Funny OLPC Story - How do you delete files?

So today i sat in on a meeting with some folks in the Uruguayan government who were trying to get ebook type educational material to laptops of the kids who have them now in uruguay. There are about 200,000 laptops being distributed, and it would cost too much to print books with the material, so they figured these laptop things might be a good way of doing it. In the discussion they told me this little story about tech support and the OLPC or Project Ceibal as it’s called in Uruguay.

It seems that during the first trial in the Florida Department of Uruguay they were having a problem. The kids it seems were downloading too much stuff from the internet. The laptops have a 1 gb flash drive, so it’s pretty easy to see how it could fill up. So the teachers told the ceibal folks that this was a problem, the drives were filling up and nobody knows how to delete files.

Well this is a problem, so there were meetings, and more meetings, how to delete files, they called up the University of Uruguay’s Engineering Faculty and investigated further. After four months of back and forth they had the answer and somebody traveled up to Florida (the uruguayan florida) with the answers and a training to teach the teachers how to delete files. It was after all what they asked for.

When they got there the teachers said, “oh, that! The kids figured out how to delete the files and manage them months ago.” Which is of course the whole point of OLPC, the kids can use the tech, it’s open, hackable, and explorable.

Another story is a friend of mine was visiting his cousin and the cousin was excited because he just got one of the laptops. But he said there was a problem, some of the interface was in english. My friend, being a programer, sat down and tried to figure it out. It seems that was some problem with the packages, he’s not exactly sure what’s wrong. But at one point “Save” was translated as “Salvar” instead of “Guardar” Salvar does mean save, but in the kind of way that Jesus Saves. Not the kind of thing you’d do with files, which is Guardar which might literally be translated something more like ‘to put away’ than ‘save’. I asked the OLPC folks about it on irc, and they said that perhaps the build being shipped out in uruguay is out of date with what they currently have released. Clearly they need a good logistics person / team to do release management and handling lots of branched distributions. Not an easy task.

On the whole people seem excited about OLPC. It would be good if the Uruguayan government could do something about class size, 1 teacher for 40 students is the REAL education problem, but the laptops help.