User:Ewoud

If I understood correct; the OLPC project is all about the numbers. If we order enough, production goes up and the price goes down. OLPC needs to sell XXX numbers of XO "100 dollar laptops", starting at $200 a piece, sales and production are low so the price remains high(er). Then why does OLPC only target the poor, and do we so often hear that it's a machine build for the 3rd world. I think education should be a global issue.

Perhaps we could help; buying lots of laptops in order to get the average price down, and so help the OLPC project?

$200=136euro

$100=68euro ... This does not need a lot of explaining.

Then the XO; My first reaction when I held the machine was that the current quality of the laptops is great! I found it has an automatic system for building a network, the machine looked and felt robust, has proven to be highly intuitive and fully functional, especially with kids. I saw a 4 year old get acquainted and operational in less than 4 minutes! I probably shouldn't be so surprised, as an organised open movement is helping in terms of interfacing, software, security, content creation and educational resources,

If the `rich` could buy and distribute XO laptops in the ´rich´countries schooling systems, those schools could (would) help increasing production numbers, but would also help with programming the open software, developing open content, organising support, warranty, recycling, innovation, etc. etc. When this would be possible we should start thinking about organising and reallocating some serious resources.

I hope we can buy (or perhaps lease) a couple of XXX laptops as a European non profit organisation, agree that after x-amount of use of the machine, ship it as a complete working infrastructure (notebooks, servers, antenna's) to a country in need. Shipping could also include a wide choice of e-learning environments, content, and service packages (and perhaps could be combined with other NGO projects).

Interesting? The ability to create, share and improve information with millions of people over the world, on the same network (the Internet) is one of the reasons why computing is what it is today. In that perspective we could say that the ability to share and improve is one of the main reasons why now we can build $100 laptops. When we create, share, improve, and recreate we are learning, which is education. And so education should get ready for the next step into the digital era.