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A View From Inside the OLPC Project
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue May 13, 2008 09:49 PM
from the there-has-to-be-a-way-to-scale-this dept.
from the there-has-to-be-a-way-to-scale-this dept.
icknay writes "Here's an interesting rant on the OLPC from someone who worked there, including: 'The core mistake of the present Sugar approach is that it couples phenomenally powerful ideas about learning — that it should be shared, collaborative, peer to peer, and open — with the notion that these ideas must come presented in an entirely new graphical paradigm. We reject this coupling as untenable. Choosing to reinvent the desktop UI paradigm means we are spending our extremely over-constrained resources fighting graphical interfaces, not developing better tools for learning.' I have an OLPC, and the OS itself seems quite unfinished. I buy the argument that it would be better to focus on Sugar as educational software, and let it run on Linux, Windows, whatever."
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OS not UI (Score:5, Interesting)
That said, the UI paradigm of Sugar falls into the Kiosk world, along with MythTV. I would have liked to see that run as an application, minimizeable and windowable, but under XFCE or IceWM for a Gnome-like UI and integration with a standard platform.
Re:OS not UI (Score:4, Interesting)
The desktop paradigm is familiar and *VERY* well refined at this point thus, there's really no need to put the kids on a outside-the-box perspective on computing just because you can. Why reinvent a very good wheel? I think that Sugar was something very innovative but was it very useful in the end? Prolly not really.
NOW, when moving back up to the discussion of WHICH desktop you should be using? Well, that's just politics and money there. The point of the project was kinda to project the idea of informational freedom on the people of the world where in some places that's kinda a weird idea. Thus, when looking a little higher into the argument toward the ideology of the project:
- information is free
- you can go get information
- go get information and improve your lives by knowing more about the world and its ways
- oh, and do your homework on it too! (For those of you with teachers. The rest? We have minesweeper!)
You see the point of wanting to make the choice of a free operating system semi-important because that 'show source key' works anywhere in the current OS. Which means that the kids who want the knowledge about computers, which, is a very valuable skill and would improve conditions in many areas (theoretically, think infrastructure for communication kinda stuff) could learn that and start working on projects that would improve the places that they live... or something like that.
If you lock the kids into a closed source OS, they can't learn how the LOW LEVEL stuff works due to that key not being able to show you the source for, say, msvcrt.dll (the C++ interpreter interface thingy). Mind, they CAN eventually remove Windows and put UbSuDeRhCeSlinux on there to taste what that kinda freedom is like but, it's like how most of us (those that made that move before you found out how very nice OSX is) had to kinda 'discover' that there was more out there. It's just another step that you don't HAVE to make kids jump through as... (ta-dah the POINT) there is another perfectly useful desktop paradigm/implementation out there in Gnome/Kde/XWhatever!! Hence, you don't have to reinvent the wheel... but you don't have to make them buy a wheel with a EULA. (whew)
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Re:OS not UI (Score:5, Insightful)
Giving the OLPC/Windows crowd the benefit of the doubt, I suspect that the open source paradigm is being blamed unfairly for the failings of Sugar.
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Uh, isn't that the whole point? (Score:5, Informative)
Isn't that the whole point of it being distributed with free educational software? No propietary software restrictions, copyright infringement for sharing programs, no licenses, no future lock in? It seems to me that this insider can't see past the fact that MS wants to subsidize Windows on the OLPC to lock in a new customer base...
Re:Uh, isn't that the whole point? (Score:5, Informative)
By making it cross-platform it would make it easier to develop and more accessible.
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Re:Uh, isn't that the whole point? (Score:4, Informative)
The reasons the user version does not are, according to the author, political and philosophical.
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Re:Uh, isn't that the whole point? (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole point of XP on XO is that Microsoft cannot stand up commercially if it ever becomes generally accepted knowledge that there are other O/Ss for small computers which work just as well, if not better than Microsoft products. This is what really gives Bill Gates and Steve Balmer serious laundry problems during the day and horrendous dreams at night. They just cannot allow that to happen.
Where the OLPC people are really in la-la land is thinking that the pupils and their teachers are going to be able to produce the course/learning software modules for themselves. The first world has failed spectacularly in that department, I'd really love to think the third world is going to be able to show up the first world as a bunch of ninnies in this regard, but I fear not.
After watching my son's schools futzing around with both desktop and laptop machines, in my not so humble opinion, laptops in primary schools are a complete waste of time, money and effort, and of very questionable value in secondary ones. Useful for teachers to keep records and to produce teaching materials, but for the pupil's use, no.
It matters not one jot who wrote either the GUI or the underlying O/S, because that's al hidden under the course-ware, which is what counts.
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Re:Pretty much. (Score:5, Insightful)
I think most people read about a page in, then rushed back to slashdot to muster their defense of Free Software and Fight The Good Fight, and well, pretty much proved his point: OLPC's mission is being lost by people who care more about meta-issues than either the learning mission (enabled by the software, not really the kernel) or the ongoing viability of the project itself (deployments need support!)
Peru may soon be stuck with 40,000 doorstops. Maybe I'll go take a look at Sugar and see if any of the ideas are worth lifting for a groove-like P2P network.
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Re:Pretty much. (Score:4, Funny)
Since he's bringing up unease of use in 95, I felt like sharing.
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Overheard from a reporter embedded in OLPC (Score:5, Funny)
Here is my version of the events: (Score:5, Informative)
If I missed anything, correcftions are welcome.
The problem with OLPC and Windows (Score:4, Insightful)
Windows is not "free," and I don't mean price, and I mean freedom. Putting Windows on OLPC is nothing more than a marketing move by Microsoft. Not to help kids, but to ensure they become customers. Not giving them books, selling the subscriptions. Not teaching them to farm, but making them sharecroppers.
Re:The problem with OLPC and Windows (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:The problem with OLPC and Windows (Score:4, Interesting)
The freedom he's talking about isn't the "freedom to do whatever you want" but the freedom to explore. In the autocratic family structure you describe, the parents can be strict mormons who don't allow their kids to have fun and require them to marry off at 15, or they can be easy-going sure-have-a-couple-sips-of-beer-you're-18-they-can-draft-you types. The point of the learning argument about proprietary software is that you can only learn so much about the proprietary inner functions.
your buisness argument is pretty good though, however, the OS functioning differently didn't affect those of us who grew up in the 80's when schools were hooked on apple, and now use OSX, Linux, and Windows on the same machine. (maybe those of us are a rare breed... i don't know)
quoting TFA:
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
And frankly, from the point of view of education, that freedom exists regardless of price tag on the OS or the apps. (Aside the from the very minor and likely to be little used ability to look 'under the hood' and modify the code.)
As this individual [slashdot.org] points out:
Re:The problem with OLPC and Windows (Score:5, Insightful)
PS: Besides, you can use a computer to learn about things other than the computer itself, right?
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Re:The problem with OLPC and Windows (Score:4, Interesting)
You can't do that with any modern computer. You can't learn from watching a multi-layer motherboard where you can't find out what connects to what in what fashion without a multi-thousand-dollar lab and a high-res X-ray machine. You can't just look up what a modern thousand-leg GPU does the way you could with a 74LS74. There are no books on that. You can't cut a trace and rewire something, not anymore.
Different times require different tools. Open source is probably the only way to see what happens in a computer these days. That's why the OLPC should be open from top to bottom.
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middle ground (Score:5, Insightful)
I think there's a middle ground, though: reuse the Gnome desktop infrastructure but replace the window manager with something simpler that prevents the usual beginner mistakes (losing windows behind each other, moving windows off-screen, etc.).
As for Windows on OLPC, I don't get it. Even if you run Windows+Sugar on the OLPC, you won't be able to install commercial software or commercial drivers with it, Windows books won't apply, and realistically you won't be able to run Microsoft's development tools on the OLPC either. But you will alienate lots of OLPC contributors, and you'll saddle yourself with an OS over which OLPC has no control, and Microsoft secretly probably just wants to kill the whole project anyway.
Re:middle ground (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Port a Debian-based distribution with good hardware support, development and "mainstream" connectivity tools.
2. Make configuration suitable for a person who is accustomed to "traditional" windowing systems.
3. Demonstrate that if Windows on OLPC laptops is addressing a problem, that problem is already solved better by using existing free software.
So far I find that laptop perfectly usable -- in fact, for some things it ended up being better because slow Flash annoyed me enough to add a script, mplayer configuration and rebuilt clive package, so Youtube works in fullscreen without glitches. On my regular laptop I did not bother, and just accepted that I have to use Flash plugin with it craptastic performance on videos.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think XFCE window management is any better for these kinds of screens than Gnome, and I think the XFCE dock and toolbars are considerably worse.
2. Make configuration suitable for a person who is accustomed to "traditional" windowing systems.
But that's not the goal of OLPC. The goal of OLPC is to make a system usable for kids and non-experts. Kids and non-experts have real trouble with
I'm not buying it... (Score:4, Interesting)
That fallacy keeps getting repeated.
Soon after my son's 1st birthday, I set up an Ubuntu system for him. I loaded gCompris, and spent about 5 minutes showing him how the mouse works. A few days later, I spent maybe 5 minutes showing him how to load gCompris from the menu. Within a few days of that, he had no problem loading his computer and loading his software. I soon found that he was also loading other programs he liked to use. Klotski seemed to be a favorite of his. It took all of 10 minutes of 'training' to teach a 1 year old child how to navigate the Gnome desktop with no problems. He couldn't even read, and he had no problem loading the programs he wanted to use. There is no way that Gnome can be called a difficult to understand UI.
This is also why to the chagrin of many geeks, the desktop metaphor just won't go away. It works, and it works well. It is incredibly easy to understand both for advanced users and novices alike. I can't count the number of articles and comments I've read where someone is saying that the 'desktop' needs to be replaced because it is 25 years old. Really, it doesn't. There have been many refinements to it, and I am sure that more will come, but the premise is rock solid.
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I've been underwhelmed by Sugar (Score:5, Interesting)
Now, I'm not a kid, and I've been brain-warped by decades of exposure to the Mac, but I really feel a lot of cognitive dissonance between Sugar's stated design goals and what's actually been delivered.
For example, one of Sugar's key design principles [laptop.org] is "recoverability," and it says "However, the primary and essential means of recoverability remains the ability to undo one's actions."
Nevertheless, the keyboard has no marked "undo" key, and very, very few of the Sugar's activities appear to support any kind of "undo" facility.
Similarly, I've read the theory of how the Journal is supposed to work, and I may be wrong--I don't have any kids to try it on--but as nearly as I can tell, the only way you can find past Journal entries is by a very left-brained search capability that requires you to have labeled each Journal entry as you make it.
There's a long essay [laptop.org] on how the Journal is supposed to work... revolutionary, non-hierarchical, etc. But I've found "tagging" to be a royal, royal pain. It's all very well to say that "Tagging will become a fundamental process for all types of data and activities on the laptops. Fortunately, children have a natural inclination to describe their world and the things they see and do." As I say, I haven't watched kids use the thing and maybe they "get" it, but I find it extremely hard to envision a ten-year old typing in tags every time he creates a journal entry.
While I'm intrigued by the idea of a GUI that is new from the ground up and informed by a fresh way of looking at things... to tell the truth my main motivation for participating in G1G1 was to experience Sugar... I'm quite disappointed by what's actually been achieved.
Right now, Sugar is a program launcher, no better than the Apple Dock or the Windows Tray... and to this aging brain, at least, the Journal simply doesn't work very well. Much less well than the Mac Finder as it existed in 1984, for example.
However, the problem is that I think open source is a key educational feature for OLPC. The concept of a "view source" button thrilled me. I grew up at a time when you could take the back off a TV set and see the tubes inside, and smash a tube in a vise and see the plate and filament and so forth inside. Maybe I couldn't build a TV or modify a vacuum tube, but just the conceptual readiness of looking inside was terribly important.
I was disappointed in the absence of a working "View Source" button in the G1G1 build. I think it's very important that all the code in the XO be open for inspection, and that definitely includes the GUI. So however bad Sugar is, I think it would be a disaster to replace it with a proprietary GUI.
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Re:I've been underwhelmed by Sugar (Score:4, Funny)
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Graphics (Score:4, Interesting)
Negroponte's dismissal of Steve's offer, only to arrive at Bill's door is rather odd. But, as the eeepc has shown, we will arrive there one day soon with or without the OLPC.
game over? (Score:3, Interesting)
I wrote about software problems in my OLPC review (Score:5, Interesting)
unintended consequences (Score:4, Funny)
GREAT JOB GUYS
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Amateurs talk strategy... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's an old military saying, and it's right. By far the most damning bits in his article don't deal with Sugar, Windows or anything else- they deal with the utter and total lack of planning on the part of the deployment folks. (Err, folk) The fact that they had virtually no plan, no infrastructure and no supply chain management indicates to me that they were simply not living in the real world- any Army 2LT could have sat down with them and explained how they were about to fail. How you get to a point where you have a quarter of a million pieces of hardware sitting around with no coherent way to get them to the people who actually need them is beyond me. Why didn't they hire a pile of old brigade S4s? You know, folks who actually have experience getting stuff to people out in the middle of nowhere?
I've been tremendously disappointed by the entire project- the goals were wonderful, the hardware ended up pretty nice, the software has ended up pretty meh, but the overall project seems to be run by pie-in-the-sky idealists, Open Source fanatics and others for whom the real world is a place they only visit from time to time.
I'm confused (Score:5, Interesting)
1. OLPC repeats and repeats they are committed to Sugar.
2. OLPC then says they are unhappy with Sugar and are replacing Linux with Windows... because they are unhappy with Sugar.
3. OLPC says they are going to port Sugar to Windows.
So let me see if I understand where they are coming from. The think Sugar is a mistake so they are going to solve the problem by porting it to Windows and switching the underlying OS from Linux to Windows.
WTF! Am I the only person who gets braincramps trying to parse the doublespeak coming from OLPC?
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Bender said he'd like to see Sugar run on many different OS's and indeed it is in the Ubuntu repositories and can be installed on the latest Ubuntu( v8.04 ) as a different session type/desktop.
And Sugar provides more than just a desktop so all the things like mesh, net
Learning inhibitors (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, I respectfully submit that the worldview favored by Microsoft actively inhibits learning. As a blindingly mundane example: Make an OS (Windows) which uses filename extensions to divine metadata about certain files (bad, but we'll let that slide for the moment). Next, release a version of said OS which has a default UI setting to hide these filename extensions from the user. This very demonstrably inhibits learning -- even the casual user picks up fairly quickly on things like ".txt" and ".exe" -- and gives people a distorted picture due to the missing information. That, in turn, increases confusion (why are there 4 things called "Setup" in this folder, why do they have different icons and which one do I click?) and paves the way for some of the the crudest exploits (somebadvirus.doc.exe) simply by dumbing down the user. Not only has the prevailing approach by the monopoly software vendor actively inhibited learning, but the net result of that has been several iterations of malware which Just Didn't Need To Happen.
How can you develop a culture of innovation when you promote a mindset which discourages tinkering? Sorry, but in this case half a loaf is worse than no loaf at all. People like Krsti should at least be able to notice this bias in proprietary operating systems and applications. He makes enough reasonable points that it's even more important not to let him off the hook for something like this.
Re:Learning inhibitors (Score:4, Insightful)
This "culture of innovation" bullshit - and the rest of the FOSS ideology - is the anchor around the OLPC's neck.
Let M'beka learn.
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The jury is still out (Score:3, Interesting)
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I'd argue with that. Half of them would be dead in a month. 90% by the end of a year, in a village environment.
The OLPCs are rugged, pretty waterproof, batteries (a VITAL point) cheap and much longer life than standard laptops.
Enlighten me (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Enlighten me (Score:4, Interesting)
He wasn't talking about the problem of getting people to accept the interface.
I believe his point was that with the OLPC's limited resources they pretty much managed to do nothing BUT get the "entirely new graphical paradigm" MOSTLY working. Not much of educational value was produced, unless you really do believe that this hardware, OS and UI have mythic powers akin to the monolith in 2001...
It would be kind of like starting a transportation project and as a first priority deciding that you didn't want to use any wheels because they seem old fashioned. Sure you might come up with a fantastic mag-lev train for a handful of people, but was that the mission or was enabling the greatest number of people to get from point a to point b?
If there is indeed value in putting computing devices in the hands of children, then time becomes a paramount factor. The time it takes to truly innovate a "new paradigm", learn to use it effectively, and then produce the software that rides on top of it and makes it worth having done in the first place... is longer than it takes a child to grow up... That means deferring the supposed value of the project to a later generation.
The project of getting devices to children who can gain value from them should be a separate project that is NOT dependent upon the "new graphical paradigm" project. By all means pursue the second project, but don't block the first project while you do it.
Of course this whole argument begs the question of how much real value the devices would actually bring to the children's education. So far I have heard ZERO arguments for the project based on verifiable research. I've also heard ZERO arguments against the project based on verifiable research.
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Re:Enlighten me (Score:5, Interesting)
When the Freeplay Foundation designed the Lifeline Radio [freeplayfoundation.org] they chose not to re-invent the wheel.
Instead focusing on the design of a rugged multiband portable - in appearance and operation a radio like any other. Building on the infrastructure and experience of eighty years of educational broadcasting.
It was and is a project that would rank zero for ideological or political correctness. But the radios are out there and the program is on track and on budget.
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Frustration @ Lack of Management (Score:5, Interesting)
I found it a depressing read. With a key person who focused on the half dozen key concepts and stuck to them, maybe OLPC could have been better with fewer hiccups. It would likely have taken a Steve Jobs to make the decisions & push needed buttons.
I see the value in business picking the best commercial hardware choice.
I do NOT see the value in forcing proprietary solutions on the third world, but also do not see the value of having software OS & Applications that can get corrupted in a device to be thrown out in the middle of nowhere. In other words, I think it would take running the OS & core applications in flash memory.
The UI is a core issue. Why should it be materially different from what a billion computers already run? If the students are going to be able to go onward from OLPC, then their "language" must be "compatible" with the other "computers" they will see later.
Too many questions. Not enough answers. Then politics hits along with MS Money.
I stopped reading after this (Score:3, Interesting)
But here's the thing: learning new stuff is the whole point of an educational laptop like OLPC. If you give kids a system that works out of the box, then you're spoon feeding them. Just give them a half finished system and tell them they can finish it themselves. It's frustrating and painful, and they'll learn something.
Obviously, he's gotten too old to be willing to learn something new every day, which is why he thinks "dicking around" with a PC is a waste of time. And we should take his views on how to help kids learn seriously? Gimme a break.
I stopped reading TFA after that paragraph, because if he can't see the fundamental contradiction between what works for an old guy who's tired of learning, and a kid who's soaking up everything around him, then his other views on Sugar and whatnot are probably not worth reading either.
Re:I stopped reading after this (Score:5, Insightful)
Frustrating the end user so that they think that the system is nothing but a frustrating, annoying piece of crap is not a very good way to get people to work with it. Especially not the people who give up quickly because they would rather be trying to figure out how to get potable water instead of how to compile a web browser.
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Re:We are not in the dark. (Score:5, Interesting)
Spin? Spin is what organizations do to put bad news back "on message". This is one guy, ranting. One guy who was really involved, who went out to do the deployments to places that make the term "backwater" seem a goddam metropolis, and one guy who is really bitter about what he saw. If you read about, oh, one or two paragraphs more, it's quite obvious he doesn't think XP is going to save what he considers a fundamentally doomed project.
Imagine your IT department deployed 40,000 laptops (that's about as many people as work for Microsoft) and didn't have one single person on the payroll to actually deploy the things into the field. Now imagine that in Peru.
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Re:We are not in the dark. (Score:5, Interesting)
With Mac OS X, the XO would have a native environment for running free software including Sugar, along with or in addition to running commercial Mac software. Unlike clone PCs, there's no vast range of hardware to support. Development tools are simpler and Apple currently has no business plan for selling its dev tools. That seems to make far more sense than slapping on a OS designed primarily to run on full sized, corporate desktops with expensive Office software licensing.
It's too bad OLPC set such lofty ideals about open development, setting itself up to drop them immediately and become yet another extension of a monopoly that doesn't have the technical merits to run on low cost mobile devices.
iPod Game Console, Tablet at WWDC? Highly Unlikely [roughlydrafted.com]
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
((btw, if you feel that you are "educating the masses" in regards to general douchebaggery, please be advised that we've seen it all))
Re:We are not in the dark. (Score:5, Interesting)
While it's sad that Ivan believes OLPC has lost sight of it's goals, you might want to keep an eye on what's happening with OLPC Australia [itwire.com].
The Rudd government is looking at providing sponsored laptops for children. OLPC has set up an Australian office as a consequence. Jeff Waugh has been appointed board director, and seems to understand the issues well.
"I have no idea as to why Windows is regarded as relevant to this and some of the stuff in the press about running Sugar on Windows and things like that - well Windows is just an operating system that doesn't deliver on the vision of OLPC."
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