Violent games on the OLPC Activities page

[Bennett Todd]

2008-01-19T02:40:02 Brad Paulsen:
> My advice to OLPC is to get out of the content business in any
> way, shape or form as quickly as your little green computer can
> carry you.

They (I've gotta refrain from saying "we" here, my heart's there but
I'm just someone so lucky his wife gave me a G1G1 for christmas) are
positively, unavoidably in the content business. Without enough
Activities in the built-in image to bootstrap experimentation,
discovery, and creation it's just an appliance, not an educational
tool. So they're delivering a very carefully managed set of built-in
Activities, and that's content.

Where things get exciting is the link, built into the Browse default
start page shipped with the image, to
<URL:http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activities>. The stuff linked off
that page certainly isn't OLPC-shipped content --- but that direct
link ties it closer to the project than the normal breadth of the
internet.

Nothing worrisome will go into the image; it appears that the
official OLPC team doesn't have the usual proportion of ... less
than helpful folk.

We can't censor the internet.

There's reasonable grounds for being careful about activities on the
page directly linked from the wired-in home of Browse, both in terms
of the children and the media. It's not the image, but thanks to
that direct link it is also not the breadth of the internet.

I'm a chicken, I'll freely admit it. I find myself taking a
contrarian position here, relative to my heart-felt views. I hope to
lose.

-Bennett
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/attachments/20080119/77db401a/attachment.sig>