iterativelearning

In one of his recent FastCompany interviews, Robert Scoble talks to the head of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, Chuck Kane. Kane conveys some inspiring stories about the difference they’ve made in the lives of many school-age children in developing countries around the world.

From a design standpoint, one detail I find interesting in this interview is when Kane explains that because many of these OLPC computers are often used by children in very rural areas, they need to minimize exposure to dust and moisture. So to do this, they have built in latches so that when the student closes up the computer to head home, these latches cover any open ports. Kind of interested to know if this design insight came from doing a little ethnography, or if it was was easily anticipated in the lab.

On other hand, what I would have liked to hear Kane talk more about is how they handle internet connectivity. How do they establish internet connections for the children in such rural areas? Through a satellite? Or perhaps, OLPC is not pursuing that at the moment, since the primary tool for internet access in developing countries is the cell phone.

The social bookmarking service, Diigo, enjoyed some good exposure with a Robert Scoble interview this past July. Diigo features quite a few tools and one that I’ve appreciated the most is the annotation tool (e.g., highlighting, sticky notes) and this is one area in which I think they really distinguish themselves from Delicious. Another distinctive feature to Diigo is that one of its target audiences has been educators and this makes sense given the popularity of social bookmarking tools among educators.

Now Diigo is offering special Educator accounts where teachers can create social bookmarking groups for their individual classes. As a complement to this, they offer some helpful privacy features in which preferences can be configured to limit communication to just those in the class. It doesn’t cost anything and the ads that appear are limited to education-related sponsors. Depending on the kind of reception they get with this new move, there might be a significant percentage of educators out there who would be more than willing to pay a small, reasonable fee for an ad-free option.