Today I visited the Mombasa public library. After leaving my backpack at the bag check outside, the privilege of entering the building cost me twenty shillings. After I walked around and admired the small but dense collection of books with torn, yellow spines, I witnessed a bit of an oddity: a commotion in the back of the building grabbed my attention, and I saw a man walking in my direction, holding a book straight up in the air with one hand. This man had a printed sign taped to his chest and back that read, “I AM A THIEF. I TRIED TO STEAL A BOOK FROM THE LIBRARY.” Behind this man was a a somber looking security guard, who slowly paraded him around the building, past me, and then out the door. What happened outside I have no idea.
The scarcity of learning materials here is striking, as is the seriousness with which the sanctity of those materials is taken. Today’s experience put into perspective my own school’s policy: the library is not for children. Books only leave the library in the hands of teachers.
And that’s just the books policy: it’s no wonder the computers are so dusty! If a book can’t be trusted to a child, how can a computer? When the culture and the resources dictate this kind of policy, does an organization like OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) make any sense?
The adults don’t trust the children with books, let alone their own laptops. In a country where a computer in the home is usually just a pipe dream, a shiny new laptop for every child runs the risk of being downright offensive to the adults, who likely would hear nothing of talk about manufacturing cost effectiveness and subsidies.
I have been reflecting on this a lot recently for two reasons:
- I am still trying to identify how best to utilize the old computers in the school library (in fact I’ve been downloading educational software nonstop for three days and counting).
- The OLPC project was in the news recently due to its downsize and forking of hardware and software divisions.
The reason that the second point struck me was this: the OLPC staff thought about more than just how to build a cheap computer. Read their Learning Vision and you’ll understand. They clearly spent a lot of time on the software side of things, thinking about what would benefit a child most… not just “which programs/games can I put on here?” but also how to organize it all. They call it Sugar, which is what actually just branched off to its own company. The (hopefully) good news is that I shouldn’t need this special laptop to benefit from this: I can download a LiveCD of the whole thing, meaning I can boot my computer right off the CD without changing anything on my hard drive.
Why take this approach? Why not just install a bunch of free stuff onto Windows, which is already installed? Well, two reasons:
- By keeping the computer itself intrinsically linked to the software ON the computer, it encourages adults to fear the children’s use of the computer. “They might change something and break it!” is a sentiment not limited to Kenya. Making the software into a fairly disposable, easily replaceable commodity, the adults only need to make sure that the children don’t PHYSICALLY break the computer. A server computer is not the correct solution in this environment, I think, because the IT infrastructure is simply not in place in the schools.
- Despite what I just said, I’m moving down the “stay-in-whatever-version-of-Windows-is-on-the-machine” road in parallel, in an attempt to possibly bundle a software package for other schools, but I’ll tell you, it’s a mess. When I find a program for Windows, I need to see if it works specifically with Windows 95. What about Windows 95 pre-OSR2, which is not a free upgrade? Will I need to install DirectX? Java? Flash? Which versions? What about the Y2K patch (no joke)? If this sounds technical and obnoxious, it is, and I’m having a difficult time imagining anyone else being able to reproduce my “old Windows machine” success unless they are coming from an IT background. A LiveCD, on the other hand, or a bootable USB stick, leaves little to worry about. Does the computer have a CD-ROM? No, then take it to the shop and get one, it’s cheap. Then use CD that costs 5 cents. Certainly cheaper than buying a newer Windows license. This makes for an inexpensive and simple distribution of learning tools that makes the OLPC Deployment Guide look like a Dickens novel by comparison.
The OLPC / Sugar Labs group is not alone in distributing an educational LiveCD, although they have probably taken the concept father than anyone else. Other LiveCDs include the old GComprix, superseded (I think, documentation is poor) now by FreeDuc. A decent article on the topic with more examples is here. I get the impression that I’ve barely scratched the surface, and I’m trying to download as many as I can before I jump to any conclusions, but I already anticipate one problem:
The computers at my school, and probably many others, are SLOW, and I don’t think that these LiveCDs always take that into account.
I think there would be a tremendous value in maintaining an up-to-date CD/USB school-ready Linux LiveCD available for schools in developing nations. I’ve already downloaded the Damn Small Linux LiveCD to see if it would make a good starting point.
Well, I still have a lot to learn, and since I’m still paying by the megabyte, my wallet is starting to shrink thanks to these LiveCDs (700MB each)! I’m talking with Zuku to get WiMax at my house, because I may be in range and it would probably be better than any of the mobile phone networks. Oh, how I yearn to multitask on a one gigabit connection again:
Having multiple computers here would be nice, too. Oh, and if you couldn’t tell by the fact that I clearly have so much free time, the strike is not over. Tomorrow I expect some fellow volunteer teachers to visit, so I’ll be going now to clean up the area around my computer. The Dr. Pepper cans area already starting to stack up! Makes it feel like home.