Kate Fernie wrote:
I wondered if anyone had any experience of the 'one laptop per child'
> machines? The 'give one/get one' scheme is opening via Amazon this month
> with an advertised price of £275 - you get a machine and one is donated to a
> school in a developing country:
I've got one :-D Bought it via eBay last year (when the 'give one, get one'
scheme was only open to US and Canadian citizens).
They are really very innovative machines, with an interface that's been
completely redesigned from the ground up, to be usable by children. So you
don't really get 'windows', or even a standard filesystem - it's a whole new
paradigm.
It's probably not suitable for gallery use though. For a start, the software
is still 'beta' and has some bugs. But more importantly, they're designed to
be 'owned' by a single child, and don't really work as shared machines (all
your files and program usage is stored as an 'activity history', for
instance).
There are other ways that the machines might be interesting to museums,
though. The laptops are currently being deployed in bulk in developing
countries, including Papua New Guinea, and there is a real need for quality
educational content.
The Internet Archive recently announced that it is going to mak its
collection of 185,000 videos available to users of the laptop. To do this,
it has to re-encode all its videos into Ogg Theora (an open-source format),
as the laptop doesn't support Flash by default - so it's no small feat.
I could go on about the project for ages, so let me know if you're
interested in finding out more!
Cheers,
Frankie
--
Frankie Roberto
Experience Designer, Rattle
http://www.rattlecentral.com
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