Sky’s Blog @ The Dalai Lama Foundation — Spreading the word in a networked world

Microsoft is countering the free software movement with “nearly free” software (announced by Bill Gates in April 2007). This in addition to their many other efforts to stymie the free software providers. The New York Times has a good article “Software by Microsoft Is Nearly Free for the Needy.” The writer suggests, and fairly, as you might suspect, that once a young user gets used to Microsoft software, they’ll become a lifetime user. So at $3 per installation, that’s a tiny “marketing” expense to Microsoft, which will eventually reap much more from these potential MS customers.

It’s called the Microsoft Student Innovation Suite.

C|Net news also reports on Bill Gates’ speech in Beijing, entitled “Microsoft aims to reach next billion PC users.” The software bundle includes Windows (XP Starter Edition), Office Home and Student 2007, Windows Live Mail Desktop and several educational products. To be eligible, a government must pay for at least 50% of the cost of the PC involved.

BBC News reported (19 April 2007) “Microsoft aims to double PC base.” They report “Governments will be required to provide free computers to schools, capable of running Windows, to be eligible for the discounted software.”

You know that these efforts were given additional impetus by (or according to some were direct ripoffs of) the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program. Nick Negroponte talked about OLPC at TED (video) in February 2006.

AMD and Intel have been aggressively-competitive for years, and both companies have announced initiatives to put inexpensive computers in the hands of students in developing nations. Intel’s Classmate is their entry (at $400) and AMD has announced its 50×15 program (50% of schools by 2015).

Now, the trick is to get the cost of the computer itself down with reach. At $50, a reconditioned computer might be affordable many places, if reconditioned computers can be made available. At $400 the Intel Classmate is pricier, but can run Windows and its associates gizmos.

Techmeme tracks news all over the web, and a link on Techmeme today to a BBC article brought to my attention yet another inexpensive laptop computer for kids. Intel has a $200+ laptop (the “$100 laptop” is now close to $175) that could also be in the running.

And let’s not ignore other efforts to create inexpensive computers, like Simputer and the recent announcement that India seeks to create a $10 laptop computer. (That’s, of course, going to be extremely difficult, but it does show that $100 may still be too high a price to achieve “everywhere” penetration.)

On CBS News, Lesley Stahl interviewed Nick Negroponte about the computer. There’s video there to be viewed. This is the CBS-OLPC institutional view, of course, but the discussion about OLPC in the blogosphere has gotten so negative lately that some positivity is welcome!

• OLPC main site
• “OLPC News“
• The CBS News report on OLPC

The Intel Classmate

• Google video of the first prototype of the Intel Eduwise computer (later the Classmate) at trade show (May 2006)
• C|Net article on Intel’s Classmate
• Brazil to test…Classmate
• A technical comparison of the OLPC “XO” and the Intel Classmate
• Wikipedia entry on the Intel Classmate

The Simputer (Simple Computer)

• Wikipedia entry on the Simputer
• Simputer web site

-posted using Ecto

Couple of things to report regarding cyber-nomads - folks who work where they want to because they work online…

First, a site I ran into months ago, WebWorkerDaily, reports lots of interesting things about people who work online, and you might want to “check them out.” A recent article Web Work Continues Explosive Growth, for instance.

Second, they report on a study from World At Work, which among other things indicates almost 15 million Americans engage in teleworking full time. (You can pick up a PDF of the report by visiting their web site.) If I calculate correctly, that’s about 5% of the population.

And just this week, an article on WebWorker Daily entitled What Type of Web Worker are You? lists four types of nomadic “Web Workers.” I am a combination of Digital Bedouin and Telecommuter. Mostly I work from my home office, but with my phone (on GPRS) and a few visits to client sites, I really distribute my work quite a bit. And I’m completely capable of picking up and working from a remote location for days when I need to. So there goes the classification scheme right away!

Along with the Project Happiness team consisting of its founder Randy Taran, Maria Linegar, Marsha Clark, and teacher Ward Mailliard, I recently spoke with Paul Curtis, who is Chief Academic and Innovation Officer for the New Technology Foundation in Napa, California. This may be interesting to you if you’re an educator or someone involved with students today. Project-based learning isn’t exactly new, but making it the model for an entire curriculum is certainly not a widespread practice.

New Technology Foundation’s mission is to “Support, refine and build on New Technology High School - a national model of project based learning in a technology rich environment. Disseminate the model - methodology, tools and resources - through replication, subscription and other means. Create and support a network of schools based on the Napa NTHS model that continues to innovate, identify and share best practices.”

Learning for the 21st century includes speaking and writing well - communicating. Critical thinking. And collaboration. They’re modeled more on what the workplace looks like and less on what traditional educational institutions look like. The Foundation disseminates the work - they don’t actually run schools - but they have seeded dozens of schools! And the number is growing rapidly.

In my opinion, “preparing for a career” (in the classical sense) is an almost impossible task today. Years ago, one might prepare for a career as a doctor, or a musician. But today it’s hard to imagine that a career, if viewed as a profession, would even exist longer than 10 or 20 years - let alone for an individual’s productive lifetime. The information learned by engineers graduating from universities today, for instance, has a half-life of 3 years. During an average individual’s lifetime, he or she will have to “retread” several times!