Vedic Math

This stuff is really cool!

http://www.vedicmaths.org/Introduction/Tutorial/Tutorial.asp

Why don’t they teach this in American schools?
Probably has something to do with educational publishers having a stranglehold on American schools…

OLPC 2.0

As excited as I was about OLPC, I’m even more excited about OLPC 2.0.

It takes the OLPC design and makes it smaller, sleeker, and hopefully, more usable.

Instead of a screen and a keyboard, it’s two touchscreens on a hinged design.

It’s still 2-3 years off, but hopefully by then battery technology will improve, and the price of touchscreens will come down.

So it’s still in the concept stage, but looks promising!

One laptop per child

So the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) program finally launched!
Yay for Nick Negroponte!

XO computer

For two weeks they are running a “give one, get one” program. The OLPC machine isn’t available to consumers, just developing nations – but for these two weeks, if you order one for a developing nation, you can also buy one for yourself at the same time.

They didn’t hit their mark of the “$100 Laptop”, ended up coming in at $200, which is still damn cheap for a laptop. And I would think costs would come down over time.

While not at slick as the $400 Asus Eee PC, the OLPC XO machine is still pretty nifty.

It might seem silly to some people to supply laptops to children in developing nations, but think about it this way: $200 would only buy, what, 10 schoolbooks? You could easily put 100 books on a laptop. There are thousands of public-domain and otherwise free texts that could be used.

Not only that, but this will be the first step in connecting them with the world.

I’m not saying it’s a panacea or anything, but it certainly couldn’t hurt to give some education technology resources.

So I put in an order, and bought one for me and one for a child somewhere.
Hopefully they’ll make good use of it.