Julianna Yau’s blog

Jason has uploaded the video from Wednesday’s talk: One Laptop Per Child – Yaacov Iland. It’s a long video (about an hour and a half), and you may want to adjust the settings so you’re viewing it at the original size (unless you’re curious about how Yaacov looks pixillated). I apologize for the coughing—that was me, fighting the last of a lingering cold.

Yaacov’s insights were fair and well-presented. Although most of the criticisms OLPC endured recently were due to their dispatch problems, Yaacov digs deeper, asking what problems OLPC was trying to address, what engineering challenges had to be overcome, and what other challenges were still unsolved. It seems the biggest issues yet to be overcome are training for teachers, accessibility to related technologies (e.g. an internet connection, electricity), and language and cultural barriers. For an organization which has said it’s an education project, not a laptop project, I find it odd that they have made so little headway with those challenges in comparison to the work they have completed on the XO laptop itself.