OLPC

[Marielle Lange]

That's a great suggestion Mark.

> How will these be marketed?
> The idea is to distribute the machines through those ministries of  
> education willing to adopt a policy of "one laptop per child."  
> Initial discussions have been held with China and Brazil. In  
> addition, smaller countries will be selected for beta testing.  
> Initial orders will be limited to a minimum of one million units  
> (with appropriate financing).

I had indeed thought that revolution, that is a desktop based  
multimedia environment, was something that could have an important  
contribution to education  in the third world (where computers -- or  
even PDAs start to appear), but internet connection are still very  
sparse.

An issue, however, is that academic that support cheap/free resources  
tend to take a strong stand and decide to keep away from *any*  
proprietary program. For instance, if you take this education  
initiative on Linux: http://www.ofset.org/freeduc-cd
Freeduc-primary, a live-cd for primary school

"Their regulation stipulates that:
Article 3.- Programs that don't meet our Libre Software standards

We do not believe that mixing Libre Software with proprietary  
software helps Libre Software. We will not provide proprietary  
software and we will not accept projects which have mandatory  
dependencies on proprietary software. In other words, as long as your  
software can run with entirely Libre Software, we can accept further  
contributions which rely on non-Libre Software, such as ports to  
proprietary operating systems.

We will only host programs with GPL-compatible licensing terms, so we  
can easily mix them with GPL programs. For non-program contributions,  
we will decide on a case per case basis whether these restrictions  
apply or not. For instance, most of the time GPL compatibility will  
not be required for documentation work."

What about getting MIT buy revolution and distributing it for free?   
(I am a dreamer).

> How will this initiative be structured?
> The three principals at MIT are faculty members at the Media Lab:  
> Nicholas Negroponte (a founder of the Lab), Joe Jacobson (serial  
> entrepreneur, co-founder and director of E Ink), and **Seymour  
> Papert** (one of the world's leading theorists on child learning).
>
> Additional researchers include: Mike Bove, Mary Lou Jepsen, Alan  
> Kay, Tod Machover, Mitchel Resnick, and Ted Selker.

Wow, when that project is realized, something **big** will come out  
of it. All these persons have great visions and have the talent to  
make their visions become a reality.

Did you check out the bio of some of them:
Mitchel Resnick is author of Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams  
(1993), co-editor of Constructionism in Practice: Designing,  
Thinking, and Learning in a Digital World (1996), and co-author of  
Adventures in Modeling: Exploring Complex, Dynamic Systems with  
StarLogo (2001).

Thanks for the link, Mark,
Marielle