The OLPC bundle

This page is intended to become eventually a listing of what it is planned that the child who is given a laptop will receive when the laptop arrives.

Please add questions in italics. Questions can be deleted when a definitive answer is added. Please add suggestions and other comments only to the discussion page so that this page becomes eventually a definitive list of what each child who is given a laptop will receive.

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Hardware

One laptop.

How is this packaged.

Anything else?

Software

Software supplied on physical media

Is there any at all?

Software available from a server at school

Online Mentoring / Tutoring Access for OLPC Users.

Either within the context of the local mesh network, or within the context of an intermittently available Internet connection, or both, the governments and NGOs that roll out the OLPC machines will want the children using them to be able to connect to educators, including teachers, older students, mentors and tutors in a structured, trackable manner.

The reasons are:

1. Students sometimes need help from teachers or other more experienced helpers. 2. The interaction between teacher or other older helper and student is inherently non-peer to non-peer. 3. Governments and NGOs can use the tracking data to understand and report concrete "wins" as a result of implementing the OLPC machines.

Reason # 1:

is self-explanatory.

Reason # 2:

The people connecting, that is the students and teachers or other older helpers, are not each other's peers. This fact implies a number of issues. First, the communication between students and teachers or other older helpers is not the sort of communication best suited for ad hoc peer to peer modes of communication. The student's particular question needs to be routed to the designated teacher or other helper who is qualified to answer it, etc.

Reason # 3:

Any sort of online mentoring system should as a matter of course incorporate substantial tracking mechanisms so that one can see how many questions have been received, how many answered, which subjects the questions were about, how many questions each mentor fielded, etc. etc.. This is the sort of hard data that will allow a government or NGO to measure the success of their laptop program and report "wins" to its stakeholders and citizens.

This kind of structured, tracked student - mentor interaction can be the foundation stone around which one can plug in a variety of other resources such as online textbooks, worksheets, problem sets with indexed hints, syllabi, etc. in a modular way. All student interaction with these other tools can also be tracked in order to give more data to the stakeholders involved. Additionally, the same sort of non-peer to non-peer communication tools will allow teachers to get help from their mentors, advisors and supervisors. The education authorities within given countries will want supervision over the educational content, but probably will not want to deal with developing any of this technology if they can access it as a piece of an overall OLPC strategy.

Mac Dougherty
AskOnline

Documentation

Is there a manual?