[OLPC-SF] Microsoft Is Joining Low-Cost Laptop Project - New York Times

[Christian Einfeldt]

hi

On Sat, May 17, 2008 at 10:13 PM, Sameer Verma <sverma at sfsu.edu> wrote:

> jim wrote:
> > thank you, ed.
> >
> >    it might help that someone remind mr
> > negroponte that the medium is the massage.
> > in other words, part of one's education
> > comes from the values of the channel that
> > deliver the educational content.
> >
>
> I think mixing the medium and the message is myopic.


I think that both Sameer and Jim are somewhat correct here.  I believe that
FOSS code itself teaches sharing.  For example, please see this clip from
the Digital Tipping Point library in which Lena Zuniga, a researcher on FOSS
in Latin America, talks about how people in some developing areas in Latin
America don't understand that it is wrong to share code.  FOSS code lets
them take greater control of their lives.  Lena explains it much better than
I can:

http://www.archive.org/details/e-dv100_pa_12_lena_01-03_001.mpg


> Does reading a
> paper-based book intrigue people to learn about making paper and learn
> about book-binding?


So Sameer has a point here, in that the focus of students at the our local
public middle school project is in getting their assignments done, and not
how Free Software makes them more free.  The latter aspect much be taught.
This is the importance of Richard Stallman's message.  He says that we need
to teach students the civics of the Free Software community, and my
experience with the school tends to support that thought.

On the other hand, to return to Lena's point, the presence of FOSS in a
community can help some segments of the community understand the importance
of community and the importance of have software that is Free as in freedom,
not just free as in beer.  I can very much tell you that the teachers of
Extremadura Spain understand that their distro, GNU/LinEx, is a point of
pride for them, because while Microsoft Office is an English word that is
difficult for the people of Extremadura to say and understand, they changed
the name of OpenOffice.org to Espronceda, which is a local poet of hundreds
of years ago, whose work and name are still popular today.  So when you say
"Espronceda" these people understand that it is their code base.  They
identify with it.  I would give you links to some of this footage, but it is
in Spanish.

-- 
Christian Einfeldt,
Producer, The Digital Tipping Point
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/olpc-sf/attachments/20080517/30499ff0/attachment.htm