One Laptop Per Child Talks

eWEEK Chief Technology Analyst Jim Rapoza interviewed both OLPC CTO Mary Lou Jepsen and VP Walter Bender in the Tech Rising podcast "The Technology of the OLPC's XO Laptop".

Mary Lou Jepsen gave an overview of the XO BTest-4 technology and Walter Bender explained the capabilities of the Sugar user interface.

The podcast is available for download here and the OLPC Talks-produced transcript is below.

---

Jim Rapoza: Welcome to techrising, a weekly pod cast dedicated to emerging technologies, their effect on business, people and the world. I'm Jim Rapoza chief technology analyst of e week. Few technologies in recent years have inspired as much interest or discussion as the one lap top per child effort to provide what has been called the hundred dollar lap top of the developing world.

When first discussed many said it would be impossible to build a laptop for anywhere near that price. Then, as the laptop came closer to reality, many took to criticizing it's capabilities and it's mission to provide computer resources as an educational tool for children around the world. Now, the hundred dollar, actually a hundred and seventy-five dollar lap top, dubbed the XO is going into mass production and it will soon be in the hands of millions of children of the developing world.

However, while much of the focus has been on the price of the laptop, many of the most impressive aspects of the XO are in it's technology. The XO has made some impressive breakthroughs in power management, display technology and collaboration. I recently had the opportunity to spend time with the offices of the OLPC and take a first hand look at the final beta of the XO.

While there, OLPC president Walter (Bender) gave me a demo of the XO sugar software inner face and I also got on the phone with OLPC's CTO Mary Lou Jepsen to talk about the many technology innovations of the XO hardware. To start off, I asked her about the recent beta release, about the many innovations of the XO.

Mary Lou Jepsen: Yes, There are two thousand BTest-4's that we built about three weeks ago in Shanghai that have now been delivered to Cambridge and have completed all their testing and so they will be distributed to a lot of developers and kids actually, to test on. People don't realize they focus on the price, they don't realize that there's a stunning technology inside. Some stuff that you would want in your two thousand dollar lap top.

Jim Rapoza: Right.

Mary Lou Jepsen: That you don't have. Where do you start, the industrial design right, the style of the housing is really much more functional than usual laptops, the display, the power management, the security system, the mess network, sugar.

Tags: BTest-4 | Jim Rapoza | Mary Lou Jepsen | OLPC Podcast | Tech Rising | Walter Bender | XO Technology |

Mary Lou Jepsen and Walter Bender on Tech Rising | Comment (0) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Send to Reddit

Famed reporter Lesley Stahl of CBS News profiled the One Laptop Per Child organization on "60 Minutes" - America's premier new program. She focused on MIT Professor Nicholas Negroponte's progress with One Laptop Per Child, his dream of one-to-one computing as an educational boost, a way for children in the developing world to "learn learning".

Ms. Stahl had on-location reports from OLPC testing in Brazil and with 13 million viewers on average, the coverage of OLPC was a major boost in profile for the project.

Below is the transcription of the full 60 Minutes segment. Please acknowledge OLPC Talks if you quote the transcription.

---

Leslie Stahl: Nicholas Negroponte, a professor at MIT had a dream, in it every child on the planet had his own a computer. In that way he figured children from the most impoverished places; from desert to jungles and slums could become educated and part of the modern world, poor kids would have new possibilities.

It was a big dream, Negroponte thought he had a chance of actually seeing it happen if he could help invent a really inexpensive laptop. So 2 years ago he founded a non-profit organisation called 'One Laptop per child'. He recruited a cadre of geeks and voila, the $100 laptop, designed specifically for poor children, was born. But let's go back to the beginning when Negroponte first got his idea in Cambodia.

The idea came to him in a remote village, a 4 hour drive on a dirt road from the nearest town, it's as far from MIT as you can get, they don't even have running water. Negroponte and his family founded a school here in 1999, putting in a satellite dish and generators, then they gave the children laptops. Instantly school became a lot more popular.

Child sings: How's the weather? It's sunny.

Leslie Stahl: Kids who had never seen a computer before now crossing the digital divide. Nicholas Negroponte was knocked out.

Nicholas Negroponte:: The first English word of every child in that village was Google.

Leslie Stahl: (Laughs).

Nicholas Negroponte: The village has no electricity, no telephone, no television and the children take home laptops that are connected broadband to the internet.

Leslie Stahl: When they take the laptops home the kids often teach the whole family how to use it

Nicholas Negroponte: Families loved it because it was the brightest light source in the house.

Leslie Stahl: Because they had no electricity.

Nicholas Negroponte: Talk about a metaphor and reality simultaneously - it just illuminated that household.

Teacher: We have to go to study computer now, yes? Good.

Children: Yes!

Leslie Stahl: Once the computers were there, school attendance went way up.

Nicholas Negroponte: This year, for example, 50% more children showed up for first grade.

Leslie Stahl: In Cambodia?

Nicholas Negroponte: Yeah, because the kids who were there last year told the other kids "You know, school is pretty cool."

Tags: $100 Laptop | 60 Minutes | Lesley Stahl | Nicholas Negroponte | OLPC | One Laptop Per Child |

One Laptop Per Child on 60 Minutes - Transcribed | Comment (5) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Send to Reddit

On Thursday, April 26, One Laptop Per Child held a three-hour analyst meeting at their headquarters in Cambridge, MA. The OLPC Leadership spoke on several key aspects of the Children's Machine XO architecture and the program's overall production strategy.

OLPC Talks received exclusive audio tapes of the meeting, transcribed below. Please reference OLPC Talks if you use any quotes or information from the transcripts.

---

Walter Bender, President, Software and Content, One Laptop Per Child:

Walter Bender: One of them is every child is a learner, and every child is a teacher. Some children learn; they have a natural affinity to learn and a natural affinity to teach. And actually, Antonio [...], who's our education officer, studies the teaching brain-- that actually studies the physical change of the brain as you engage in teaching. And that's part of human cognitive development.

The second thing is that people everywhere, children everywhere are fundamentally social beings. And so we build being social into the very part of the software. And thirdly, people everywhere, children everywhere are expressive. It's a fundamental of being human. And so we're building upon learning and teaching in a social context through expression.

Now, what we did was we took Linux, first off-- and I'll talk about open source at the end of the discussion-- but we took Linux for a number of technical reasons as well, and one of them is that it's very easy to sort of make out of Linux a very small footprint that fits to the particular needs of what you're trying to do. So we're working with Red Hat; we're using a stripped down version of Fedora for the laptop. We made a few decisions early in the process about our development environment. We decided rather than having every single choice to build on the laptop for everyone all the time, we'd actually make some decisions.

We made some decisions, one of them being that our core development environment is Python, and Python is a simple, clean language. It's got a broad development community. It's an interpretive language, which means that everything is transparent and available all the time within the context of the language. One of the reasons-- the primary reasons why we switched to the LX processor is not more [..], but because it has an L2K and that L2 Cache makes a tremendous difference in terms of the interpretive language processor.

And I'll give you an example later; I'll show you the difference in performance between this laptop, which is very close to what the mass production of the machine will be, and the machine you've got there. When we were designing the software, we thought about the experience we wanted children to have, and we also thought about some opportunities we had. One of the opportunities we had is that for the first time we're designing something where we know that every single laptop, every single user is gonna be connected to every other user.

Tags: CSound | GMail | GTK Libraries | OLPC | OLPC Technology | TamTam | Walter Bender |

Walter Bender at OLPC Analyst Meeting (Speech) | Comment (3) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Send to Reddit

At the MIT Museum, Walter Bender, President, Software and Content Development, One Laptop per Child, Senior Research Scientist (on leave), MIT Media Lab spoke about One Laptop per Child: Revolutionizing How the World's Children Engage in Learning.

In an informal conversation with an MIT Museum audience, Walter Bender describes the mission and progress of the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) venture. The brainchild of Nicholas Negroponte and the MIT Media Lab, this enterprise aims to put low-cost ($100 or less!) laptops into the hands of a billion plus children in the developing world. T

The full audio program transcript is below.

---

John Durant: Friends, welcome to the--ooh--welcome to the MIT Museum. I sound as if I’m coming from miles away! Great to be back for the first Soap Box that we’re doing in 2007, and to see you all here this evening, and to welcome all of the people who are taking part in this event online. We’re pleased to have those folks with us as well.

I just want to make a couple of announcements before we get into the subject of tonight’s Soap Box. The first one is, if you have a cell phone or PDA switched on, could you please switch it off, or at least turn the sound off? The second thing is that we’re trying to do a kind of ongoing survey of who’s coming to these Soap Box events, where you come from, what brought you here and so on. It’s part of some data we’re collecting, not least because of the partnership we have with WGBH-Boston over a collaboration we’ll be doing with them later on in the year, so you may find survey forms around. Please take a couple of minutes, if you would, and fill them in; we’d be grateful.

We’re using new webcasting tonight. The webcast should be a little faster, a little smoother, for the people who are online. I hope that’s true, and we hope very soon that when we get to the questioning and discussion stage of the evening that we’ll be in a position to take comments, e-mail comments from people online as well, so that we can extend the conversation that Soap Box is all about as widely as possible.

Now, we’ve organized this Soap Box, I have to confess, slightly at the last minute, and the reason we did was that we could get a hold of Walter Bender, on my right, who travels a lot, as does his colleague Nicholas Negroponte, not least, I think, because they’re busy now, implementing one of the most exciting projects that’s been associated with MIT for some time. And that project is sometimes known as “The $100 Laptop,” sometimes known as “One Laptop Per Child.” I’ll leave Walter to say what the official name of the project is. That’s the project that has taken you, I think, all over the place, because this is a truly global ambition that we’re going to hear more about shortly.

Walter was a founding member and former executive director of the Media Lab; he’s president of software development for this particular project. I’m going to let him say anything else he wants to say about himself. He’s going to introduce this project, then we’ll go into the brainstorming, where you get a chance to define the questions you’d like to pursue with him in discussion, and we’ll take it from there. But, Walter, welcome to Soap Box.

Walter Bender: Thank you!

[applause]

Tags: John Durant | MIT Museum | One Laptop Per Child | Seymour Papert | Soap Box | Walter Bender |

Walter Bender at Soap Box: MIT Museum | Comment (0) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Send to Reddit

On Christopher Lydon's Radio Open Source program for Public Radio International, Walter Bender, Ethan Zuckerman and Wayan Vota speak about One Laptop Per Child's Children's Machine XO.

The full audio program is here and the transcript of Radio Open Source: "One Laptop Per Child" is below.

---

Christopher Lydon: From Public Radio International. I am Christopher Lydon this is Open Source.

In our laps at last, the "$100 Laptop" is here for inspection. Built for kids to take home from school in scuff-proof heavy plastic. It opens up like a lunch box with swiveling full color screen and keyboard. It’s got a pull cord for power and cute little bunny ears with radios that will network instantly with other laptops and other kids even in far corners of the third world and will link of course into the online world wide web. The point in this is not the price after all. The One Laptop Per Child, or OLPC, as they call it. Is a children’s laptop not a cheap laptop and it’s not about the original systems inside; the revolution is in learning more than computing. It’s about kids everywhere, a billion of them, teaching themselves how to learn on a global platform of knowledge. First of many quibbles, what if kids would rather have cell phones? Laptops for children are next on Open Source.

[Music]

Christopher: I am Christopher Lydon, this is Open Source. The radios out of the web’s online gab fast, free, open, and global at radioopensource.org. We are holding in our hands and second-guessing this hour the digital dream of No Child Left Offline. What was conceived as a "$100 Laptop" to bridge the digital divide to give a billion school kids from Maine to Mali a transformative key into the age of information. These are called OLPC’s now for One Laptop Per Child or the "Children’s Machine XO". Argentina, Brazil, Libya, and Nigeria are ordering them up in lots of a million. So why are they still controversial? Is it the non-Microsoft innards of the machine? Is it the learning theory behind them? Is it the many questions that are still open about the classroom connection? Put your $100 theory down on our thread at www.radioopensource.org.

We begin with Walter Bender who is the president for software and content of One Laptop Per Child. On leave from MIT’s media lab.

Walter Bender, congratulations on your baby. We are looking at this green and white prototype, compact little marvel of technology, with learning theory, maybe of cultural and political transformation. We will get to all that. How to inspect the many dimensions of this thing?

Walter Bender: How are you Chris?

Christopher: Good. Welcome.

Walter: Thank you. Thank you. It’s good to be here. So where do you want to begin?

Christopher: I want to see where you begin. What is the triumph we are supposed to be noticing here? First of all you did it and congratulations.

Walter: Well so far we built a laptop, what we haven’t done yet is gotten the laptops to the children. Once we have done that then you can congratulate me because then we will have done something. To build a laptop is sort of an engineering feat and getting laptops into the hands of children is the real change. That’s the real challenge.

Christopher: Talk about it. We will come back to the machine but there is the notion around that it is about... It’s not even about the software. It’s about the kids and the leverage that they will find in it. Spell that out.

Walter: Well there are about one billion school aged children of the developing world and most of those children are lacking an opportunity for learning and there are a lot of ways of trying to give them that opportunity. Build schools. Hire teachers. Loads of things that are already happening. Those are things that take time. Take money. And what we are trying to do is accelerate the process by giving the children connected laptop computers. And we think that those laptop computers will give them first of all access to books. second of all a communication infrastructure so they have access to each other, their teachers, their parents, their community. And third we think that computation itself is a powerful thing to think with. It’s a wonderful way to learn learning. So we are trying to combine all those different ideas together into One Laptop Per Child.

Tags: Christopher Lydon | Ethan Zuckerman | OLPC XO | Radio Open Source | Walter Bender | Wayan Vota |

Walter Bender on Radio Open Source | Comment (0) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Send to Reddit

In September 2006, Walter Bender, President, Software and Content, spoke at Ars Electronica Simplicity - the art of complexity about One Laptop Per Child.

The transcript of Walter Bender's session:

---

Announcer: Ars Electronica 2006. Simplicity, The Art of Complexity.

Walter Bender: OK, thank you very much, John, for inviting me to Ars Electronica. It’s a pleasure to be here. What I’m going to do with my few minutes is explain what it is we’re trying to accomplish with the laptop project, spend a fair amount of time actually talking about the design and the process we went through and some of the problems we’re trying to address. Then I want to talk a little bit about ways in which we expect the children to use the laptop. So that will be the gist of it.

I do want to make a couple of comments about simplicity and complexity, as part of the motivation, because this is a topic that John and I have talked about and argued about over the years. Last night we had a lovely dinner downtown in a little restaurant that was right in the middle of a wine festival. One of my favorite examples of the juxtaposition between simplicity and complexity is wine, because I never go looking for a simple wine. I like a wine that has some complexity to it. So, the goal, and certainly the goal with the laptop project is not to eliminate the complexity of the world, but rather, the goal is to build a device that is simple in its use but allows us to reach and enjoy and experience and leverage all the complexity in the world. So that’s sort of the fundamental relationship to the project and to the theme.

Our mission at one laptop per child is to get laptops out to kids so that they can use them as things to think with, as tools to learn and express and explore the world with. We’ve been working on technology and learning at MIT for almost 40 years and we really think through all our experiments and experience that computers are something pretty special and they represent an opportunity that we want children to have. Now of course, in year one it’s probably going to be the 100 euro laptop, not the 100 dollar laptop, but we’re working on it.

Tags: $100 Euro Laptop | Ars Electronica | Design Continuum | Michallas Bletsis | One Laptop Per Child | Walter Bender |

Walter Bender at Ars Electronica | Comment (2) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Send to Reddit