson I took away was that people really love to play with technology, high and low, and it's the best way for them to learn. Along with this observation comes the understanding that a lot of careful work has to be put in by the exhibitors in order to allow this play to take place.

Nothing New

(This commentary is occasioned by the announcement from the OLPC project April 28 that Microsoft Windows will be put on the XO Laptop, that the price will rise to $175 and that the minimum order quantity will be reduced. See OLPC News for further details and history. See here for my initial post on OLPC.)

So, let's say you've got a dysfunctional society and things have to change but nothing is forthcoming from the top. A charismatic leader turns up and convinces a lot of people to help him build a new order with or without the permission of the rulers. Enough people join in and coordinate their work so that things can be done the way everyone agrees they ought to be done and not how they are done.

Eventually this comes to a point of confrontation with the rulers and, surprisingly, they clear out, leaving nothing behind. Your group fills this power vacuum and everything seems to be going great. Your charismatic leader has good political connections with the outside world, and you trust him to set things up right. You've had a peaceful revolution!

Then, with no warning, an invading army appears and begins a march on the capital city.

A Minor Enlightenment

(This is not commentary on OLPC - go here to start that thread, which continues to December 2006)

I recently visited the MacWorld exposition and found myself making the familiar trudge through the aisles, glancing left and right while attempting to absorb and judge what I was seeing. I've done this many times before and it always seemed that my experience of hell would be of walking through an endless trade show.

Of course, I've seen worse (the late un-lamented Comdex a few years before its demise was a warren of tiny booths all showing the same bits of junk that were of no use to me). I took in the gigantic presentation by Apple of their iPhone and came away convinced that Steve Jobs had pushed through a most impressive piece of human interface programming, though all of an evolutionary and not revolutionary aspect.

Fortunately, I found myself in line buying an overpriced sandwich immediately behind a good friend of mine, and we sat and talked as we ate (there were many more opportunities to sit at MacWorld than at other trade shows). He directed me to the back hall where small companies had tiny stands with new products, or products that were almost ready.

There I ran into something very interesting. A tiny new company named Unicon was showing their tiny devices (about half the thickness of a deck of playing cards, with about the same profile) that were built to function as media handling devices, for want of a better word. Each had a small quarter-VGA (320 x 240) color LCD screen with a Linux (2.6) computer built onto the rear of the display using flex circuit technology. The design had two USB 2.0 ports and one USB 2.0 "mini OTG port for PC connection" - OTG standing for "On The Go" and referring to a dual-mode (A or B) dynamically configurable USB port allowing it to connect to anything except another OTG peripheral (which would have trouble deciding which protocol to assume).