Linux
One of the things that I often tell teachers is that I think that they should never hesitate to bring their own personal experiences into the classroom. Teachers are often shy about that. They think that it’s sort of unprofessional. You know - teach the syllabus, teach the textbook, teach the stuff that you want to teach, but don’t bring in your own life and your own experiences. But after all, every teacher - maybe the teacher has not had the the kind of experiences I have had - but all teachers have lived certain kinds of experiences, which made them who they are. And whatever those experiences are, whatever led to a change in consciousness of those teachers, students should know about that. And I discovered this: that whenever I brought into the classroom my own experiences, the interest of the students suddenly quickened. I don’t want to to say that before I brought my experiences in my students were asleep. I like to think that half of them were awake. But certainly when I began to bring my own life into it, my own experiences, yes students’ interest always quickened. A lot of teachers don’t understand this; students always want to know who their teachers are, who they really are, behind the textbook, behind the syllabus, what their lives are like, what they went through, and what they’re thinking about. I always resented it when I was a student and I spent a semester or a year with a teacher and at the end of the semester and and the end of the year I didn’t know where that teacher stood. I thought there was something missing there.Howard Zinn - Original Zinn
Technorati Tags: My hiatus will rise like lions after slumber
I don’t have a lot of routines, but one that I fall into every baseball season is watching Sports Center in the morning. You see, during the rest of the year I have the news to keep my hopes down and my desire to crawl back in bed up. During the baseball season I’ve got the Dodgers to do that for me.
As luck would have it this morning I sat down not during baseball highlights. Per the routine this means that I can pay far less than half attention and convince myself that this counts as sleep.
Here’s what I was able to ascertain from my psudo-sleep: It seems that there’s a championship series going on, or about to go on, or something, for a non-baseball type sport. As I was dropping into a further level of zone-out and waiting for the Royals/Sox highlights I thought I heard:
What?
Ubuntu.
There. They said it again. As I shifted my eye sight from blurry eating mode, not much eye sight needed to shovel food in the ol’ gullet, to something near focusing I began to see the Celtics on the screen and decided that I’d finally lost it. This was going to drive me insane. And at the end of this school year it was going to be a very short drive. Why would anyone be talking about Ubuntu and the Celtics. Must. Go. Back. To. Half. Sleep. Then they said it again.
Ubuntu.
Crap. I was going to have to focus on something that wasn’t baseball. Then the world became a bit more strange.
Turns out that the Celtics use “Ubuntu” as some sort-of battle cry.
Neat.
It’s a lot better cry than “We’re waiting for Windows 7″. By now I was awake enough to put off thoughts of an OpenSource NBA team and Magic vs. Bird, finish breakfast, and go to work.
Strange stuff and not at all an unfitting way to start the last day of this school year.
Around Christmas time I got into the G1G1 project that OLPC did and picked up an XO “for my daughter”. We did the whole Christmas thing with it and it took her all of about twenty minutes to rip the “k” key off. I packed the XO up for a little bit and thought to myself “we’ll give that a shot later” and then thought to myself “how my times and different ways can you use quotes in one post”. In fairness the daughter was just barely three at the time and ripping of keys, I’m sure, seemed like a natural thing to do.
About a month ago I got my daughter playing a few games on the PC. Just the ones that you can play online. You know the ones that are for kids. Good wholesome games, for example Defend Your Castle, Trogdor and of course The Impossible Quiz. Seriously we started at Nickjr. The daughter would use the space bar and I’d do the rest. Shortly she was clicking the mouse and about two weeks ago mom taught her to click and drag. From there it was game over.
Me: You want some help playing that game
Her: Nope, I got it
About two days later I walked into the computer room and she was in a chat room fending off predators and looking at porn. I mean as soon as I came it she was all alt-tabing and closing windows. It was really cute.
That never happened. But this did:
I walked into the room and she was playing a game a Nickjr that we hadn’t played together before. It was game that I hadn’t shown her. It was a game that involved selecting the correct puzzle pieces and clicking and dragging them to the correct part of the screen to create a robot that would do something. When I first walked in I just stood back and watched her. The puzzles had about 15 pieces, some large, some small, and she was just clicking and dragging and hitting the right spots and using deduction to find the right spots.
It was pretty amazing. I want to stress again that
- she found this game on her own
- she learned how to play this game on her own
- she’s three
In fact it’s the game that she’s playing in this video:
Now I’ve just spent a lot of time setting this post up and I realize there’s very little chance that anyone’s made it this far. If you have here’s the point I’m trying to make:
I set that game up so she could play it on her own computer. Which she did, for about five minutes. A few minutes later she remembered taking pictures with the XO at Christmas-time before the “k” key debacle and wanted to do that again. So I showed her where that app was, showed her how to click the little circle to start the recording and away she went. Seriously.
She told 15 second stories about her blanket. Took the XO outside and made another one about her soccer ball. Tried to get her brother and cats into the act (both are about as easy to get to do what you want). And screamed and laughed, a lot. She did all of this on her own. She even unplugged and plugged in the mouse as she went from place to place in the house.
A short time later she had opened the paint program and after showing her where the pencil tool and the colors were she went after that too. Again, you know what I’m going to say here, but it was on her own. No prompting, very little showing, just her doing and creating.
She’s already asking about the little turtle, and I can’t wait to learn logo and turtle math again with her. Before long I’m sure she’ll be asking about the other things too and what she can do with this machine. This children’s machine. Her machine.
Here’s where this gets important (and I’m sorry it took me so long to get here): because of the design of the computer and the design of the Linux OS, Sugar, it’s created an environment where my daughter wants to create things, not just sit there and do things that have been created for her. She now wants to create her own things more than play the pre-built games at nickjr.
To the folks that bought an Asus or are going to buy the other alternatives out there, you’re missing the boat and missing the point. PCs have been created with some idea of what we’re supposed to do with these machines. Those machines, just like our PCs, tell us what to do with with them. The XO is built for kids to imagine what to do with it and then make that happen.
That’s the part of the discussion that’s been missing. Until I got a chance to watch a kid use one, I didn’t quite get it. Now it couldn’t be more clear.
Best Buy now has the Eee PC in stock. Both the Linux and XP versions are $399. It appears that the Linux version is only being offered for purchase online.
Over on his blog, Miguel Guhlin asks:
Anyone have suggestions on how to respond to this question? I welcome all brainstorming ideas...
We are ready to implement a student portal (with teacher and parent portals to follow) for our 1:1 campuses. We would like for this portal to be a web-based, searchable, "pretty"
While "pretty" is subjective, this is one place where spending a little time with either an ID or a graphic designer, or both, will benefit your site. "Pretty" has a frequently overlooked cousin, "Usability" -- sorting out your navigational structures (done in Drupal using the core block and menu items), and making sure your theme enhances these architectural decisions, will often get you both Pretty and Usable, which is a winning combination. Starting with a solid base theme, like Zen, helps you theme your site in a time-efficient way, particularly if you and your team are learning how to design/theme in Drupal. Drupal can be themed pretty effectively via css alone; if you have someone on staff who can work in php, there really isn't much you can't do. Also, if there is one element you decide to outsource, the theme is a pretty good choice.
Here's some bad news for those of us who support GNU/Linux: Wal-Mart removes Linux PC from store shelves. They'll still sell them online, but the "tepid response" from customers just didn't warrant the shelf space for these $200 PCs. Curious, really. Reminds me of Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier, where the poor people were opting to buy expensive (and less wholesome) canned milk when there was plenty of fresh milk available at a much lower price. A status thing?
This post is coming to you live from an OLPC laptop.
First thoughts, it’s small, durable, easy to use, and for any one who’s worried about adults running off with these things; let’s just say the keyboard (which is perfect for little hands) will be enough to keep that from happening.
Now I’ve got to wrap this thing up for my daughter to open on Christmas. Well, I might bring it by work tomorrow to show my staff. Seriously, I have to give this to my daughter (must. keep. saying. it.).
Technorati Tags: olpc
This came to me by way of Tom Hoffman --
