At the risk of sounding blasphemous, I wonder about the future of the OLPC. I realize and support its intention and likely don’t understand the political, equity and pervasive nuances of the concept but with the cost of the project reaching $175 and deals like the following, is this going to be necessary? Take your choice: We’ve already people taking...

As I pack up for the day, 2 posts grabbed my attention. Will’s post on the OLPC and especially the exchange in the comments between Gary Stager and Tom Hoffman and Will. The fact that we cannot find a way to provide kids with the essential tool of our day continues to astound me. Virginia shooting on Wikipedia. It already has over 500...

The OLPC project is officially underway as students in Nigeria received the first shipment of laptops. CNet has some nice photos of the...

I spent the afternoon with three teachers all involved in one to one computing classrooms; the two teachers from the Palm handheld project and a veteran teacher in a tablet PC classroom. We spent part of the afternoon in the tablet classroom observing the setup and watching the students work. This isn’t about student excitement over a new tool. It’s gone...

As the shift towards one to one computing continues, I’m advocating we move to more laptops for teachers and students. I’m in a bit of a debate with our IT department as to what the minimum requirements should be for a laptop. Ads for laptops under $700 abound. He claims this would not work well in our environment. Here’s some of his thoughts on our...

I’m in Santa Clara (the heart of Silicon Valley) at the Palm Educator’s Training Coordinator’s certification. This is largely connected to our current Palm(R) Handheld project. The training emphasizes early on that the Palm products are not PDA’s (Personal Digital Assistants) but handheld computers. The distinction is significant in that the...