OLPC Idea Pool

Maybe this should be split into individual sub-pages? (Vorburger 20:06, 9 February 2006 (EST))

Software Ideas

System Software

Peer To Peer Distribution, for Electronic Text, Software, Email

Extending the original idea from below... this is more general then just about electronic text, though. In lack of a better term, let me call it "built-in support for non-real-time Internet connectivity", provided as shared service and usable by apps.

For example, I myself often read some web pages that I had downloaded while on the network at home while traveling, disconnected from a network, and of course when clicking on a link you get some stupid technical error message. Why can't the thing remember I want to read the linked page later and "queue" it somewhere? This idea is probably more much more relevant in some OLPC scenarios than it is for myself; what if you are connected to the "Internet by Motorbike" say only once every two weeks, as in the Motoman project in Cambodia?

This applies to many forms of data, from electronic content be it a complete ebook, HTML page, Email or some software to download - or publishing of content such as homepage or blog updates, etc. (I think OneWorld has an XML-based publishing along those lines; but could be confusing it with something else.) Making it possible (and easy!) to request, and publish, data from one device, which then forwards the reqest to another, and ultimately forward to Internet when connected. Doesn't it make you feel like good ol' FIDO Net is back?

Vorburger 20:06, 9 February 2006 (EST)

I believe one of the most useful purposes of the laptop will be to distribute electronic text (i.e. e-books). The distribution of any information without a persistent network connection will be difficult. I imagine a situation where 1 out of 100 or 1000 kids may have access to a network connection. The peer to peer network could be used to distribute e-books from that single network connection to 1000 kids. I'd like to propose the design of a peer-to-peer network client designed specifically for this purpose.

A simple, graphical language-localized client would be designed to present a catalog of e-books. The client would pull down a listing of books available in a certain age-range for a targeted language. The student would pick texts that he or she has interest in. This list of requests would consist of a very small packet of data, perhaps a unique identifier of the device and a unique identifier of the text. When the device sees another device, it would off load it's packet to the peer device and vice-versa. Each device would contain a listing of requests from all of the peers that it came in contact with. The next time a device connects to the Internet, it would pull as many texts as allowable by pre-defined memory limits (say 3-5 meg). As the device comes into contact with other devices, it would deliver the texts to the other devices. Hopefully, over time, the requestor would be delivered some of the texts originally requested. As each text is delivered, a delivery or cancellation notice would be sent back through the peer network.

The peer to peer network should gather performance intelligence over time. It should be able to guess which routes have better chances of making a request and returning a delivery.

If a proof of concept proves to work well, the peer to peer network would be extended to handle two-way communication for interaction such as email or the submission and grading of assignments.

--65.7.133.163 04:41, 27 January 2006 (EST) Jason Hoekstra - jason@solexinc.com

Distributed Filesystem?

Will the Wikipedia Offline fit into 512 MB (or even 1 GB) ? Even if it does, how about some software and other textbooks loaded at the same time? Clearly, the storage on one device is very limited... but: What if data could be spread over several laptops, a sort of built-in distributed filesystem like Coda or MogileFS - do these make any sense on a device like this, with the goal of enhancing storage capacity through distribution? In a school, every of say 100 children has 1/100th of Wikipedia - instead of clogging each device with a complete copy.

Vorburger 20:06, 9 February 2006 (EST) .

Better-performing Flash Filesystem

The proposed JFFS2 filesystem was designed for NOR-type Flash memory, which has very different timing characteristics from the cheaper NAND-type Flash memory used in USB thumb drives and, presumably, the laptop. YAFFS is a GPL'ed open-source journalling filesystem designed specifically for NAND Flash memory that is claimed to use less RAM for its tables and generally outperform JFFS2, and they are working on YAFFS2, which is tweaked to be faster and to work with the new larger, 2KB-page-size NAND devices.

YAFFS has the following technical advantages over JFFS2:

• It uses NAND Flash memory better, making it faster (about 2X), more space-efficient and wearing the memory chips out less quickly
• It is faster at mounting a filesystem: a hand-waving example of startup time for a 128MB device is 3 seconds instead of 25
• It uses far less RAM for its internal tables
• It scales better: JFFS2 is said to fall apart above 256MB because its internal data structures get too big while YAFFS is known to work well up to 2GB (the laptop currently aims at 512MB)
• It stores error-correcting codes for all data, which is essential since NAND Flash is supplied not 100% perfect and degrades over time
• YAFFS provides some features lacking from JFFS2 (hard links, memory mapped file writing)

JFFS2 has the following advantages over YAFFS:

• It has built-in write-time data compression
• It is included in the standard Linux kernel

YAFFS has a home page and a there is a technical article which goes into depth on the differences between NOR and NAND flash memory and the drawbacks of using JFFS2 with the NAND type.

It would be worth running comparative performance tests on the two filesystems, because there are big potential performance wins on several fronts. In-filesystem compression isn't everything, slows all file operations down and, when used without error correcting codes onto an unreliable medium, risks major data loss.

Martin Guy 4 March 2006

3d software rendering

As the system does not include hardware accelerated 3d rendering, a software rendering library may be included to wrap the OpenGL (OGL/ES maybe) API and create rendering code on the fly. This, even on a machine with limited clock speed can provide a rendering performance paragonable to that of some integrated 3d chipsets, especially if the resolution is kept low. There are some existing tools that can be leveraged for this; for example, Vincent is an OpenGL/ES implementation that provides software rendering for constrained devices like cell phones; SwShader, precursor of transgamings' SwiftShader and many others. Having (limited) OpenGL capability does add some capabilities to the device without requiring additional hardware.

Software Installation, Package Manager, Central Repository

How relevant is a polished end-user friendly Package Manager? With limited memory, are you more likely to uninstall and try another application and install back one? In the beginning, how important is it to be able to very easily get patched new versions of the software? Underlying question: Is a central repository of applications desirable? Completely open, anybody can submit their (pre-compiled) package?

Vorburger

Should there be an easy way to install and remove applications from the device without corrupting the system image? I am thinking of something like klik (http://klik.atekon.de/). -- DPalmerJr

Laptop as USB-Drive

It would probably be useful if the laptop could be accessed as a USB-Drive, like a digital camera.. In the Software Development context hackers could probably also configure File Sharing via the WiFi... but simple "USB cross cabling" could be interesting to end-users because it's: a) most simple, b) secure, probably OK to give access to entire filesystem, if locally attached, c) doesn't need Wifi; the nearest Internet Cafe in a bigger town will let children/teacher USB-connect their laptop to one of their stations to copy over a newly downloaded application, but not have a Wifi basestation; at least not where I have travelled in India.

Vorburger

Maybe a software can be developed for this. Since the system is going to be "Linux Based", just accesing the filesystem should allow to configure almost everything. A software that gives access to the filesystem (and emulate a camera or an USB thumb), could be included. Or maybe, a special cable provided with the laptop (that uses one special of the 3 USB ports) could allow direct access to filesystem. (or with a switch somewhere in the laptop that even without power makes it work as a USB-Drive, even with the posibility of charging batteries while connected).

Gandolfi

Hard-Reset built-in

Curious kids will certainly easily manage to screw up the software side of the device - and they should! A built-in hard-reset that can re-initialize the OS etc. from ROM; sort of like some modern laptops have a hidden partition on the HDD that can re-install without the usual Recovery CD, could be useful.

You always have the problem of personal data, files, and configuration settings. Some solution for that would have to be provided; e.g. easily copy to your friend's device over the wireless network?

Vorburger

Font technology

Which font technology is to be used?

I expect that the system will use Unicode for characters. In that case it is important that an advanced font technology is available. For European languages such as French and Spanish an ordinary font technology such as TrueType is fine, yet for languages using Latin script yet using accented characters which do not each have a precomposed Unicode character, an advanced font format is necessary. This is so that glyph substitution can take place to convert a sequence of a base character followed by a combining accent into a "looks right" display. One such system is OpenType.

I think that Arabic script systems need an advanced font technology. As far as I know, Chinese does not need an advanced font technology system. For languages of the Indian subcontinent I think that basic displays can be achieved without an advanced font technology yet for a display involving conjunct ligatures an advanced font technology is needed.

Some time ago I devised a font format using characters from the Unicode Private Use Area. As far as I know it has never been implemented. However, I mention it here in case readers might like to have a look at the documents and decide whether it might be of any use for the laptop project.

I named it the eutofont font format.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/eutofont.htm

The eutofont font format has glyph substitution facilities and also has chromatic font capability.

The system could be extended if font technology needs are required which the eutofont font format presently described does not support.

Regarding the use of Private Use Area codes: by using them a compactness of font size would be possible which an XML based font system might not be able to achieve: in due course, if the eutofont font system were successful, maybe codes would be added to regular Unicode, though that would lose some compactness as the codes would not be in plane zero; however, in the short term the Private Use Area codes would be needed.

William Overington

11 March 2006

End-user Application-level Software

VOIP

Availability of a well-working SIP-based VOIP client on this device could prove popular (when when always-on connectivity and sufficient bandwidth is available through the set up of some satellite IP link in a remote region) Vorburger

Recording & Sending Voice Messages

Recording and subsequently listening to voice messages - this is not very big in "our" world, other than the voice mail on your phone; few people seem to record and attach voice messages to typed emails. But if you don't have phones at all, and no always-on for VOIP, maybe recording a voice clip and sending it could prove to be a popular usage - particularly for the parents of the kid that the laptop belongs to, who may be unable to read and write much?

Vorburger

Education

Logo

Seymourt Papert developed a lot of work around teaching kids programming. What could an updated version of Logo be? ...maybe logo scripting for kids (instead of php or java) :-)

Opinion: Logo could be an excellent way to introduce programming and logic. I started with it!! I think this should be an starter way, but definitely and impreved new version (with more than one "turtle" at least). Today's children can understand easily and faster everything related to computers. And could be some kind of art too if are given the propers tools. (filling closed shapes, or maybe object oriented). Could be a very nice piece of soft!!

Gandolfi

ViOS-like information indexing system

In early 2001 I saw an illustrated post in the alt.binaries.education.distance newsgroup about the ViOS system.

The system offered a third party view virtual world 3d landscape as a way of indexing the web.

A description remains on the web.

http://www.howstuffworks.com/vios1.htm

There are also some notes on ViOS in the following document,

http://jlombardi.blogspot.com/2004_10_01_jlombardi_archive.html

I wonder if I may please suggest that the ViOS look is worth considering as a way of indexing information sources for the users of the $100 laptop.

It might perhaps be possible to have the display done by a relatively small program and the data in blocks which could be fetched from a server as needed.

William Overington

9 March 2006

The "ready-to-test" concept

In February 2002 I wrote the following.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/ast02800.htm

This was one of a series of documents indexed at the following web page, though the others in the series are on different topics, so the above document is complete in itself.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/ast00000.htm

I do not know if the idea would be of any use to the laptop project but I am thinking that it might be, so I thought that I would post the idea here in the hope that it could be assessed by the experts.

William Overington

10 March 2006

Hardware Ideas

Ideas that will require changes, or additional, hardware:

Broadcast texts over shortwave radio

A major challenge is providing access to information through the green machine. Access to the Internet in most of the regions of the world where children will benefit from the OLPC program is usually limited. Here's a hardware+software idea that could make access to information truly ubiquitous. It goes for _access_ as opposed to speed. The idea works synergistically with other ideas such as Jason's idea for p2p distribution of texts and mesh network access to the Internet.

Rationale: I see the green machine as (1) a tool for accessing information and (2) a tool for self-driven learning through investigation. A problem with the former role is "from whence cometh the information ?". With the limited storage resources, "pre-loading" the information on the machines seems like an untenable approach. The crux of this proposal is that having easy and reliable access to a small library of information will be more useful than having spotty access to the entire Internet, even through mesh networking. The idea focuses on access to information, rather than access to the Internet, the latter and Information not always being synonymous.

Idea: Broadcast texts over shortwave radio. Have the texts broken up into chunks, and all the texts from a library interleaved in time. If possible, transmit different interleaving sequences on a set of different channels. The basic circuitry for a shortwave radio demodulator can be very simple, particularly if the decoding is done in software sitting behind a straightforward RF and analog front-end. When a child wants information on a topic, the implemented system captures fragments of a text relating to the topic off the air, and over time, the whole text is collected.

Example: Purely as an example, let the library of texts being transmitted consist of (1) Project Guttenberg texts (2) (one thing I wish I had access to as a kid:) mathworld.wolfram.com (3) Some free encyclopedia. All the content is broken up into packets of some size, encoded, all the packets interleaved according to some scheme, and the entire interleaved stream repeatedly transmitted. The infrastructure for transmitting the data streams need not even be in the nation or on the continent where the recipients are. Let, for example, the entire stream take two months to transmit. 4GB of encoded data at 1200 baud will take ~40 days. 1200 baud for a packet radio seems feasible, though I can't say how complex the hardware would be. Bear in mind we're only talking about receiving, not a full-blown modem.

Extensions: You can imagine having N different interleavings, which are transmitted on N different channels. When a child wants information on some topic, the request is sent out to at least N other green machines, over the mesh wireless network. All the machines start picking up chunks for the text on one of the N different channels. The chunks are sent to the requester over the mesh network.

That's the top level idea. I think it is feasible to implement with minimal hardware, and the algorithms and their software implementations to go behind the hardware are interesting issues, many of which are already well understood or solved.

--Pstanley 10:52, 1 February 2006 (EST)

Yes, good idea.

You might like to consider using telesoftware, that is the unidirectional cyclic broadcasting of software and its selective use, to broadcast software packages for the laptop as well.

The following webspace about the DVB-MHP (Digital Video Broadcasting - Multimedia Home Platform) interactive televison system might be of interest.

http://www.mhp.org

The MHP system broadcasts Java programs to interactive television sets.

The following idea, not implemented as far as I know, might be of interest in relation to digital radio.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/tor00000.htm

William Overington

5 March 2006

---

Some interesting experiments in using direct satellite broadcasting for education took place in the 1970s using the ATS-6 experimental satellite.

http://www.nasm.si.edu/research/dsh/artifacts/CS-ATS6.htm

William Overington

6 March 2006

More RAM, less Flash

The laptop's RAM cannot be expanded in the field, but its Flash memory can be expanded easily and cheaply by plugging in USB thumb drives for any user who needs one. Thus, if you have a chance to add a little more memory to the base unit, add a RAM chip, not a Flash chip!

Question: What's the relative access speed of USB2 thumb drives versus the built-in flash memory?

Note of course: A hard drive can easily be added by plugging one into USB2 as well. One catch is that rugged, properly cooled USB2 hard drives do not seem to exist at any reasonable price. Another catch is power.

--John Gilmore

I agree with this point... maybe a free slot to allow increase of ram ?? (at least is the possibilty to add ram) that shouldn't be that much increase of costs...

In the other hand, as John said, a USB thumb or hard drive, could be easily plugged.

About the power of an external hard drive, I think if someone has money to buy it, it probably has electricity, so it's a matter of designing an external hard drive with with external power (or rechargeable batteries), if not, USB thumbs seems a good option, and they're getting cheaper.

Gandolfi

USB2 networking

The USB2 interface hardware allows one of the USB ports to be used as a device port as well as a host port. This means that with the proper cable and software, two laptops could be plugged together and you could network them via USB2. They can be daisy-chained in the same way, and should provide ~20 Mbytes/sec of thruput (see GNU Radio USRP software for Linux software that can keep the USB2 bus moving data at maximum speed). There's USB device software in the Sharp Zaurus, which runs Linux and has such a dual-use USB port (USB 1.1 though).

A USB2 cable is much faster than the wireless, and cheaper than adding USB2 ethernet cards + hubs + cables + etc. Running IP, DHCP, and Rendezvous over USB shouldn't be hard; I'm a little surprised it isn't standardized already (like IP over Firewire).

--John Gilmore

Cheap External VCD/DVD Drive via USB, including built-in streaming from e.g. teacher to students

An external, and separately powered, CD-ROM/VCD/DVD drive might prove popular, to use the laptop for watching movies, both instructional as well as for after-school entertainment. Would the current architecture, including display design/resolution/framerate etc. allow for this in principle? (It would be great if this were REALLY cheap; a normal standard CD-ROM for VCD reading, rather than a DVD, will do based on my experience in India; although I'm not sure what the difference in price between the two is.)

On the software side, how about some peer-to-peer streaming stuff; think one drive/player per say school class, and groups of kids watching a (same) movie on several laptops? This is possible with e.g. VLC - but could be built-in, preconfigured/high-lighted and very simple - thingie pops up saying "A neighbouring laptop has started streaming video, would you like to watch?" - done.

The hardware exists off the shelve... but will they all work out of the box? Drivers? Can player software be included in the "default" software? If not a full-blown "certification" program, at least at page (on this Wiki!) with "external devices known to work" (or if not, instructions on how to get them to work will probably be needed.

Vorburger

Keyboard

• Omit the CAPS LOCK key and status LED from the keyboard! This could save valuable real-estate inside the OLPC and on its face. When was the last time you pressed the CAPS LOCK key on purpose?? Typing in all caps is usually either a mistake or rudeness. My new Microsoft keyboard even has a (software) option to disable the CAPS LOCK key. I'm surprised the Apple hasn't already removed the Mac's CAPS LOCK key.

Serial Port??

I know it can be done thru USB emulators... but serial ports are simple and easy to use. If someone wants to make some electronic project, or using old hardware (mouse, or serial comunications devices), it could be useful to have one.

it's just an idea, but I started making my first hardware projects with this, and even today is cheaper (at least here in Argentina) and easy to make serial ports working hardware (rather than buying PICs and programming them).

And still many hardware has serial ports (networking devices for example).

Gandolfi

Old style light sensitive pens ??

Old style light sensitive pens ?? maybe a touch screen it's expensive... but I use to have one of this pens with my Commodore 64. It was attached to my tv, and I don't know if it can made in LCD screens. But this could be an option. Of course it needs a cable, but it can work as an "anti losing the pen system". Who didn't lost the pen of the PDA once ?? :) (I don't have one, but my boss always..)

Gandolfi

Other Ideas

Other ideas, not specifically for hardware or software of the laptop itself:

I think the function of OLPC and UMPC should be the same, right?

Wireless Networking

A book called Wireless Networking in the Developing World is now available on the net in pdf at http://wndw.net/. It has a lot of information that might be useful when deploying the OLPC program. In addition to covering WIFI theory and design, it covers practical, social, and economic problems that they encountered. One idea is to share the cost of the infrastructure with other local groups like businesses and local government. Another is to disperse the knowledge of how to operate the system so that if one person moves away, critical knowledge isn't lost.

Wireless Thin-Client as alternative?

The main counter argument for a thin-client approach is probably the need for maintenance/administration and general dependency on the central server, think e.g. particularly power in this context?

Still, maybe providing a (much) cheaper wireless portable thin client (think one-chip LCD+wireless controller; nothing else inside, particularly no memory and real CPU, which are probably the next most expensive part after the display?), for say $20 instead of $100, plus a commoditized say $1000 Dual-CPU with 2 GB RAM server, per school/entire village, could of interest in some situations? This is assuming that the configuration and loaded software etc. of all devices would be very homogenous, which is probably a fair assumption in this context? If the server could run say 100 clients (essentially running very similar software to what was built for the full $100 laptop of 128 MB RAM each, but with all of the OS and application code shared, thus only using about 16-32 MB for per-client data) then this seems at least imaginable, and would mean a total cost of just $3000 instead of $10'000 - for the 100 children.

That's a lot of ifs and assumptions of course, and only real pricing, scalability and the "market" can tell if there was an interest for (also) providing this - later. Just an idea, really.

Development Process

How much coordination of the Software Development Process is useful? Just make an SDK available and hope for self-organization? Or maybe e.g. a registry of suggested/needed software, a forum to coordinate software development between parties using this. Or how about volunteer summer projects for CS university students, like Google's summer of code thing?

User interface

Get John Maeda involved with the UI and other design elements.

Remember the Social Context of your Technical Solutions

I think that the ideas here need to be seen in the context of how networking and distribution of data is going to be performed. In the poorest countries, the ideas may need to be modified due to limited scope for immediate netwoking. Also the role of charity will be very improtant; remember that most of the african countries have not yet been involved in the project, so charity support will be a major driving force in distributing the hardware.

I suggest a charity funded system of data distribution, but flexible enough that it could be a commercial venture for a citydewller with transport. Western charity could provide data transfer credits to individuals in remote villages, to be spent on delivery of data serveices to and from the village. A courier would have a laptop with large storage expansion, and travel to villages to deliver data designated for them, and to recieve data for delivery from them. They would expend their credits in the process of givig their data transmission, and recieve a secure reciept for their last communications sent from the data courier. When the courier returned to the city, they would access the internet via a larger access point if available, or just by telephone if not, and would load the appropriate dvd into a usb drive to retrieve the appropriate requested data from several repositories of information - e.g. encyclopedia (possibly wikipedia), educational syllabus for the next month or year as developed by national education system, etc. The delivery of the data would be accompanied by a cashing in of the data-transfer-credits collected on their journy around the villages, and converted to cedits for cashing at a bank, or directly at the internet access point if appropriate. Email based securely encoded credits designated for the individuals in villages as charity gifts would then be recieved from the internet and delivered by the courier to the village on their next visit. To prevent ransom of the delivery of the credits, the entire collection of data intended for the village would be bound in to a 'delivery package' only decodable and seperatable by the intended recipient and then distributed to the individuals by a simple username and password (the username selected from a village specific list, to avoid confusion).

For adults, with limited postal service or reliability, A major application of importance would be political communications, and the option of communications by pgp communications is essential, but should be very user friendly. There must be a pgp-like delivery certification to ensure that deliveries of emails is made without being intercepted or held ransom by delivery people is also very important. - a user or regular email would confirm reciept by clicking a url on the delivered email to confirm reciept to an international reciept confirmation server. reciept confirmation of the village resident would be sent by pgp based confirmation.

access to personal data must be able to protected, by user/password encoded access only, also for deleting data - there should be a firmware controlled partition or directory on the flash which can only be accessed by users' passwords, or deleted in its entirety (not per user) - also there should be a limit on the space used by each user. There should be a hardware switch for deactivating wifi if installed, to prevent hackers and viruses in potentially unstable political climate - likely used to prevent political dissent.

I think that the social model of data repositeries on dvd, and internet access, in cities or perhaps towns is a realistic and efficient solution. With funding of data distribution by digitally secure credits or tokens delivered securely to villagers, access to data by the holders of the laptop can be guaranteed.

-- suggested by ma http://wiki.laptop.org/wiki/User:Ma

Proposed Educational Models

I think with the prospects of using a system such as this on the global level that it's designed for, this would be a good opportunity to start a global mentality of "United in Education." This is done first by the fact that no country in need will be left out of the opportunity for use of this technology. But I think also that it should extend beyond that.

The Internet As A Backbone

The internet is the living example of what global unity in information exchange is, and the upcoming idea of "Web 2.0", or an "always-on, integrated" internet I think proposes a way to provide the educational content on the scale that it needs to be. I feel that once these laptops are distributed to local communities across the globe, through local wi-fi (the idea of which is not unique to me by any means) that is distributed through the schools or a designated "community center," the internet can be accessed.

Once this connection between the world's young students and the world's information is established, I feel that the best way to start the education process would be a very meticulously crafted website or series of websites that cover the educational needs for various grade levels. For example, very easy to navigate lessons using flash websites and pictures for pre-school to middle school children. Then as fluency in the use of the internet increases and a more advanced study continues, use of other web sites and internet services can be brought in to the more advanced students in high school/college area.

Language Barriers

While trying to be as objective as possible, I feel that the best solution for the concept of language barriers is such: If using the website oriented education concept above, instead of spending time and money to translate the many lessons, concepts, and websites to the respective countries native language, I propose the use of a constructed language, preferably Esperanto, the most popular one in use today (with about 5 million users worldwide) as the language of education worldwide. This idea has many benefits which I will explain:

-Esperanto was designed to be easy to learn and to the best of my knowledge and personal experience, it is. This could be the first of the lessons that the student would learn. In keeping with the idea, http://www.lernu.net/ is an example of a site where one may go to learn the language. To ensure the quickest possible learning, and to root out problems involving an individual’s first language, the "Direct method" of teaching it is used here. There are other websites I'm sure that are just as successful in teaching this way.

-English and Mandarin are the top spoken languages in the world. This is not by choice. Population is the reason in the case of Mandarin and English just happens to be the language of business and the internet. I feel that a strong sense of global satisfaction in this project would result if not only the students of the third world countries had to learn Esperanto in order to learn, but also the many nations across the globe that are teaching them had to learn it as well. That would allow for any country to communicate and teach directly with the students. No language barriers.

-What happens when people from the U.S., Europe, or Asia decide to visit these nations involved in the project? Immediate communication is established without the idea of the students needing to switch their native language. Without the use of Esperanto, these students would have all this valuable information, but not be able to do anything with it due to language barriers. Imagine a flourishing of education in South Africa and the schools put out some great talent. What then for them? They would travel in search of prosperity. While the many dialects of Africa are definitely beautiful, they aren't popular business languages and these student's talents' would not be able to flourish with their new education. It would be giving someone a brand new car without any keys to go with it. Learning of the worlds main business languages (English, French, Japanese, Arabic) is not ruled out by any means to those that want to learn it. But it represents a higher level of education that most will probably not obtain. I feel that the ability for even the individual schooled in just the arts, or just math, or just the sciences (all of which are not normally ventures that promote the assimilation of foreign languages) be able to gain the advantage of having that common language anywhere in the world.

Comment on the idea of using Esperanto

Esperanto was designed to be an auxiliary language, with the idea that it could be a second langauge for everyone: it was not intended to become the first language of users.

I feel that it would be a good idea to make available Esperanto versions of learning material so that people can use that to become skilled in using the language if they so desire. However, although producing many versions of learning material in many different languages will as you write involve "spending time and money to translate the many lessons, concepts, and websites to the respective countries native language," that is, I feel, part of what needs to be done to make the project work. If some people can produce Esperanto versions by volunteer effort then hopefully they will be made available within the system: I feel that as auxiliary items they could be very useful, they need not be regarded as replacing versions in native languages. Nevertheless, if a learning module starts in English and then versions in Spanish and Portuguese are produced fairly quickly and then other versions take longer due to the amount of work and the possibly smaller number of translators available for localization into languages with a smaller number of users, then an Esperanto version might well be a valuable resource for a teacher whose native language is such a rarer language and who does not know English.

I am interested in Esperanto and indeed have included the accented characters for it in most of the fonts which I have produced. I feel that it has much to offer in the context of being an auxiliary language. I do feel, however, that children should have the opportunity to be educated in their own language. However, the word "should" is easily written yet does not deliver a solution, so using Esperanto is, I feel, certainly a tool which is there to be used and which could, in certain cases, perhaps be of great usefulness.

Some years ago I produced an animated gif file, when I was learning how to make them, which mentions Esperanto.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/de000000.htm

William Overington

12 March 2006

Teaching Barriers

As much as a teacher wants to teach, they can only teach what they know. The, for lack a better term, "flaw" in the educational process of third world countries is the knowledge available to the teacher. This is either by their own unfortunate lack of knowledge or by their inability to obtain new information for teaching. Since the emphasis of the project (I think) is toward the children more so then the actual teachers, I would think that some standard of training is necessary for the teachers that are involved with use of these laptops. I would think too, that this training would mainly be in the technological side of how to operate the laptops so that there would be nothing stopping the flow of information from the internet to the student.

Perhaps these laptops and the aid of volunteer workers that are familiar with the technology could be used in conjunction with another specific website to give this training to the teachers. Initial help could be given in person so that the individual could continue to teach themselves the particulars of using a website devoted to teaching them how to teach students on these laptops. This is the first step in helping people help themselves. This is essentially enabling the teachers the ability to teach on the new medium.

Services Available to Teachers/Community Leaders

    -A central website devoted to the posting of technical issues about the laptop hardware where MIT or
     other certified people can respond and help
    -Perhaps a site/wiki where the specific communities could have their own page and be able to post and
     inform the world what their current activities are or what they’ve learned or are working on (could be a
     tool to spawn educational competition or collaboration amongst neighboring cities or nations or to get
     artistic work on the web)

Teacher Basic Training

    -Basic functionality of the physical laptop (on/off, charging, maintenance)
    -Ability to get around the user interface and perform simple tasks (to be clarified)
    -Be able to assess/troubleshoot networking problems? (perhaps too advanced?)
    -Be already quite versed in Esperanto (should use of that language be an accepted proposition)

Educational Outline (This list is to be critiqued by experienced educators)

1. First Steps (pre-school to middle school):

    -Learn the language of learning, Esperanto
    -Learn the metric system
    -Basic physical sciences and early math
    -Art/Music (I feel arts education is just as crucial to healthy education as anything else, but there
     is no set way to teach this. This would purely be left up to the specific teachers and their staffs to
     organize)

2. Welcome to the World

    -Learn the basic workings of the internet and how the technology the students are using works
    -Perhaps learn how to use the internet for personal use, blogs and wikis on their community page?
    -Learn literature, both unique to their particular culture (in native tongue) and accepted works
     worldwide (translated to Esperanto)
    -History oriented for their specific country
    -Continue the mastery of Esperanto
    -More advanced learning of math and sciences, more incorporation of current worldwide news and
     relevant scientific discoveries

3. Higher Learning

    -By this point the students should be enabled to get around the internet with ease, therefore
     seeking and finding any information and news they are interested in. 

As a note, I feel, and I think this is obvious, that no specific religious education should be brought into the education until much later in the students learning when it becomes a personally driven academic venture. Their native culture and religion should be preserved and held in high regard. I think since this common educational ground is spanning so many different cultures and religions, this is an important ideal to be set early on.

Brian Clements

11 March 2006