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Do these planned top-down approaches ever work? Especially in education? It seems like when technocrats have questionable ideas they try to shove it down the th

Do these planned top-down approaches ever work? Especially in education? It seems like when technocrats have questionable ideas they try to shove it down the throat of kids instead of having a more decentralized approach with more choice. Negroponte's failure with the OLPC project comes to mind. A mix of cheap netbooks, tablets, and phones made it quickly irrelevant. If we see social VR in education it'll be impromptu study groups in Altspace or screensharing in Bigscreen. It'll happen dynamically as kids decide what platform they prefer. Teachers will probably make similiar decisions on a per teacher/classroom way. I've already spent a bit of time in Altspace and Bigscreen and its very impressive from many aspects like usability, discoverability, presence, features, etc. I can't imagine using a SL-like system. Its too messy, ugly, and complex. It feels very Web 1.0. Also, my god, the uncanny valley in SL is inexcusable. Either do photorealism or use cartoony avatars, there's really no room for middle ground here.

Jtsummers 10y ago
> Negroponte's failure with the OLPC project comes to mind. A mix of cheap netbooks, tablets, and phones made it quickly irrelevant. To be fair to OLPC, it just predated those other devices. It [the hardware] was developed precisely because cheap laptops didn't yet exist, and then the form and market came into existence and obsoleted a large part of the project's efforts (the physical hardware development, not its educational goals).
- drzaiusapelord 10y ago
  Not really, but the time they were actually shipping the olpc in non-trivial deployments, the netbook revolution was already here. Intel also had the education aimed Classmate netbook as well. 2007 article on the two competing platforms: http://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2007/03/acomparison-of-olpcs-xo-laptop-and-intels-classmate-pc/ http://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2007/03/acomparison-of-... >nd then the form and market came into existence and obsoleted a large part of the project's efforts It was also a terrible, terrible product. The crappy screen, low ram, low performance, lack of software, etc. When I used one I considered it something for toddlers or preschoolers. The Classmate by comparison is something I could use right now if I had to and still be mildly productive with. The market moves fast and OLPC wasn't ready for it. They built their house on not just last gen technology but last junky gen technology (milquetoast AMD designs, shovelware linux distro, etc). They got leapfrogged trivially. The fact that they couldn't see that is inexcusable. Moores law reigned supreme back then. While the OLPC was ambitious, it pretty much is the poster boy for incompetent central planning by out of touch technocrats who thought they were smarter than the market, educators, and policy makers.
  - Jtsummers 10y ago
    N.B.: I agree with pretty much the entirety of your post. My point was, and I still stand by it, merely that OLPC (hardware) was developed because nothing else in the price and performance (particularly battery performance) existed at the time. The relatively poor hardware was, unfortunately, necessary to achieve the 20 hour battery life that it could pull off. It's important to recall that one of the major targets for the device was areas with poor power infrastructure. The 4 hour life of the Classmate PC would not have been conducive to that environment. However, I agree with the rest of your post. I was much more interested in the project from when I first heard about it (2005 or 2006) and lost a lot of interest once netbooks (and similar) came about, at reasonable costs, a couple years later. OLPC would have been much better off if they had focused on their software and curricula components, particularly being OS agnostic as much as possible (I recall a lot of teeth-gnashing about the idea of distributing Windows to 3rd world countries, particularly from FOSS zealots of the time). Let the hardware and OS vendors compete, provide a compelling suite of software, tools, and digital library that they (vendors) can all ship on their own systems instead.
  - corysama 10y ago
    I seem to remember around 2007 there were several netbook manufactures who were just getting started calling out the OLPC as the direct inspiration for creating the market segment in the first place. Meanwhile, that article describes Intel's device as having a better CPU, but half the screen rez, 1/5 the battery life and costing hopefully only a bit more than twice as much two years later. The OLPC hardware was very low-spec. But, it was a brilliant design for being so low spec. It's UI was considered alien at the time. But, today the app-based, fileless approach has been proven out by the tablet market to be much better for the mainstream, non-hardcore user. It's unfortunate they insisted on running so much in Python on such a tiny CPU. I understand that they really wanted view/modify source as standard for the kids. But, the only language I could see that working out well at the time would have been Lua --which doesn't have nearly as much clout as Python even today. In my outside observation, OLPC was mostly tanked by politicians declaring that "If our kids can't use it to learn Microsoft Office, I don't want it even for free." There were a multitude of issues. But, that one really cut off the investment that could have overcome them.
- pjc50 10y ago
  No, there was plenty of existing hardware and software that could have been used, but the whole thing was full of extraordinary "not invented here"isms that made learning the OLPC a learning dead end of nontransferable skills.
  - Jtsummers 10y ago
    In 2005, what was an existing, portable, long battery-life device that cost under $200 that would have satisfied the goal of getting a PC into students' hands?

Jtsummers 10y ago

> Negroponte's failure with the OLPC project comes to mind. A mix of cheap netbooks, tablets, and phones made it quickly irrelevant. To be fair to OLPC, it just predated those other devices. It [the hardware] was developed precisely because cheap laptops didn't yet exist, and then the form and market came into existence and obsoleted a large part of the project's efforts (the physical hardware development, not its educational goals).

drzaiusapelord 10y ago
Not really, but the time they were actually shipping the olpc in non-trivial deployments, the netbook revolution was already here. Intel also had the education aimed Classmate netbook as well. 2007 article on the two competing platforms: http://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2007/03/acomparison-of-olpcs-xo-laptop-and-intels-classmate-pc/ http://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2007/03/acomparison-of-... >nd then the form and market came into existence and obsoleted a large part of the project's efforts It was also a terrible, terrible product. The crappy screen, low ram, low performance, lack of software, etc. When I used one I considered it something for toddlers or preschoolers. The Classmate by comparison is something I could use right now if I had to and still be mildly productive with. The market moves fast and OLPC wasn't ready for it. They built their house on not just last gen technology but last junky gen technology (milquetoast AMD designs, shovelware linux distro, etc). They got leapfrogged trivially. The fact that they couldn't see that is inexcusable. Moores law reigned supreme back then. While the OLPC was ambitious, it pretty much is the poster boy for incompetent central planning by out of touch technocrats who thought they were smarter than the market, educators, and policy makers.
- Jtsummers 10y ago
  N.B.: I agree with pretty much the entirety of your post. My point was, and I still stand by it, merely that OLPC (hardware) was developed because nothing else in the price and performance (particularly battery performance) existed at the time. The relatively poor hardware was, unfortunately, necessary to achieve the 20 hour battery life that it could pull off. It's important to recall that one of the major targets for the device was areas with poor power infrastructure. The 4 hour life of the Classmate PC would not have been conducive to that environment. However, I agree with the rest of your post. I was much more interested in the project from when I first heard about it (2005 or 2006) and lost a lot of interest once netbooks (and similar) came about, at reasonable costs, a couple years later. OLPC would have been much better off if they had focused on their software and curricula components, particularly being OS agnostic as much as possible (I recall a lot of teeth-gnashing about the idea of distributing Windows to 3rd world countries, particularly from FOSS zealots of the time). Let the hardware and OS vendors compete, provide a compelling suite of software, tools, and digital library that they (vendors) can all ship on their own systems instead.
- corysama 10y ago
  I seem to remember around 2007 there were several netbook manufactures who were just getting started calling out the OLPC as the direct inspiration for creating the market segment in the first place. Meanwhile, that article describes Intel's device as having a better CPU, but half the screen rez, 1/5 the battery life and costing hopefully only a bit more than twice as much two years later. The OLPC hardware was very low-spec. But, it was a brilliant design for being so low spec. It's UI was considered alien at the time. But, today the app-based, fileless approach has been proven out by the tablet market to be much better for the mainstream, non-hardcore user. It's unfortunate they insisted on running so much in Python on such a tiny CPU. I understand that they really wanted view/modify source as standard for the kids. But, the only language I could see that working out well at the time would have been Lua --which doesn't have nearly as much clout as Python even today. In my outside observation, OLPC was mostly tanked by politicians declaring that "If our kids can't use it to learn Microsoft Office, I don't want it even for free." There were a multitude of issues. But, that one really cut off the investment that could have overcome them.
pjc50 10y ago
No, there was plenty of existing hardware and software that could have been used, but the whole thing was full of extraordinary "not invented here"isms that made learning the OLPC a learning dead end of nontransferable skills.
- Jtsummers 10y ago
  In 2005, what was an existing, portable, long battery-life device that cost under $200 that would have satisfied the goal of getting a PC into students' hands?