MIT Team Working On a $12 Apple (II) Desktop

Slashdot | MIT Team Working On a $12 Apple (II) Desktop

PC Pro: News: MIT working on £6 Apple desktop

A new project to create a £6 computer is underway at MIT, the same University that spawned the One Laptop Per Child non-profit laptop.
The PCs will be loosely based on Apple 2 machines, first unveiled over 30 years ago, and the team are actively recruiting enthusiasts of the retro computer to help with development.

The Apple 2 was the first mass-produced PC, which sold over 5 million units. It was extremely popular for educational use in the 80s, but is set to get a new lease on life.

Rather than a laptop, the unit will act as a desktop computer and plug directly into a standard television.

Designers on quest to build $12 computer - BostonHerald.com

Derek Lomas, Jesse Austin-Breneman and other designers want to create a computer that Third World residents can buy for less than you probably spend on lunch.

“We see this as a model that could increase economic opportunities for people in developing countries,” said Lomas, part of a team that’s trying to develop a $12 computer at this month’s MIT International Development Design Summit. “If you just know how to type, that can be the difference between earning $1 an hour instead of $1 a day.”

Jeremy and I were talking around this issue last night. He sent me a link to an article that claims that the OLPC’s a con, because it was never about constructionism. I find the notion silly. Constructionism as it was developed (not used) was based on using technology, so the two are wedded. Also, it is MIT, so of course it has to have a toy attached. And bowing in to allow for Microsoft to take it over is just fate. Apple offered their OS for free, but were denied, I’m told, because they wouldn’t open source everything. So now they pay for Microsoft. Hubris crushes all.

To me, the OLPC/XO was never the point. Julia D and I have talked for years about Zero Cost Computing before the OLPC came a long… so it was fun to watch someone do all the work. Sure they’ve failed in a pretty spectacular way. Sure it was an hegomonizing act of technology and pedagogy. But it sure was neat! They tried and have failed. Now more people can try, and fail less. This AppleII group is cool because it is a geek project. OLPC tried to be other than geek, but couldn’t pull it off. I’d like to see a proper educatator’s project some day too.

What is best about all this, is that any time you disrupt the corporate culture, even just a little bit, the world becomes an infinitely bit more human.

Just a theory: Modern culture destroying science education

Just a theory: Modern culture destroying science education - Boing Boing Gadgets

The Chronicle of Higher Education writes about the decline of science education, which has wussed out and become too interested in its own cultural propriety to adequately teach the nuts and bolts. We just don’t challenge kids with hard stuff like trig anymore, preferring that they have self-esteem, which qualifies them to have just gotten laid off by Starbucks….

Now, bringing women and minorities into all this marks the writer as an old fart. I bet a dollar he’s the type that weasel-words like a champ in the evolution debate, because The Left is science’s real enemy. But he’s right about how soft science education’s getting….

After all, science’s organized enemies all more or less openly proclaim their agendas. But the shallow pool of talent that results from a culture of entitlement isn’t something we can nail down, as it were, quite so easily.

Relevance: science is where the iPhones come from.

Yes, this is part of it. But the problem is, imho, that there is no autonomous play. There is no safe/dangerous play. There is no real experimentation. We ‘over program’, and the result of this an expectation that everything is either magic or doable without much effort. I’m not saying “kids today are like this or that”, each generation drops the ball on something. What I’m asking is what are we doing as educators to encourage and foster a creative exploration of the world and lived experience?

That said, I really liked the line, “We just don’t challenge kids with hard stuff like trig anymore, preferring that they have self-esteem, which qualifies them to have just gotten laid off by Starbucks…”

But from the article:

Students usually have to catch the science bug in grade school and stick with it to develop the competencies in math and the mastery of complex theories they need to progress up the ladder. Those who succeed at the level where they can eventually pursue graduate degrees must have not only abundant intellectual talent but also a powerful interest in sticking to a long course of cumulative study. A century ago, Max Weber wrote of “Science as a Vocation,” and, indeed, students need to feel something like a calling for science to surmount the numerous obstacles on the way to an advanced degree.

And it gets better:

The antiscience agenda is visible as early as kindergarten, with its infantile versions of the diversity agenda and its early budding of self-esteem lessons. But it complicates and propagates all the way up through grade school and high school. In college it often drops the mask of diffuse benevolence and hardens into a fascination with “identity.”

Of course I disagree. We DO start with children as scientists. Curious about the world and inquiring, children are born to explore and theorize. People like the author, if the author’s being honest, kill curiosity, exploration and theorizing through the formal institutionalization of lived experience (something that science has aided and abetted) in accountability factories of standardization (not all schools, just the ones that don’t actively thwart this). When students get to university, many have lost the desire to inquiry and explore, and rather want something they have been taught to want… (I’m not going to say what…).

You want scientists? You want FREE THINKERS? Cancel all the tests. Burn the curriculum. Turn the school into a forest and a laboratory, and learn what it means to play. Do that and people will line up for trig lessons… just so they can take play one step further. And they will freak out over the new technologies over at http://www.ecogeek.org/ and want to make them themselves. Give every child in your country the golden book of chemistry and teach them how to make gunpowder, and you’ll create a scientist full of wonder.

Access Denied

Access Denied

In a discrimination case that is still crawling through the Louisiana court system after seven years, McNeese State University’s president has asserted that it is not a “high priority” for disabled students to access the university’s student union.

The case, which stems from a 2001 accident, was brought by a student who — while in a wheelchair — was injured trying to pry open a bathroom door in the union. The door was not made accessible for disabled people, according to the suit.

I can hear Len already formulating a comment on LJ, even though I’ve not posted it yet. Len, Jen and Aleja have been enlightening me about realities related to disability issues over the past year that I’ve been helping a bit with the Gimp Girl Community. I had just assumed that proper legislation would just make it easier for institutions to use money to accommodate students, not that they’d balk at having to use money in this way. Real life is tough enough, without having institutions taking the stand by trying to tell people what they can and cannot have, when legislation’s in place describing what the needs are and how they should be met. I’m a slow learner.