Tonight, Harper and Gabriel came over to talk about TinyLanguage, but we also spent a lot of time messing around on the XO machines we have. It is a lot of fun to have a couple of them together right next to each other, you really can have a good time with the collaborative editing and games.
While we were connected up to the community, a number of students joined in. They said they were from Thailand, Ban Samkha specifically. We quickly realized that we were currently talking to students in the pilot program! I got to tell them all about my job with the Field Museum, and how we have sent researchers to Thailand to study. I even got to speak to a teacher in the program, who has been using the laptops for 9 months. They told me that the students learn very quickly, but that the parents are also extremely excited. The students even knew where Chicago was… from maps on the internet.
From the 45 minute conversation, I gained a number of new pen pals and a whole slew of new perspectives. It is amazing to see the impact that these machines have.
Comments (4)
Wait - you connected to Thailand through a wifi connection without specifically choosing it?
Is this an automatic feature of the XO mesh?
We actually spoke to them via Gabble connecting to jabber.laptop.org. It worked brilliantly I might add.
At first, it was a good project, but now, asus is on the market with his 701, less than $299, good quality, design and performance, what is the future of the olpc… don’t know, but asus’s future will be better.
The Asus still comes in at double the current cost of the machine. It does not have a supplemental program associated with it, nor does it offer a good majority of the functionality of the OLPC machine (low power consumption, mesh networking, dual purpose LCD, etc.).
The Asus machine is certainly a step forward in ubiquitous computing, but it is by no means an OLPC killer.