OLPC Aus­tralia had a strong pres­ence at linux​.conf​.au 2012 in Bal­larat, two weeks ago.

I gave a talk in the main key­note room about our edu­ca­tional pro­gramme, in which I explained our mis­sion and how we intend to achieve it.

Even if you saw my talk at OSDC 2011, I recom­mend that you watch this one. It is much improved and con­tains new and updated mater­ial. The You­Tube ver­sion is above, but a higher qual­ity ver­sion is avail­able for down­load from Linux Aus­tralia.

The ref­er­ences for this talk are on our devel­op­ment wiki.

Here’s a bet­ter ver­sion of the video I played near the begin­ning of my talk:

I should start by point­ing out out that OLPC is by no means a niche or minor pro­ject. XO laptops are in the hands of 8000 chil­dren in Aus­tralia, across 130 remote com­munit­ies. Around the world, over 2.5 mil­lion chil­dren, across nearly 50 coun­tries, have an XO.

Invest­ment in our Children’s Future

The key point of my talk is that OLPC Aus­tralia have a com­pre­hens­ive edu­ca­tion pro­gramme that highly val­ues teacher empower­ment and com­munity engagement.

The invest­ment to provide a con­nec­ted learn­ing device to every one of the 300 000 chil­dren in remote Aus­tralia is less than 0.1% of the annual edu­ca­tion and con­nectiv­ity budgets.

For low socio-​​economic status schools, the cost is only $80 AUD per child. Spon­sor­ships, primar­ily from cor­por­ates, allow us to sub­sid­ise most of the expense (you too can donate to make a dif­fer­ence). Also keep in mind that this is a total cost of own­er­ship, cov­er­ing the essen­tials like teacher train­ing, sup­port and spare parts, as well as the XO and char­ging rack.

While our prin­cipal focus is on remote, low socio-​​economic status schools, our pro­gramme is avail­able to any school in Aus­tralia. Yes, that means schools in the cites as well. The invest­ment for non-​​subsidised schools to join the same pro­gramme is only $380 AUD per child.

Com­pre­hens­ive Edu­ca­tion Programme

We have a respons­ib­il­ity to invest in our children’s edu­ca­tion — it is not just another mar­ket. As a not-​​for-​​profit, we have the free­dom and the desire to make this hap­pen. We have no interest in vendor lock-​​in; build­ing sus­tain­ab­il­ity is an essen­tial part of our mis­sion. We have no incent­ive to build a depend­ency on us, and every incent­ive to ensure that schools and com­munit­ies can help them­selves and each other.

We only provide XOs to teach­ers who have been suf­fi­ciently enabled. Their train­ing pre­pares them to con­struct­ively use XOs in their les­sons, and is form­ally recog­nised as part of their pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment. Bey­ond the min­imum 15-​​hour XO-​​certified course, a teacher may choose to undergo a fur­ther 5–10 hours to earn XO-​​expert status. This pre­pares them to be able to train other teach­ers, using OLPC Aus­tralia resources. Again, we are redu­cing depend­ency on us.

Train­ing is con­duc­ted online, after the teacher signs up to our pro­gramme and they receive their XO. This scales well to let us effect­ively train many teach­ers spread across the coun­try. Par­ti­cipants in our pro­gramme are encour­aged to par­ti­cip­ate in our online com­munity to share resources and assist one another.

We also want to recog­nise and encour­age chil­dren who have shown enthu­si­asm and aptitude, with our XO-​​champion and XO-​​mechanic cer­ti­fic­a­tions. Not only does this pro­mote sus­tain­ab­il­ity in the school and give invalu­able skills to the child, it rein­forces our core prin­ciple of Child Own­er­ship. Teacher aides, par­ents, eld­ers and other non-​​teacher adults have the XO-​​basics (formerly known as XO-​​local) course designed for them. We want the child’s learn­ing exper­i­ence to extend to the home envir­on­ment and bey­ond, and not be con­strained by the walls of the classroom.

There’s a reason why I’m wear­ing a t-​​shirt that says “No, I won’t fix your com­puter.” We’re on a mis­sion to develop a pro­gramme that is self-​​sustaining. We’ve set high goals for ourselves, and we are determ­ined to meet them. We won’t get there overnight, but we’re well on our way. Sus­tain­ab­il­ity is about respect. We are tak­ing the time to show them the ropes, help­ing them to own it, and devel­op­ing our tech­no­logy to make it easy. We fun­da­ment­ally dis­agree with the atti­tude that ordin­ary people are not cap­able enough to take con­trol of their own futures. Vendor lock-​​in is com­pletely con­tra­dict­ory to our mis­sion. Our schools are not just con­sumers; they are pro­du­cers too.

As explained by Jonathan Nalder (a highly recom­men­ded read!), there are two primary notions guid­ing our pro­gramme. The first is that the nom­inal $80 invest­ment per child is just enough for a school to take the pro­gramme ser­i­ously and make them a stake­holder, greatly improv­ing the chances for suc­cess. The second is that this is a schools-​​centric pro­gramme, driven from grass­roots demand rather than being a régime imposed from above. Schools that par­ti­cip­ate genu­inely want the pro­gramme to succeed.

Tech­no­logy as an Enabler

Enabling this edu­ca­tional pro­gramme is the clever devel­op­ment and use of tech­no­logy. That’s where I (as Engin­eer­ing Man­ager at OLPC Aus­tralia) come in. For tech­no­logy to be truly intrinsic to edu­ca­tion, there must be no spe­cial­ist expert­ise required. Teach­ers aren’t IT pro­fes­sion­als, and nor should they be expec­ted to be. In short, we are using com­puters to teach, not teach­ing com­puters.

The key prin­ciples of the Engin­eer­ing Depart­ment are:

• Tech­no­logy is an integ­ral and seam­less part of the learn­ing exper­i­ence – the pen and paper of the 21^st century.
• To elim­in­ate depend­ence on tech­nical expert­ise, through the devel­op­ment and deploy­ment of sus­tain­able technologies.
• Empower­ing chil­dren to be con­tent pro­du­cers and col­lab­or­at­ors, not just con­tent consumers.
• Open plat­form to allow learn­ing from mis­takes… and easy recovery.

OLPC have done a mar­vel­lous job in their design of the XO laptop, giv­ing us a fant­astic plat­form to build upon. I think that our engin­eer­ing pro­jects in Aus­tralia have been quite innov­at­ive in help­ing to cover the ‘last mile’ to the school. One thing I’m espe­cially proud of is our instance on open­ness. We turn tra­di­tional sys­tems admin­is­tra­tion prac­tice on its head to com­pletely empower the end-​​user. Tech­no­logy that is deployed in cor­por­ate or edu­ca­tional set­tings is typ­ic­ally locked down to make admin­is­tra­tion and sup­port easier. This takes con­trol com­pletely away from the end-​​user. They are severely lim­ited on what they can do, and if some­thing doesn’t work as they expect then they are totally at the mercy of the admins to fix it.

In an edu­ca­tional set­ting this is dis­astrous — it severely lim­its what our chil­dren can learn. We learn most from our mis­takes, so let’s provide an envir­on­ment in which chil­dren are able to safely make mis­takes and recover from them. The soft­ware is quite res­ist­ant to fail­ure, both at the tech­nical level (being based on Fedora Linux) and at the user inter­face level (Sugar). If all goes wrong, rein­stalling the oper­at­ing sys­tem and restor­ing a journal (Sugar user files) backup is a trivial endeav­our. The XO hard­ware is also renowned for its rug­ged­ness and repair­ab­il­ity. Less well-​​known are the amaz­ing dia­gnostics tools, provid­ing quick and easy indic­a­tion that a com­pon­ent should be repaired/​replaced. We provide a com­pletely unlocked envir­on­ment, with full access to the root user and the firm­ware. Some may call that dan­ger­ous, but I call that empower­ment. If a child starts hack­ing on an XO, we want to hire that kid

Eval­u­ation

My talk fea­tures the case study of Doomadgee State School, in far-​​north Queens­land. Doomadgee have very enthu­si­ast­ic­ally taken on board the OLPC Aus­tralia pro­gramme. Every one of the 350 chil­dren aged 4–14 have been issued with an XO, as part of a com­pre­hens­ive pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment and sup­port pro­gramme. Since com­men­cing in late 2010, the per­cent­age of Year 3 pupils at or above national min­imum stand­ards in numer­acy has leapt from 31% in 2010 to 95% in 2011. Other scores have also increased. Think what you may about NAPLAN, but nev­er­the­less that is a stag­ger­ing improvement.

In fed­eral par­lia­ment, Robert Oakeshott MP has been very sup­port­ive of our mission:

Most import­antly of all, quite simply, One Laptop per Child Aus­tralia deliv­ers res­ults in learn­ing from the 5,000 stu­dents already engaged, show­ing impress­ive improve­ments in clos­ing the gap gen­er­ally and lift­ing access and par­ti­cip­a­tion rates in particular.

We are also engaged in lon­git­ud­inal research, work­ing closely with respec­ted research­ers to have a com­pre­hens­ive eval­u­ation of our pro­gramme. We will release more inform­a­tion on this as the eval­u­ation pro­cess matures.

Join our mission

Schools can register their interest in our pro­gramme on our Edu­ca­tion site.

Our Pro­spectus provides a high-​​level overview.

For a detailed ana­lysis, see our Policy Doc­u­ment.

If you would like to get involved in our tech­nical devel­op­ment, visit our devel­op­ment site.

Cred­its

Many thanks to col­leagues Ran­gan Srikhanta (CEO) and Tracy Richard­son (Edu­ca­tion Man­ager) for some of the inform­a­tion and graph­ics used in this article.

This has been mak­ing the rounds lately and is an abso­lute gem:

Teach­ers’ hefty salar­ies are driv­ing up taxes, and they only work 9 or 10 months a year! It’s time we put things in per­spect­ive and pay them for what they do — babysit! We can get that for min­imum wage. That’s right. Let’s give them $3.00 an hour and only the hours they worked; not any of that silly plan­ning time, or any time they spend before or after school. That would be $19.50 a day (7:45 to 3:00 PM with 45 min off for lunch and plan­ning that equals 6 ¹⁄₂ hours). Each par­ent should pay $19.50 a day for these teach­ers to baby-​​sit their chil­dren. Now how many stu­dents do they teach in a day… maybe 30? So that’s $19.50 x 30 = $585.00 a day.

How­ever, remem­ber they only work 180 days a year!!! I am not going to pay them for any hol­i­days. LET’S SEE.… That’s $585 X 180 = $105,300 per year. (Hold on! My cal­cu­lator needs new bat­ter­ies.) What about those spe­cial edu­ca­tion teach­ers and the ones with Master’s degrees or higher duties? Well, we could pay them min­imum wage ($7.75), and just to be fair, round it off to $8.00 an hour (but we shouldn’t get car­ried away). That would be $8 X 6 ¹⁄₂ hours X 30 chil­dren X 180 days = $280,800 per year. Wait a minute — there’s some­thing wrong here! There sure is!

The aver­age teacher’s salary (nation wide) is $50,000. $50,000/180 days = $277.77/per day/​30 students=$9.25/6.5 hours = $1.42 per hour per stu­dent — a very inex­pens­ive baby-​​sitter and they even EDUCATE your kids!) WHAT A DEAL!!!!

Make a teacher smile; re-​​post this to show appre­ci­ation for all educators.

I don’t think the dol­lar val­ues are for Aus­tralia — our min­imum wage is higher than $3.00. The point should be obvi­ous non­ethe­less: we ser­i­ously under­value the people who are respons­ible for edu­cat­ing our children.

Update: my talk has been covered by OLPC News.

Here’s the video of the talk I said I’d be giv­ing at OSDC 2011, titled Australia’s Toughest Linux Deploy­ment:

In it, I out­line our edu­ca­tional pro­gramme and how the tech­no­logy fits into it. Some key points:

• we have a bet­ter ver­sion on You­Tube of the video I show in the talk
• we main­tain a Policy Doc­u­ment, which provides an over­view of our over­all programme
• OLPC Aus­tralia have two core prin­ciples in addi­tion to OLPC’s ori­ginal five
• we have some sup­port in gov­ern­ment at dif­fer­ent levels — for example, we were praised in fed­eral par­lia­ment and the print media (pay­wall) by a prom­in­ent fed­eral Mem­ber of Parliament
• we have deploy­ments across remote Aus­tralia — a feat that can only be man­aged through build­ing self-​​sufficiency
• our pro­gramme is show­ing bene­fi­cial res­ults, and we are engaged in lon­git­ud­inal and detailed evaluation
• we have a com­pre­hens­ive edu­ca­tional pro­gramme, with online train­ing and cer­ti­fic­a­tions (such as our XO-​​cert course)
• we are break­ing depend­ence on spe­cial expert­ise and infra­struc­ture — build­ing sus­tain­ab­il­ity and grass-​​roots sup­port is key
• deploy­ments are made at the classroom level, which is more man­age­able than sat­ur­at­ing a whole school at once
• we don’t provide XOs without train­ing — a teacher must earn a cer­ti­fic­a­tion before they can receive XOs for their class
• our sup­port is focused on enabling schools and com­munit­ies to help them­selves, and each other
• we have innov­ated in the tech­no­logy space, with offer­ings such as the XO-​​AU OS, XO-​​AU USB, XOP and XS-​​AU
• con­tex­tu­al­ising learn­ing, for example through loc­al­isa­tion, is a power­ful tool to improve engage­ment from the child, school and community
• we invite people to join our devel­op­ment efforts
• there’s a nice sur­prise men­tioned towards the end, which I shall elab­or­ate upon in the near future

For those of you who have seen me speak about OLPC Aus­tralia at SLUG, this is a much more pol­ished talk.

I am speak­ing next Thursday at the Open Source Developers’ Con­fer­ence 2011 in Can­berra. The title is Australia’s Toughest Linux Deploy­ment. Yes it’s a play on the rug­ged­ness and flex­ib­il­ity of the XO’s design to meet the needs of remote communities.

Here’s the talk abstract:

A 300,000 seat Linux deploy­ment is noth­ing to sneeze at. What if those seats were actu­ally children’s laps? By provid­ing a flex­ible learn­ing plat­form, OLPC Aus­tralia aims to cre­ate a sus­tain­able and com­pre­hens­ive pro­gramme to enhance oppor­tun­it­ies for every child in remote Aus­tralia. What’s more, we plan to achieve this by 2014.

In focus­ing on the most remote areas of the con­tin­ent, the mis­sion is by no means easy. These areas are typ­ic­ally not eco­nom­ic­ally viable for a busi­ness to ser­vice, hence the need for a not-​​for-​​profit in the space. Expert­ise for hard­ware and soft­ware is vir­tu­ally non-​​existent. Set­tle­ments are small and spread very far apart. Envir­on­mental con­di­tions, cul­tures and life­styles vary wildly. They are very dif­fer­ent worlds from the coastal cit­ies where the bur­eau­cra­cies are based.

Even within com­munit­ies, dif­fer­ences abound. Schools often stand in stark con­trast to their sur­rounds. Gov­ern­ment and busi­ness interests have also made their marks.

This talk will out­line how OLPC Aus­tralia has developed a solu­tion to suit Aus­tralian scen­arios. Com­par­is­ons and con­trasts will be made with other “com­puters in schools” pro­grammes, OLPC deploy­ments around the world and cor­por­ate IT projects.

For example, stand­ard sysad­min prac­tice typ­ic­ally man­dates tight, cent­ral­ised con­trol over all sys­tems and infra­struc­ture. The OLPC Aus­tralia approach is the exact oppos­ite. By pro­mot­ing flex­ib­il­ity and ease of use, the pro­gramme can achieve sus­tain­ab­il­ity by enabling man­age­ment at the grass-​​roots level. The XO laptops them­selves are built espe­cially for edu­ca­tion. They are extraordin­ar­ily rugged as well as being inex­pens­ive. They are also totally repair­able in the field, with min­imal skill required. Train­ing is con­duc­ted online, and an online com­munity allows par­ti­cipants nation­wide to share resources.

Key to the ongo­ing suc­cess of the pro­gramme is act­ive engage­ment with all stake­hold­ers, and a recog­ni­tion of the total cost of own­er­ship over a five-​​year life cycle.

In hon­our of OLPC Aus­tralia’s second anniversary, we have pro­duced a video reveal­ing some of the suc­cess we have achieved.

Feel free to spread it far and wide

The video of my talk at linux​.conf​.au is online. You can watch/​download it online.

Over­all, I think it went quite well. A per­sonal cri­ti­cism is that I need to ser­i­ously cut back on my use of ‘um’ and ‘ah’ sounds. Sug­ges­tions on com­bat­ing this prob­lem and/​or gen­er­ally improv­ing my speak­ing skills are welcome.

Speak­ing of talks, I found this one by Sir Ken Robin­son to be espe­cially illu­min­at­ing. It’s sum­mary of how and why tra­di­tional edu­ca­tion meth­ods are fail­ing us, and what we can do about it. I think it goes some way towards explain­ing the kind of think­ing behind OLPC.

OLPC Aus­tralia has a doc­u­ment­ary air­ing on Chan­nel 7 this Sunday, 5 Decem­ber at 11.00am (AEST), entitled “Ideas for Good – the One Laptop per Child ini­ti­at­ive”.

The doc­u­ment­ary show­cases our reach into Far North Queens­land, and cap­tures foot­age of celebrit­ies Christine Añu, James Tobin, Clint Bizzell and Sam­antha Har­ris as they travel to Morn­ing­ton Island and Bloom­field. It also invites people to sup­port the One Laptop per Child cause, by tex­ting 044 SUPPORT (0447 877 678) with the word LAPTOP. You can send as many as you like. You can also show your sup­port by click­ing the but­ton on the Ideas for Good site (one click per IP address per day).

For every 100 mes­sages received, Tel­stra will donate an XO laptop to a child in a remote com­munity — up to 500 XOs.

I have already seen it, and I am proud to see the pub­lic expos­ure of our efforts to improve oppor­tun­it­ies for kids in remote Aus­tralia. See­ing the tech­no­logy I man­age actu­ally being used in the field is very satisfying.

We at OLPC Aus­tralia cel­eb­rated our first birth­day with a massive bang — a black-​​tie gala event held at the Museum of Con­tem­por­ary Art on Sydney Har­bour. It was a won­der­ful night of cel­eb­rat­ing Aus­tralian Indi­gen­ous art, music, cul­ture and food. Cor­por­ate spon­sors gen­er­ously donated to the cause.

Of spe­cial note was our key­note speaker. Prime Min­is­ter Kevin Rudd voiced his sup­port for our mis­sion, extend­ing deduct­ible gift recip­i­ent status to all dona­tions made to us. Also in attend­ance was the Assist­ant Treas­urer and other rep­res­ent­at­ives of state and fed­eral government.

Myself and other mem­bers of the OLPC Aus­tralia team were for­tu­nate enough to meet with Kevin before the offi­cial pro­ceed­ings com­menced. He took the time to con­verse indi­vidu­ally with each of us. I related my exper­i­ences in Dhal­inybuy, where every child has their own com­puter on the Inter­net. This ratio of 1:1 access is almost unheard of even in city schools. I was pleased to see one of our anec­dotes make it into his address, not very long after our conversation.

It’s an indes­crib­able feel­ing know­ing that you’re on the radar of the highest polit­ical office in the land. We are a small team and have a long way to go, but I firmly believe that we are on track to empower remote com­munit­ies across Australia.

I am writ­ing this from Dhal­inybuy School in remote Aus­tralia. What’s even more impress­ive is that I am typ­ing this on a production-​​model OLPC XO-1.5!

For those who don’t know yet, in March I star­ted full-​​time as the Tech­nical Co-​​ordinator at One Laptop per Child Aus­tralia. This basic­ally means that I man­age the tech­no­logy sur­round­ing the XO laptops, XS server and so on.

We are in East Arnhem Land, North­ern Ter­rit­ory, this week for OLPC deploy­ments, as well as train­ing in Yir­rkala School and the Yir­rkala Home­lands Learn­ing Centres (HLCs).

There are eight HLCs in all, spread over a wide area. The closest one is close to two hour’s drive away from Yir­rkala, almost entirely on dirt road. Yir­rkala itself is quite remote — about 13 hours drive (again, almost entirely on dirt) from Dar­win. It’s gen­er­ally easier to fly to these loc­a­tions (which takes at least four hops if you’re com­ing from Sydney), espe­cially right now as a trop­ical cyc­lone (which barely missed us a month ago when we were out this way) des­troyed many of the roads.

In col­lab­or­a­tion with the Uni­ver­sity of West­ern Sydney (UWS), and with some assist­ance from the North­ern Ter­rit­ory Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion and Train­ing (NTDET), we have formed teams and spread out over the eight HLCs to work with chil­dren, teach­ers, schools and communities.

I’ll have to go into my work at Yir­rkala School at a later time, but here at the HLCs we have man­aged some impress­ive feats, if I do say so myself! For instance:

• this is to the best of my know­ledge the world’s first deploy­ment of the new XO-1.5 devices, and we’re doing it across all eight HLCs at once
• chil­dren can write in their own lan­guage, as we installed Yolngu Matha fonts
• we have taught teach­ers and stu­dents to cre­ate their own e-​​books using Scratch, using pic­tures they take with the cam­era and con­tent we loaded onto the XOs beforehand

In addi­tion, I worked with Ian Cun­ning­ham from NTDET to pro­duce an inex­pens­ive and simple means to deploy wire­less access points to these remote com­munit­ies. These are Link­sys WRT-​​54GL devices flashed with DD-​​WRT. We con­figured each such that they will just work when plugged in. The HLCs that have satel­lite Inter­net can have their access points man­aged from any­where on the NT Schools network.

I left our setup to the UWS stu­dents (none of whom are tech­nical) on my team, and they were able to suc­cess­fully set up the access point and cre­ate a work­able area for the XOs to be charged.

Most of the HLCs have their elec­tri­city sup­plied entirely by local gen­er­at­ors, which are nor­mally rationed to run at night. Dhal­inybuy school has its own smal­ler gen­er­ator. This is enough for the basics, but insuf­fi­cient for the four desktop PCs that they have. Con­sequently, these com­puters are rarely used, and the teach­ers tell me that they are too dif­fi­cult to man­age any­way. Being bat­tery powered and far more power effi­cient, XOs are far more suitable.

We have suc­cess­fully deployed XOs to every school-​​age child in Dhal­inybuy. I’m still out here, so I don’t yet know the status of the other HLCs. I am, how­ever, con­fid­ent that they are oper­a­tional, given the ease at which we got things going here.

Through the access point, every XO (and hence every child) can col­lab­or­ate and share their activ­it­ies in Sugar. This also facil­it­ates an Inter­net con­nec­tion for all the XOs, through the NT Schools net­work. They are now open to a wider world of inform­a­tion and communication.

I was asked by a journ­al­ist to com­ment on the NSW gov­ern­ment decision to dis­trib­ute Win­dows 7 “mini note­books” across schools. Here’s my reply:

I used to work with satel­lite net­works, provid­ing Inter­net access to
most of NSW before wired broad­band was widely avail­able (and it still
isn’t in a lot of places). We had many rural schools and local
coun­cils as cus­tom­ers. The dif­fi­culties of get­ting com­put­ing and
Inter­net resources to remote areas (with asso­ci­ated infra­struc­ture,
train­ing, etc.) can­not be underestimated.

Firstly examin­ing from a busi­ness per­spect­ive, how is this to be
fun­ded, given that NSW is in a poor fin­an­cial state and the gov­ern­ment
has been axing pro­jects left, right and centre? What altern­at­ives were
con­sidered? How were they eval­u­ated? Was there an open ten­der­ing
process?

What mat­ters most is what we can achieve with this pro­gramme. Simply
throw­ing a com­puter to every stu­dent won’t cut it. There needs to be a
clear plan and set of out­comes defined, as you would have with any
reas­on­able busi­ness arrange­ment. This press release doesn’t touch upon
any of that.

What is the oppor­tun­ity cost of fund­ing this scheme? Could the
resources have been spent on bet­ter facil­it­ies for the chil­dren or
bet­ter teach­ers’ salaries?

The phrase ‘new era’ implies some sort of major change. Has this been
adequately planned for?

Teach­ers have a hard enough time keep­ing up with tech­no­logy. Will they
be given train­ing and con­tin­ued assistance?

How will these devices be integ­rated into cur­ricula? How can they
become effect­ive teach­ing aids and not just expens­ive appendages?

Will the focus be on teach­ing or train­ing? I am a firm believer that
schools should teach chil­dren to be clever and think for them­selves,
cre­at­ing the basis for a flex­ible work­force. They should not simply be
trained to mem­or­ise the func­tions of a par­tic­u­lar ver­sion of a piece
of soft­ware. Rote-​​learning like that will be worth­less when they
gradu­ate and enter the workforce.

Will there be any addi­tional costs required to prop­erly use the
equip­ment? Are classrooms adequately equipped with appro­pri­ate
elec­trical wir­ing and capa­city to charge all of these? What about
net­work con­nectiv­ity? What will it take to main­tain the infra­struc­ture
required for these, includ­ing hard­ware and soft­ware for serv­ers,
routers and so on.

In fact, there is no men­tion of sup­port­ing infra­struc­ture at all. What
are the costs of the entire life cycle of these devices, the soft­ware,
main­ten­ance, infra­struc­ture and so on?

Who will own the note­books? Will stu­dents be free to explore and learn
about their com­puters, or will they be locked down? Can they install
whatever soft­ware they want? Will they be tied to par­tic­u­lar
applic­a­tions and file formats?

There is no men­tion at all of what soft­ware will be installed on these
com­puters. An oper­at­ing sys­tem without applic­a­tions is use­less. Will
the included soft­ware be enough to empower and teach our chil­dren?
Have deals been struck with other soft­ware sup­pli­ers? Will there be
addi­tional costs to acquire the soft­ware for par­tic­u­lar sub­jects? Who
bears this cost — the school sys­tem or parents?

Has open source soft­ware been con­sidered at all? There’s plenty of
open source soft­ware that works hap­pily on top of Win­dows. Microsoft
may have dis­coun­ted Win­dows, but did they include an office suite?
Open­Of­fice would do the job just fine.

Even if you believe the tired-​​old argu­ment that the state MUST
pur­chase Microsoft Office for each and every stu­dent (which works out
to tens of mil­lions of dol­lars), wouldn’t it be bet­ter to choose
Open­Of­fice for free, and spend those mil­lions on new lib­rary books or
hos­pital beds?

I’ll admit that Open­Of­fice isn’t exactly the same thing (it’s bet­ter
in some ways, not as good in oth­ers), but it’s so sim­ilar that it
doesn’t really make a dif­fer­ence. It is worth tens of mil­lions of
dol­lars just to get the Real Thing? Does learn­ing MS Office 2003 in
school really pre­pare you for using Office 2007 (with its com­pletely
new inter­face) once you hit the work­force? Refer to my earlier
com­ments about teach­ing versus training.

Are they includ­ing graph­ics soft­ware for the art and design classes?
Are tax­pay­ers going to have to pay for a copy of Adobe Cre­at­ive Suite
for every­one? How about we save the hun­dreds of dol­lars per stu­dent
and use the GIMP and Ink­s­cape instead? Examples such as these abound,
and there are plenty of other open source applic­a­tions that simply
have no good par­al­lel in the pro­pri­et­ary world.

I find it strange that the country’s largest state would tie the
edu­ca­tion of its chil­dren to a totally unproven oper­at­ing sys­tem. A
smart pur­chaser — espe­cially one pur­chas­ing at such a grand scale -
would wait until the soft­ware had been out for a while and had been
thor­oughly tested by con­sumers around the world. Internal test­ing is
one thing, but you can­not beat real-​​world experience.

A point-​​zero release is sure to have rough edges, and it would have
been far wiser to wait for at least the first ser­vice pack like most
organ­isa­tions do. Can you ima­gine the fury that would have been
unleashed if the NSW Gov­ern­ment had decided to kit out the state with
Win­dows Vista before its release? Sure it soun­ded good before it came
out (“The wow starts now!”), but it lost its lustre very soon after
unveil­ing. Many people today still cling onto Win­dows XP, and oth­ers
have switched to Linux and Mac OS X, in response to Vista’s abysmal
state.

The OLPC Pro­ject has already iden­ti­fied and addressed many of the
issues that may be faced. They have done this through devel­op­ing a
com­bin­a­tion of hard­ware, soft­ware, infra­struc­ture, train­ing,
pro­ced­ures and learn­ing mater­ial. It would be wise to learn from their
experiences.

The whole mini note­book revolu­tion star­ted with Linux. Start­ing with
the OLPC XO laptop, Linux has proven to be a flex­ible and cap­able
oper­at­ing sys­tem suit­able for small devices. Its res­ist­ance to vir­uses
and other net­work nas­ties is legendary. The last thing I’d want is for
my child’s com­puter to get infec­ted and start show­ing kid­die porn.
Anti-​​virus and anti-​​malware soft­ware are band-​​aid solu­tions. I’m not
going to build a castle on a swamp.

Com­mer­cially, devices like the Asus Eee PC could not have exis­ted if
it were not for Linux. It forced Microsoft to actu­ally com­pete for
once, by resur­rect­ing Win­dows XP and slash­ing its price to a more
reas­on­able level.

The press release claims that this scheme is ‘unpar­alleled in
edu­ca­tion glob­ally’. There is con­sid­er­able risk in being first off the
block. I’ve already explained the risks of using an unproven oper­at­ing
sys­tem. It would be more prudent to learn from other large scale
rol­louts in education.

Take the Repub­lic of Mace­do­nia, for example. Des­pite being one of the
poorest nations in Europe, they are the only nation to have one
com­puter per stu­dent. They achieved this through the use of Edubuntu,
a vari­ant of the pop­u­lar Ubuntu GNU/​Linux oper­at­ing sys­tem that is
spe­cially tailored for edu­ca­tion and learn­ing. With that, they got a
vast lib­rary of open source edu­ca­tional soft­ware, which was all
trans­lated into their nat­ive language.

Sim­ilar stor­ies abound in places like Brazil, Rus­sia, India and China.
Col­lect­ively known as the BRIC coun­tries, they are con­sidered to be
the up-​​and-​​coming nations to watch over the next few dec­ades. Their
eco­nom­ies have been grow­ing at break­neck rates, partly because they
have been clever in their invest­ments. These nation states recog­nise
that edu­ca­tion is the key to long-​​term eco­nomic success.

You might say that these coun­tries are poor and that is why they are
choos­ing to use open source soft­ware. It is true that they don’t have
plenty of money to throw around, but does New South Wales? Does
Aus­tralia? Where would you want your tax dol­lars spent?