Erik Pukinskis

State of the Code

My official time is up for Google's Summer of Code. I didn't get as far as I would have liked, but I think I made a good start, and I had a hell of a summer.

Design

What's been done...

A decent bit of user research: writeup of related projects in history, who are the users?, education in Brasil, and education in Nigeria.

A big part of making Abi work well on the OLPC is making it mesh well with the design work being done at Red Hat. I've documented their vision as I understand it and how it applies to AbiWord here.

Part of making Abi simpler so it can fit Red Hat's vision is paring down the functionality. I did an inventory of Abi's features and their relevance in an OLPC context.

Many sketches have been created.

What's left to do...

The big hole in the design process is evaluation and iteration. I didn't do a very good job finding kids to help me evaluate Abi on OLPC (I had only one lead, and it fell through), so I haven't done any evaluation yet. This has been especially hard because I've been travelling around so much this summer.

When I get to San Diego (next week) I will start looking for some kids to try AbiWord out so we can get some real feedback. And from there we'll be able to do some real iteration which will help fix the massive problems my design undoubtedly has.

Implementation

What's been done...

• AbiWord runs in the sugar shell
• It has a minimal interface with a custom toolbar
• I implemented a new clipart toolbar that lets kids drag and drop pictures into their documents

What's left to do...

• Polish (make clipart bar look nicer, have it look for clipart somewhere intelligent)
• Finish implementing table menu button
• Integrate AbiCollab with Sugar shell
• Use clipart bar to add drawings drawing app

Documentation

I've dumped a lot of documentation on my wiki and my Summer of Code blog, but I think there would be some value in writing up more polished, complete guides to both designing UI for Sugar and getting software to work with it. The Red Hat folks are already working on some of this, but I could certainly contribute.

So, that's that

My #1 goal for Summer of Code was to start building relationships with people in the Free Software world and get started hacking, and I absolutely accomplished that.

So this is both a retrospective and a look to the future. There's more to be done to get AbiWord onto the OLPC, and I intend to keep contributing to the effort.

But for the next few days at least, I'll stick to enjoying the American West.

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Progress

Yesterday I did, in fact, manage to get my "final" mockups finished, and I figured out what was holding my code back (I had to add the header file I created to the makefile template thingy). And I finished before midnight, so... two snaps for transparency.

I also got a lot of great advice from Martin about how to implement the drag and drop featured described in the spec. So, hopefully that will be moving along quickly.

On that note, here are today's goals:

1) Get AbiWord to print a happy message to the console when I drag one of the clipart items onto the document.

2) Make the font format toolbar button.

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Transparency

I haven't been very good about hitting my Summer of Code milestones over the last few weeks, so I'm going to try to be a little more transparent, and put daily goals on my blog. That way, if I fall short of those goals, anyone who reads this thing will know it. Hopefully that will light a fire under my butt.

So, for today I have just two, fairly simple goals:

1) Non-functional interface mockup, demonstrating intended functionality for basic and advanced prototypes (Deliverable)

2) Figure out why the stuff I wrote on Friday is not compiling.

Wish me luck.

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Programming for everyone

Most people, if you tell them things like "math is fun!" or "being able to program computers is awesome," will look at you like you're wearing your underwear on your head.

"Sure," they say, "if you like sitting in front of a computer screen for 18 hours a day, talking about megabytes and googlewatts and not bathing."

Or maybe you'll get something simpler like "I hate math and math hates me."

But if you know how to code, you know what I'm talking about: being able to coerce machines into obeying your carefully crafted commands is powerful, it's addictive, and it's really really fun.

It's also a massive pain in the ass.

Over the last year or so I've started to understand that most of my interests in computing converge on this same idea: how do we make this thing--programming, scripting, development--accessible to everybody. And when I say everybody, I mean everybody: doctors, teachers, baristas, kids, elderly, poor people, rich people, blacks, whites, asians, hispanics, entrepreneurs, slackers, geniuses, scientists, africans, asians, australians, europeans, blind people, autistics, and telemarketers. How can we empower everyone with this amazing power that programmers have.

It's not an easy question, especially since the easiest answer is "they dont' want it". Most people don't have the patience to learn a computer language, let alone develop the skills necessary to actually write software. Empowering people with a programmer's toolbox without forcing them to make that investment is what my research is all about. But there's more to it than that. In fact, I can think of three major issues that stand in the way of getting this power into the hands of people:

1. Access to computers

This is why I am so infatuated with the OLPC project. They are trying to get computers into the hands of kids all over the world. This is obviously the first step in empowering them: giving them access to computing cycles.

2. Access to code

This is the one that the GNU people and the FSF people and the Red Hat people and the Ubuntu people talk about. Most people will never write software from scratch, because writing from scratch takes a lot of skill and patience. So for "regular people" to control their software, they need somewhere to start. In order for a nurse to be able to change the way she gets notified about a patient, for example, she needs access to the source code for her patient monitoring software. It's as simple as that. And that's what Free Software provides.

3. Programming without all of this crap

In order to do my summer of code project, I need to know how to wrestle with the UNIX toolset, I needed to know Python and C++, I need to know how to answer questions about how the Gnome APIs work, and a million other little things. My bachelor's degree in Computer Science helps too.

But I don't believe that the barrier to entry needs to be this high. There are a few academics out there making programming easier, but I think we are misunderstanding what programming is at a fundamental level.

When people prop open a door with a trash can, they are reprogramming the building's security system. They don't know C, or whatever language the system is coded in, but they are intervening in the operation of the system in such a way that the behavior changes. In my mind, that's "programming", and the fact that no one talks about this kind of programming and how it relates to writing a PERL script suggests to me that there are many more kinds of "programming" out there that are just as powerful and just as easy for people to jump in to.

And that's why I'm going to UCSD next month to start my Ph.D.: I'm going to find them.

But really, all three of these pursuits are critical pieces of the puzzle, which is why I'm trying to get involved in all of them.

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India backs away from OLPC

A variety of sources are reporting that India is no longer planning to implement the OLPC program in their country. Some quotes from The Hindu:

"The case for giving a computer to every single is paedagogically suspect. It may actually be detrimental to the growth of creative and analytical abilities of the child", Education Secretary Sudeep Banerjee told the Planning Commission in a letter sent last month.

".....We cannot visualize a situation for decades when we can go beyond the pilot stage. We need classrooms and teachers more urgently than fancy tools," Banerjee said.

This certainly won't stop the project, or even slow it down, but I think India's concerns are valid, and represent a significant gap in the OLPC message. Us academics are used to saying "well, we think this might work so let's try it," but people outside the Academy are rightfully wary of this approach. It's fine when you have tenure, but not necessarily when you have voters or shareholders to report to.

I've blogged before about the kinds of problems the OLPC might face, and I think the organization might have a stronger message if they had some context-sensitive research to back up their claims. In fact, maybe they do... I just haven't seen it.

That said, I think Nicholos Negroponte and Seymour Papert believe in the concept strongly enough that they feel the first pilot test will answer most of the doubts, and prove the program's value. And the part of me that believes strongly in the concept thinks they just might be right.

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First Code

I still have a lot of design work to do, but given that this is Summer of Code, I need to be coding too. So, I've been picking at the Sugar codebase and got a "Hello World" activity working:

It's not much, but my Summer of Code mentor, Robert Staudinger, knows a thing or two about embedding AbiWord in Python, so hopefully getting AbiWord documents in there shouldn't be too hard.

Also, I talked to Wendy on the phone, and she said she will try to put me in contact with the after school program she used to work for, which means that I may get to do observations, and possibly even usability testing, with some kids up in Boston this summer.

It was interesting talking to Wendy anyway because she's had some experience watching kids who can't really read yet use computers. She said a lot of kids just go straight for the games, which was also true in the Hole In The Wall project. But Wendy said some of the older kids really got into Word Processing. It made them feel professional and grown up, and they'd spend an entire afternoon typing one paragraph if they had to.

Hopefully I can learn more.

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Sugar in action!

I finally got Sugar (the front-end for the OLPC) running on my laptop. I say finally not because it was particularly difficult (it's just a few steps to get it running on ubuntu) but because I thought it made sense to do a bunch of other things first: buy an external hard drive, backup all my stuff, and install Fedora on my old laptop.

In the end, all I needed to do was upgrade my new laptop from Ubuntu 5.10 to Ubuntu 6.04, which was 100% painless, and then install git, which was equally painless.

Lesson learned: I really need to keep Ubuntu up to date if I want to keep up with the Joneses. Obligatory screenshot:

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The beginnings of a design project

I'm back in Connecticut, and getting slowly settled in. I don't have a desk, but I've got two boxes next to my bed that I can put my laptop on, so at least I have somewhere to work. And I'm starting to get a good sense of the constraints, goals, and problems that need to be worked through to get AbiWord into shape for the OLPC. Here's where I'm at.

How can we conform to Red Hat's design vision?

Right now, the folks at Red Hat[1] are sort of holding the UI design reigns for the OLPC. Marco has told me that they they want to make the work more open, but it will take some time to get there. They are under a tight schedule, and releasing their work to the public takes time and energy, so for the time being I'm mostly just going to try to follow their lead and put as much of my work out in the open.

You can read about my understanding of their design direction here, but this is what they seem to be going for, in short:

Simplicity. Their apps are generally simpler than the stuff we are used to seeing on the Linux desktop. There are no menus, and they are using pretty basic toolbars with no labels. Abiword has a lot of features, so getting down to this level of simplicity is going to be tough.

Collaboration. They are really focused on the online presence stuff offered by (I think) Galago. And other people are excited about it too. Marc and Martin have been doing some amazing work with AbiCollab, which fits in beautifully with the Red Hat folks' vision. To really get this cooking on the OLPC, I think AbiCollab will need to integrate with the OLPC's presence and chat infrastructure.

Direct Editing. Chris Blizzard mentioned this to me, and if I interpreted him correctly, what this means is moving away from the open-edit-save cycles, and towards just editing documents in place. "Instant Apply" for documents, if you will. I think this makes a lot of sense, especially in the context of AbiCollab. When lots of people are editing the same documents, it just seems simpler to have one current version of the document. Having an open and a saved version would just create confusion. Doing this in AbiWord might be as simple as removing the save buttons and having documents be automatically saved on exit.

Making sure it works on the hardware

The biggest constraint of the hardware is, of course, the screen size. But Red Hat's strategies are design to take that into account, so I think by following their lead, we'll get this one "for free".

Staying aware of the context

I've posted a few posts about the kids who will be getting OLPCs (here and here), and I'm starting to pull together a picture of this very diverse group of people here, but to sum up:

In the first round of pilot deployments alone, the OLPC is going to be going to kids in grades K-12 who speak dozens of different languages across three continents. Most of these kids will have no computer skills, and very low literacy rates. The current desktop system is littered with metaphors that will be completely foreign to them. There's a good chance they've never seen a clipboard, a floppy disk, or a manila folder before, and they never will. Many of these kids have an insatiable thirst for learning, and a variety of competencies they've learned participating in the economic engine of their household, farming and hunting and bringing goods to market after school.

It's not clear exactly how AbiWord or the OLPC needs to change to meet these kids needs, but I've taken a look at a few of the metaphors AbiWord uses and asked how they might fit in to these different cultures.

Starting to prototype

Taking into account some of the prescriptions above, I threw together a quick mockup:

This design is really just a "straw man"... there are a lot of problems with it. For one, it drastically reduces the usefulness of Abiword, removing a lot of features. But I think it's probably going to be the case that if we want to hit the level of simplicity the OLPC folks are striving for, we're going to have to make some AbiWord features inaccessible.

Deciding which features are important is going to be a bit of a task. I did an inventory of most of AbiWord's features and tried to think though what would be important on the OLPC and what would not. It's a starting point, but I think what we really need to do is talk to someone who's worked with kids and computers and find out how they actually use word processors. User research is much more useful than my barely informed guesses.

But for the time being, we can still explore how to present AbiWord's various bits of functionality. Trying to get more of AbiWord's functionality represented I put together some sketches of a slightly different kind of toolbar:

You can see how some of the other buttons would work on my sketch page. This would be a pretty non-invasive change. It doesn't require changing much about how AbiWord works, just reorganizing the interface a bit and cutting some features out.

I've also been sketching out some possible UI for integrating chat and AbiCollab into the OLPC style:

Chatting within a shared document:

Labelled cursors showing who's doing what:

And I mentioned using clip art to help teach language. Here's a sketch of what that might look like:

There's still a lot to do to figure out what's feasible implementation-wise and what's really appropriate from a design perspective, but at least these are a starting point and they're heading towards something a little more OLPC friendly.

Hacking

I'm still working on getting Fedora Core 5 and the Sugar development kit installed on my old laptop. It's slow going, but I'm holding off on playing with the source until I get that set up.

Next steps in research

I have some good research that was sent to me on kids and education in Malaysia which I'm planning on filtering through at some point. But what I think is most important right now is that I start talking to people who have experience with kids and computers so I can get a better sense of what they really use in a word processor. I also need to talk to someone who knows more about how kids learn to read and write to get a better sense of how AbiWord fits into that picture. I'll keep you posted.

[1] As far as I can tell, the team is Chris Blizzard, Diana Fong, Marco Pasenti Gritti, and Dan Williams.

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Education in Nigeria

One of the great things about being at the University is that there are knowledgeable people in almost every area of inquiry you could think of within a 1 mile radius, and there doors are almost always open.

Today I met Dr. Shittu R. Akinola, who is visiting IU as part of the Workshop for Political Theory. He's from Obafemi Awolowo University, in Ile-Ife, Nigeria, and Nigeria is one of the pilot countries for the OLPC. He is very knowledgeable about Education in Nigeria, and we had a great conversation. Here's what I learned from him, with some bits and pieces I found on the web sprinked in:

Government

The Education system in Nigeria suffered some serious upheval in the 80s. Because of the Structural Adjustment Program (SAP), which were a set of policies recommended by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) aimed at "poverty reduction", much of Nigeria's infrastructure collapsed. It was difficult for the government to pay salaries, which meant that many teachers in public schools went unpaid. Because the country was being controlled by a military regime, corrupt officials embezzled money from the educational coffers.

Public vs. Private

In order to survive, teachers began teaching private lessons and evening classes. Unemployed people with degrees saw these teachers' success and also started teaching to make money. Because of this and the fact that public schools are not free, there was been an increasing trend towards privitization of education in Nigeria since the mid 1980s. The goverment is trying to reverse this trend by offering good salaries and benefits to teachers and making public education free again, but private schools are still very prevalent.

Today, there are many kinds of private schools in Nigeria: expensive schools for the rich, more affordable schools for the middle class, and cheap private schools that might be run out of someone's house or some rented rooms. According to research done at the University of Newcastle, in three of the poorest districts they look at, "an estimated 75 percent of schoolchildren were enrolled in private schools."

Religion

There is a very large muslim population in Nigeria, particularly in the north, and among these people there is some distrust of western education. As a result, muslims in Nigeria tend to have much less education, although there are some private islamic schools. Additionally, some muslims believe that sending a girl to school will make her a less appealing bride, so many girls are not allowed to go to school. This is reflected in the literacy rates in the country: 72.5% for men, and 48.2% for women. In the north west, 55.7% of men are literate and only 20.9% of women. These are up-to-date numbers provided to me by Dr. Akinola today.

According to Cynthia Sunal at the University of Alabama:

"There have been concerns in families that primary schooling conflicts with traditional practices, reducing a female's ability to pass on her culture to her children (Mohammed 1984; Sunal, Osa, Gaba, & Saleemi 1989). Mohammed found that 58 percent of the one hundred rural Muslim parents she interviewed in northern Nigeria were concerned with their daughters' marriageability (Mohammed 1984). These parents favored marrying girls at an early age, from 12 to 14, if there was a good prospect for a husband. In 1994 the average age of marriage in Nigeria, as reported by UNESCO, was 18. Although parents who favor the tradition of early marriage do not represent the average Nigerian, they do constitute a large group in the society." (from Perceptions of Unequal Access to Primary and Secondary Education: Findings from Nigeria)

Geography

Education is much less prevalent in the northern part of Nigeria, partly because of the larger muslim population. The problem is not the quality of schools, but rather the lack of support for education in general, particularly western education.

The School Day

School starts at 8am and lasts until 1:30 or 2pm, Monday through Thursday. On Friday school ends at 1pm so that kids can go to the mosque. Some students might travel by bus or motorbike or just trek to school, but poorer students tend to just go to the school closest to them, so they might not have to travel far. Typically classes have 35-40 students, although there are sometimes less. In the 80s there might've been 50 in a class, sharing desks, but this is less common today. Public schools have utilities and toilets and playgrounds, but this is not necessarily the case in private schools, which might be a group of small rented rooms each big enough for 10 students.

After school, some students go to additional lessons, if their parents can afford it, others just play out and about, or go to after school programs. Some have to go sell goods for their parents. They might carry oranges or bananas on their heads to market where they can try to earn some money to support their families.

Teachers

The standard for teachers in public schools is that they have a certificate in education, but this isn't necessarily the case in private schools. Because private schools don't always pay good salaries, offer poor job security, and no benefits, turnover is high. But after the crisis in the 80s, there is still fear of nonpayment of salary in public schools.

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Disposable camera study

Some of the people who read Planet Gnome will remember Nat Friedman's disposable camera study from 2004, when he gave disposable cameras to a bunch of kids in one of the Favelas near Rio. This seems like a good example of the urban poor in Brazil, and is the kind of environment that OLPC kids are likely to live in, so it's a good design resource for people designing for it.

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Kids, Education, Brazil

In my continuing quest to answer the question: who will be using the OLPC?, I interviewed Andrea Siqueira at the Center for Latin American and Carribean Studies yesterday about kids and education in Brazil, which is one of the first countries the OLPC is likely to hit. Here's what I learned:

There is a lot of variation in schools in Brazil, but the two big splits seem to be public/private and urban/rural. The kids in public schools are almost all poor. The wealthy send their kid to English or French private schools, and the middle class scrimp and save to send their kids to private schools too. Even within public schools, there is a lot of variation. Educational policy is coordinated at the municipal level, which means that even within a state there can be big differences between schools. The poorest municipalities get some federal support, but the quality of your child's education depends largely on how progressive the mayor in your municipality happens to be.

Urban vs. Rural

Kids in rural schools might walk, bike or take a boat 20-30 minutes to get to school. Many don't have running water or electricity at home, althought they might have some limited access to black and white TV. That said, Andrea said in her experience the kids are extremely curious. She was using a GPS during one of her visits, and the kids wanted to know what it was and figured out how to use it in "2 seconds", she said.

There is poverty in the rural areas, but it is a different kind of poverty. They might have less money for education and infrastructure, but people are more likely to get enough protein, which can be more of a problem in the urban areas.

In urban areas, which include shantytowns surrounding bigger cities, 24 hour electricity is more common, although far from pervasive. Kids are aware of global trends. They listen to hip-hop and American as well as Brazillian music, although they might have to pirate CDs to get them.

The School Day

School starts around 7:30am and goes until around noon. After school, kids in rural areas tend to go home where they'll work with their parents (fishing, hunting, going to the forest to harvest, etc). They might take care of siblings or be taken care of by extended family members. Girls start contributing to the household earlier than boys, handling child care, cleaning, cooking, and wood gathering.

In urban areas, some municipalities, NGOs, and churches have after school programs where kids can get lunch, have time to do their homework, and then have supervised play while their parents are working.

Attendance

There are 8 years of mandatory elementary school, followed by 3 years of high school. A government incentive program called "Bolsa Familia" gives parents about $7/mo for sending their kids to school, because in many cases kids would skip school to work with their families.

Facilities

Schools tend to be in towns, are more likely to be made of brick, but might not have windows, depending on climate. Schoolhouses usually have electricity, running water, and a bathroom.

On the wall is a blackboard and chalk, and that's about it for teaching materials. Kids sit at desks, which they sometimes have to share. There is supposed to be one teacher per grade, but often teachers are responsible for four or five. You could have kids aged 7-12 in one room together.

Social Life

Kids also do a lot of playing. They play soccer, they fly kites. They spend lots of time with other kids. Even while working, often there are other kids around and some level of playing. They play a lot.

The social life is more family oriented. People go to parties with the whole family, not like here where there are often separate parties for each age range. The family is an important social network and important for economic survival. It provides lots of support in the form of childcare, etc.

Language Education

Learning to read and write is similar to how we learn here in the states, but there seem to be pretty big literacy problems. Most kids can read/write basic things by the end of their schooling, but aren't able to really write full, formal portugese when they graduate.

One of the problems with learning to read/write is that kids are pretty uninterested in things that are completely irrelevant to their world. They don't want to learn the word for for grapes, because they've never seen them, or about middle class behaviors that aren't relevant to them. They are more interested in words for fishing, the forest, etc.

There is almost no foreign language education in the poorer schools. In the middle/upper classes kids will learn english, and there is foreign language in the curriculum in 5th grade, but it's not actually taught. This is because the teachers aren't prepared to teach foreign languages.

That said, kids living in the cities on the coast in the Northeast might learn to speak some german or english in order to interact with the tourists in thos regions. They might learn these languages in the streets in the afternoon, giving tourists directions or advice in exchange for tips.

Higher Education

It's very hard to get from the public schools into the university. You have to take national exams, and Andrea had never seen anybody who went directly from the public school system into the University. The public schools just don't prepare kids for that path, although some kids take a year of intensive courses to prepare themselves.

Progressiveness

One of the things Andrea emphasized is that generally, people in Brazil are very open to new things, new technology, and new behaviors. In other parts of the world, where things are more tribal, people might hang onto traditional ways of living, but she said that is less the case in Brazil.

So, that's what I know. Any mistakes in here are likely to be mistakes I made in writing things down or understanding. If there are any Brazillians or OLPC reading who have things to add or correct, please email me or post a comment below.

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Who is this thing for?

To everyone out there on the various Planets Summer of Code: Hi. I'm Erik Pukinskis, and my project is to redesign the AbiWord user interface to be more appropriate for the OLPC (MIT's $100 Laptop). My sponsor is the AbiWord project, rather than OLPC or Gnome, but hopefully the other SoCers with those orgs will be interested in what I'm working on. You can read my application for more details.

So, the first thing I need to get a handle on is: who is the OLPC for?

First some basic demographics. The OLPC people recently put up a map that shows which countries they plan to run pilot studies in: Brazil, Argentina, Nigeria, Egypt, India, China, and Thailand. And according to the OLPC wiki, "There are about 1.2 billion children at the age of 6-15 years and about half of them are potential users of this hardware."

That's a little scary to me. Designing for a group of people that spans several continents and ten years of intense developmental changes is not a simple proposition. If you want to do user-centered design, it's hard to know where to start.

Chris Blizzard has been blogging about the context of use for the OLPC, and says they "have good sense" of what it is. I'm not entirely sure what he means when he says context of use, but I think what he's saying is that they understand the educational goals of the OLPC pretty well. I'm going to read through Papert's various writings on the OLPC wiki and hopefully get a better understanding of what those goals are too.

But that's a little tangential to my original question: who is the OLPC for?

And the answer is: I don't really know. And I'm not sure who in the OLPC really knows, but I'm going to try to find out.

Thankfully, there is a wealth of ethnographic data out there which has been compiled by professional ethnographers whose job it is to write about the cultures they study and also to write about their own motivations and biases. It's a fantastic source of data for those of us designing for the OLPC, and it's there for the taking.

I don't have a good list of what to read yet, but I've got some queries out there, and I'll post here as soon as I start finding some good ethnographic data about children in the OLPC countries. I did find "Booting Up Amid Flattened Frogs", an interesting article in Revista, the Harvard Review of Latin America. Edward B. Colby talks about his experiences setting up a computer lab for the kids he was teaching English to in Costa Rica. Costa Rica isn't an OLPC pilot country, but I imagine Edward's experiences might have been similar in Brazil or Argentina.

I emailed Edward to find out more about how the kids used the computers, and he sent an interesting reply:

I only taught one period in the computer lab per week for each grade at my school, and that only in the last several months of the school year--so mostly I was content to let the kids explore the various audio-visual English-language programs we had (which they really enjoyed), and learn how a computer generally works. (The popular programs included Crayons Paint Studio; a slew of different classic children's stories like the Rabbit and the Hare; and a construction CD which allowed them to build various structures.)

Partly because my students were much more proficient orally (in both Spanish and English) than with writing, much less time was spent on word processing. However, I remember some days when some kids enjoyed using the encyclopedia Encarta, and if I had had more time, I would have tried to use Encarta and Microsoft Publisher as teaching tools more. [emphasis mine]

That puts this whole AbiWord-on-OLPC project in pretty sharp relief. It means my goal is not just to design a word processor for someone who lives in another country and is using a low-resolution screen. My goal is to design a word processor for someone who hasn't developed strong written language skills yet.

What might that mean? Maybe it means that AbiWord needs integrated drawing tools to give kids who can't write a way to get started. Maybe it means we should have text labels on all the clip-art so that kids can make clip-art stories and learn to read at the same time.

In the end, I'm not really sure what it means for AbiWord, but I think this kind of research is what we need to make AbiWord into a really powerful tool for these kids.

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Google, Pimp

I was accepted to Google Summer of Code! I really want to write more about what I'm going to be doing and I really want to get started....

... but I am presenting my Capstone in two days, and that's occupying a rather large slice of my attention.

So, good news. I have a job for the summer. I'll post more soon.

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Update

It's been a busy week, and that's the honest explanation for why there are no blog posts in a while. My parents and sister came out to Indiana for my graduation parties and ceremonies, which was wonderful. I've got a bunch of pictures and stuff, but haven't uploaded them yet because I haven't had time to figure out how to get the new version of F-Spot (which is needed to support my new camera) on this computer.

I did, however, get my paper written for Erik Stolterman last week, and I got my Google Summer of Code application in today. I got some good feedback about my SoC app, which felt great. I really hope I get accepted. It's just one of those opportunities that feels right.

This week I am finishing my draft of the Sheepsploitation paper so Yvonne can give me some feedback, I am testing my Capstone prototype with a few biologists, and getting updated feedback from Kenny and Mehmet, and I'm hopefully advancing BusyBodies a bit too.

I am utterly in love with all of these projects, and that's such a nice feeling.

Anyway, it is way past my bedtime. I'm off to sleep.

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Bad diffusion

My friend Lilly writes about the $100 laptop and its short and long term effects. She asks, "Could it be the new skolt lapp parable?"

I had to look up Skolt Lapp, because I had never heard of them before. I found an description in an essay about Diffusion of Innovations. The other examples of diffusion remind me a lot of the rhetoric surrounding the "99+1" laptop:

what happened...

In the 1950s, missionaries distributed steel axes to a tribe of Australian aborigines, hoping "a rapid improvement in living conditions would result." What ended up happening was a massive increase in leisure time, an upset of the power structure between young and old, and a weakening of trade relations because of deritualization.

what might happen...

It seems unlikely that laptops would act as a direct substitute for existing labor. People might find new sources of income to replace the old, but it's not as if the laptop makes farming easier. It also seems unlikely that the laptop will become a mechanism for isolation like the steel axes did. People might talk less face to face, but it seems like the laptop would open up new social channels. As for upsetting the balance of power, I think that this is quite likely. Is it bad? It's hard to tell.

what happened...

In the 70s, Santa Monica created a diamond lane for carpoolers and busses on their four lane highway. It was wildly successful, decreasing commute times for people both in the lane and out, and increasing bus use by 250%. But people hated it. It gave the illusion that it slowed the main road down (it didn't.) And eventually, people sued to have the diamond lane converted back to a regular lane and won.

what might happen...

This seems like a common problem. Whether or not technology works seems less important than whether people believe it works. I can easily see the $100 laptop falling into this trap. Heck, look at how people villainize video games and the internet in this country.

what happened...

In the Nile river delta, many villagers choose canal water that has dead animals and urine in it over pure, chlorinated water that comes from public taps. They think it lowers sex drive, they believe their folk methods do purify the canal water (they don't), they find the taps inconvenient (they are), and the taps don't provide the same social opportunities that the canals do.

what might happen...

Could digital communication technologies result in a net decrease in social opportunities for $100 laptop users? Could they remove the need for geographic meeting places, killing off essential parts of the social fabric of the groups using them? Maybe. Certainly the opposite is possible as well: they could provide many more opportunities for social contact. Could people misunderstand their benefits, and continue to use old technology instead? That also seems possible.

what happened...

And of course the Skolt Lapps are a group of reindeer herding people in Northern Finland who had a fairly robust culture built around reindeer herding, eating, and trading, that was deeply upset when snowmobiles began to inflitrate their society and replace previously reindeer-centered activities. The snowmobile became the "thing to have" and people made fatal sacrifices to have it. Unemployment skyrocketed, debt exploded, the reindeer population dwindled, and their previously sustainable economy collapsed.

what might happen...

It seems reasonable that laptops could become a symbol of prestige, and that people might begin to believe that it is the right solution for all problems. This could certainly cause people to make large and misguided sacrifices to obtain and maintain them.

All of this is highly speculative, and I think Lilly is right to interpret it as a "fascinating historical event". Still, it seems like it would be possible to avoid the same kind of mistakes that were made with the deployment of the innovations mentioned above. I don't think we need to wait until the technology has run its course: we could study how third world cultures currently work and look for warning signs. We wouldn't even have to leave our offices. I am sure there are a lot of ethnographies written about the cultures the $100 laptop will be deployed in. It's just a matter of reading them and doing some slightly more educated speculating than what I've done here.

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