Dating and the OLPC

Dating and the OLPC

People will meet via OLPC and marry

Michael de la Maza 21:18, 7 September 2006 (EDT)

How long will it take two people who have never met to get married because of a relationship enabled by the OLPC? The first time a couple gets married clutching their OLPCs (or their children’s), the OLPC’s success in forging relationships will be joyfully explicit.

I expect that an OLPC-enabled dating service that meshes with bricks & mortar social institutions will be available within a few months of the first large deployment of OLPCs. The OLPC has many hardware and software features, such as instant messaging and telephony, that make it a wonderful partner in starting and nurturing romantic relationships.

Indeed, the entire infatuation-disillusionment-contentment relationship cycle could be supported by the OLPC. The first software developers to embrace this idea will be congratulated for their extraordinary kindness.

Silly page. Delete it.

Since the OLPC computers will be deployed in school classrooms, it would be extremely unlikely for people to meet and marry via their computer. After all, they can simply meet directly.

This is a SILLY page. Please delete it. 81.158.248.157 9 September 2006

Sign your entries.

Please identify yourself when commenting. The entire point of the OLPC computers is that they will become a means by which the family will become computer literate.

That said, I do think this is a bit far fetched -- but then I reflect on the use of mobile phones to run dating services and less scrupulously legal activities.

clarka 13 October 2006

Everybody here is wrong.

This wiki is insufficiently instructive. I think we would have better compliance with the rules if they were at hand on each page. This is not hard to accomplish in one place.

This particular entry is signed in the usual MediaWiki way, using four tildes at the end of the entry after logging in.

The first entry is a little off topic, but not much, since some of the initial OLPC material shows kids with pictures of each other on their screens.

I suggest that making an application which makes it easy for each student to build a personal page which others can visit would be a good thing. Such pages are popular in the USA, but they are very popular in Korea, for example.

But I predict that the first OLPC generated marriage will happen before any of the students are even using their laptops. Indeed it may have happened already among folks who met online while pursuing OLPC related projects, possibly on different continents.

The second contributer failed to log in and gave no hint of identity. Whoever it was suggested removing the page. This is not the wiki way. Wikis prefer to evolve by continual improvement. If something is wrong, then fix it. Even remove it. But if it is merely silly, let it suffer the indignity of being ignored by serious readers. Disk space is rather inexpensive these days so we need not be harsh in controlling wastage.

Even the third contributer, who provided some ID information, failed to log in and failed to use the tildes method for signing.

Further, I believe clarka is quite wrong about the point of OLPC. Teaching the whole family about computers is quite peripheral to the central point of improving the education of students. It is the opportunity to foster more personal involvement by the student in their own education which I see as the motivation and intent of the OLPC project.

On the other hand, the fourth contributer is obviously self centered, obnoxious, tedious, and pedantic. He is ill suited for any role in any educational project, especially an experiment. This completes my argument that everybody here is wrong.

Even the wiki itself is wrong. For yet another example of that, there is no hint near the summary box either of how or why to sign your entry or even of to whom it will be attributed to by signing it in the text or in the history. In contrast to the problems apparent with the contributers, these are correctable flaws. How shall we approach fixing them? Nitpicker 02:50, 2 December 2006 (EST)