Talk:OLPC Keyboard layouts

..uh, you guys are gonna teach 100 mill kids how to break 1 bill fingers on q|awerty|z layouts???

..what's wrong with Dvorak layout's? (Other than these kids typing 40% quicker than you?)

grab key?

To me, it looks like a stop key. That is what a hand in that position represents. Anyway... what does it do?

The QWERTY phenomenon

It is interesting to note that although one of the three (3) parables Seymour has picked talks about the QWERTY as a phenomenon, the keyboard layout chosen for the XO is that very layout.

Seymour, are you all talk? Why do you make such a number of the QWERTY layout, if you are not willing to back that opinion by enforcing a different layout (e.g. the Dvorak) on the XO?

What kind of a learning tool are we making, if we are forcing children in emerging countries to learn to type on an archaic layout made for inefficiency? Shouldn't we be empowering the children, encouraging them to break the world record for type writing instead of crippling them with the XO's keyboard?

What kind of a message are we sending out the XO? That we are all for efficiency in power consumption and economics, but not user interface?

What kind of a message are we sending about staying true to our stated goals, our mission, our publicly expressed views about better education, if we are not willing to change the layout of the keyboards, when we already concede that the QWERTY layout is inferior (although the Wikipedia article on Dvorak does leave some room for debate on the superiority department)?

For some reason I found very little discussion on this. I think the external user interface is as important as the internal especially as one key tool for learning is writing. We should not hamper that with a design decision that cannot be thoroughly backed.

I hope it is not too late for this discussion. I'm sure it shouldn't be, since we're talking about another different layout for the keyboard, which already has a number of different layout options. Also since we're designing both the hardware and the software, the software can be made Dvorak (or other superior-to-QWERTY-layout) aware from the start and thus avoid some of the problems stated in the Wikipedia article on Dvorak.

More on this at the Keyboard design topic. The worst part of the deal is the usage of the same slanted-column layout they had to apply back in the old days because of limitations of the early typewriters. IMHO it would take little effort to make it slanted in a way to possess mirrored symmetry (or at least to have a plain matrix). -- bkil 20:51, 14 April 2007 (EDT)