“He’s got a point. I don’t know many kids that want to grow up to be ‘Information Workers’.”
Most kids don’t dream of being mathematicians, either. Or historians. Should we not teach children math? History? Literature?
I’m trying hard not to blow a gasket over Mr. Negroponte’s statement… the idea that anyone could visit the developing world and then use the phrase “one of the saddest conditions” to describe the use of Microsoft Office. Seriously.
It sounds… well, it sounds like something someone wealthy would say about poverty – a sort of “Let them eat cake” moment for the information technology field.
Nij–more likely your human interactions are hampered by using the word ‘whilst.’ ‘Whilst’ makes people want to punch you in your mouth and call you a fucking nerd.
vic,
there are tens of thousands of noble causes at any given time, will you next castigate Jeff for not dedicating a blog entry to each and every one of them? Only so many things can interest us at once.
I believe the statement was simply offered as a reason it had not come up before. I can’t see how such a statement could be taken as mockery of the project, nor how Web 2.0 and mockery of noble causes has become conflated, nor why you respond by mocking the blog in turn.
This whole thing seems pretty patronizing. I’m sure that any 8 year old kid could use the same interfaces I do to work with the computer. Sure there’s a lot of room for improvement in those interfaces, but I think that’s where we should be spending our time, not on some untested, half-baked UItard.
And I’d like to thank you, vic, for spending your time writing that visionary comment in this oh-so-vital blog. Very Pretentious Jackass 2.0 indeed.
vic, lighten up. WIthout the blogs and “web 2.0” resources you’re so quick to dismiss, we’d be missing huge informational and collaborative resources, which provide much of the very educational value of the OLPC you love so much in the first place. Sure there are a lot of useless blogs out there, but this is not one of them.
However, a potential downside of OLPC that just occurred to me is that we’ll suddenly have a lot more adolescents on the internet, making comments like vic’s. I guess we survived the AOL floodgates, we’ll survive this too
I never really comment here, but the yelling in my head won’t let me click ‘close’ after getting to the bottom.
A point I think need sharp underlining is the impact that web resources such as wikipedia and google could have on the impoverished (and much of the developed) world. Maybe the UI poke-and-prods are up for grabs, but some crucial technologies that would benefit the third world are glaringly obvious to those who look online.
Imagine the boom a third-world farmer could reap in googling ‘Crop rotation’ or ‘how to double my crop output’. Think of a struggling working-class revolution with access to U.S Army field manuals (globalsecurity.com) or maps (Google Earth). Think of how much of that fighting may not be necessary with access to dreams such as the U.S. Constitution, the Magna Carta, and the latest advancements in the study of game theory (John Nash, not Nintendo). I speak three languages and am learning a fourth, mostly through the power of online info/resources.
I think the global potential for progress would explode given instant online access to those still struggling with lack of power, water, and food- hands down.
Good article, but … I’m rankled by the arrogance of bloggers.
“Largely ignoring” he says.
Smacks of the mom’s basement movie maverick at my local rental place who haughtily and loudly dismissed “The Matrix” (the first one) to attempt to claim some podium of elite film appreciation by dissing something that was generally and popularly held to be a blockbuster.
Not at the author, but in general: Thanks to the net, dorks can feel like they’re standing shoulder to shoulders with the Negroponte’s of the world. Then mom comes in and bursts the bubble threatening to turn off his computer until his chores are done.
I know the X is probably close, the two squares is probably minimize or maximize, and the spyglass is search, but the rest of the icons are a complete mystery.
The children are already being taught too much reliance on the computers and it ~is~ affecting their interaction with each other. Although computers have their place in school, I am not sure that the lower grades are the appropriate grades. This should be the time to learn interaction, people skills, and tactile skills. We as a society are ending up with people that are incapable of doing math without a computer; we are “forgetting” how to spell or even write by hand. People are forgetting how to deal with one another on a personal level. How often have you seen two or more people walking together and are all on cell phones to other people or even each other!
The other issue. Teaching a student how to use the “office automation tools” isn’t neccesarily training him/her to be an “Information worker” as much as it is training the child to use programs that they will in all likihood use their whole lives (in particular in high school and college).
That said, I think this GUI looks quite clever. A whole new concept that seems like it might also have great potential in third world countries.
“I am not sure that the lower grades are the appropriate grades. This should be the time to learn interaction, people skills, and tactile skills.”
What “people skills”? The only thing I learned from lower grades were basic things like arithmetic and basic spelling, which were redundant and dumbed-down. Instead of engaging my brain, I had to be forced to be patronized and “play” for the waste of time that is “recess”. Learning “people skills” is equally an equally imagined notion as “street smarts”, and contributes to the dumbing down of society by having people believe that there is something else that people who are obviously not intelligent can make up for by having. Such egalitarian ideals only contribute to regressing society into retrograde subhumanity.
“We as a society are ending up with people that are incapable of doing math without a computer; we are “forgetting” how to spell or even write by hand.”
Do not use “we”; I am not a part of your hyperbolic generalized assertion.
Back when I was in high school, the most sophisticated piece of technology we each had was a TI-81 calculator. But we also had textbooks and teachers. I imagine for a poor child in a poor nation, they won’t have many books or many teachers. So devices like the OLPC will enable them to share the information that would ordinarily be carried by textbooks. And if the teachers are clever, a single teacher will be able to monitor and grade hundreds of students, by having questions be turned in electronically and automatically sorted and collated.
So, anyway, the OLPC isn’t going to be used to teach computer science (though it would work for that), it will be used to teach history, literature, reading, writing, arithmetic, and anything else that requires information and exercise.
Jeff, while the Sugar UI still hasn’t had any direct usability testing, it is built on the theories of people like Seymour Papert and Alan Kay, who have more than twenty years of experience building UIs and computers to help children’s learning process. So this isn’t really a shot-in-the-dark kind of effort.
The YouTube video is pretty difficult to watch, so I found the original version at http://www.ivr-usability.com/olpc/olpc.html where you can actually read the text bubbles…
If you’ve ever actually tried to automate Word, Excel or PowerPoint, you would know that they are not office automation products. With every version, Microsoft tells IT departments: “There. Now they can be used as office automation products.” And IT departments complain that it still doesn’t really work. Infopath, Access and Sharepoint are office automation products.
It doesn’t take much thought to realize that Word, Excel and Powerpoint are COMMUNICATIONS products that are popular in offices because communication is very important in offices.
Now that said, the office environment is different than the third world school environment in a variety of ways. In the office, they have printers and an infinite supply of (sporadically available) paper and toner. Thus, Word’s dominant metaphor is words on paper. Powerpoint is designed primarily for display with projectors, not small computer screens. Excel is optimized for the kinds of calculations done in an office and not a classroom.
The bit that bothers me about the Negroponte quote is that it is so illogical and elitist. How could a product named “Word” be about anything other than communication, sharing, making things and exploration? How could a product that projects one person’s ideas onto a large screen at the front of a room full of human beings be called “office automation software”? If PowerPoint did not exist and were invented today it would be hailed as amazing, uplifting collaboration software. But it comes from Microsoft and therefore it must be evil, dull office automation software (common sense notwithstanding).
Let’s try to look at this stuff with clear eyes, based on requirements and empirical testing, rather than knee-jerk reactions and biases.
The venom and unwarranted hatefulness displayed in some of these posts is a hand-in-glove demonstration why putting a “neighborhood” computer in every child’s hands will never be the end all-be all to helping them improve their lives. A helpful tool, perhaps. But a replacement for textbooks, pencils, paper, and even recess? Hardly. Whether some people like it or not, the world is about socialization, not “collaboration” behind a keyboard.
