Edtech Treks: Squeaks, Squeals & Squawks

The non-profit OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) foundation provides full-featured low-cost XO laptops to elementary school age children in developing countries. Considering the high percentage of American youngsters who qualify for either free or reduced lunch vouchers and the fact that the Federal government is projecting a reduced technology budget for K-12 public schools in FY 2008-09 (http://www.ed.gov/about/overview/budget/budget09/summary/edlite-section3.html#eliminations), I’m thinking there should be a parallel initiative targeting American elementary school students too.

The petite XO is about the size and weight of a small textbook. It has a built-in kid-size carrying handle, tiny 80+ key-sealed rubber membrane keyboard, and two rotating adjustable bunny-ear antennae. Despite its toylike demeanor, this device is NO toy! It’s a full-blown computer equipped with:two sets of four-direction cursor-control keys

• one touchpad
• two internal stereo speakers
• one stereo monophonic microphone
• one standard 3.5mm 3-pin switched stereo audio headphone jack
• one standard 3.5mm 2-pin switched mono microphone jack
• three USB 2.0 connectors (I connected a 2-button scroll wheel USB optical mouse that worked without my having to install any drivers)
• one expansion slot for an MMC/SD card
• an integrated color vision video camera capable of 640×480 resolution at 30FPS (frames per second)
• a pivoting, reversible 7.5” dual-mode TFT (Thin Film Transistor) color/monochrome screen capable of 1200 (H) × 900 (V) or 200 DPI (Dots per Inch) resolution (optimized for computing in bright sunlight).

The XO connects to the Internet via Wireless Access Point (WiFi hotspot), School Server (mesh network), or Simple mesh network (i.e., other XO devices). It supports 802.11b/g (2.4GHz) Wi-Fi, but lacks an Ethernet port. In a “mesh” network, each laptop becomes a “node in the mesh” of other local users. Every computer connects directly to each of the others. If one computer stops working, the rest can still communicate with one another, directly or through one or more intermediate devices. The XO is even capable of mesh operation when CPU is powered off.

As far as software is concerned, the XO is no Windows or Macintosh computer. It’s outfitted with the free Fedora Linux-based open source operating system and features built-in support for Java virtual machine, Adobe’s Flash Player and five programming environments: (1) Python, for the user interface, (2) Javascript for browser-based scripting; (3) Csound, for music and audio; (4) Squeak, a version of the object-oriented programming language called Smalltalk; and (5) Turtle Art, a kid-oriented Logo programming language that supports critical thinking activities for mathematics, language, music, robotics, telecommunications, and science.

Additionally, this kid-friendly laptop comes with several applications (which it calls “activities”). These include:

• Browse, a Web browser built on the Firefox browser engine
• Write, an open source word processor
• Record, a multimedia still video and audio authoring and playback environment
• Paint for creative painting and digital doodling
• TamTam for music composition, jamming, and synthesis
• Read, a PDF Reader
• Calculate, a simple calculator
• News Reader, an RSS subscription reader to handle the feeds that download to your computer when you click those orange RSS buttons on certain Web pages
• Etoys, a media-rich authoring environment with 2D and 3D graphics, images, text, videos, sound and MIDI elements for the design games and other projects
• Gmail, Google’s email client
• Chat for instant-messaging text talk
• Journal which keeps a record of all that users do so they can retrieve or delete a document or photo, return to an activity, or access external media like flash drives and the school server’s backup system
• Measure, an Oscilloscope and Data Logging tool
• Memorize, a memory game
• Terminal to control the XO directly from the Command Prompt, and more.

Users can easily download additional activities, connect to the Internet to access online references like encyclopedias and dictionaries, or work collaboratively with online tools such as Buzzword (http://www.buzzword.com/#o) or Google Docs (http://docs.google.com/). XO Operating System updates, complete with installation instructions can be downloaded from http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Olpc-update. New OLPC applications are available from the OLPC Activities page (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activities), complete with installation instructions.

The XO works best in an unsecured wireless network environment. It usually takes several attempts to connect it to a secure WEP-enabled wireless network and with each attempt you must enter the 13 hex digit pair security. Technology-comfortable folk can try connecting to a WPA-PSK secured network rather than Web because WPA supports a human-readable (e.g. English) passphrase. But to use WPA-PSK you must first download a special script (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/WPA_Manual_Setting), then launch the Terminal application and enter a few Linux commands. I managed to connect via WPA-PSK at my office in the Greenfield Public Schools, but had no luck with WPA at my home office. There were too many unsecured networks competing for my attention. I also tried to connect to my home network via Cat 5 cabling using a $20 XO’sTRENDNet TU2-ET100 USB to Ethernet network adapter (http://trendnet.com/products/proddetail.asp?prod=150_TU2-ET100&cat=14), but the TRENDNet adapter only came with Windows drivers. Where’s open source support for Linux when you need it most?

Additional frustrations with the XO will revolve around its small 1024 KB flash storage and its turtle-slow operating speed. Activities and Web browsing proceed at a snail’s pace. Perhaps that’s to be expected because of its limited 256 MB RAM and 433MHz x86-compatible processor? Moreover, the computer has no built-in printer drivers so it can’t print and the word processor lacks a spelling checker. However thanks to its open-source roots and the community of stalwart developers that has built up around it, I’m convinced that those capabilities will soon become available. If education is about providing all youngsters with options and opportunities for success, then one can only hope that the XO is the first of many low-cost laptop initiatives (http://linuxdevices.com/news/NS9292516116.html) aimed at delivering the digital tools and community our K-12 students need.

Product: XO Laptop
Company: One Laptop Per Child, http://www.laptopgiving.org/
Price: $200
Photo credit: Mike McGregor mikemcgregor.com, pictures on http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Category:Laptop_pictures

About the Author: Carol S. Holzberg, PhD, cholzberg@gmail.com, (Shutesbury, Massachusetts) is an educational technology specialist and anthropologist who writes for several publications. She works as District Technology Coordinator for Greenfield Public Schools and the Greenfield Center School (Greenfield, Massachusetts) and teaches in both the Licensure program at Hampshire Educational Collaborative (Northampton, MA) and online in the School of Education at Capella University.