I’ve just returned from Hainan Island with a group of 56 teenagers.

It was a great trip, but I am happy to be home in Shanghai even though the Shanghai weather is deteriorating day by day. Highlights in Hainan included Houhai Beach and Yanoda Rainforest Park.

I was a teacher supervisor, which meant I spent the week observing from the sidelines as the children got stuck into surfing, swimming and beach games. Houhai is wonderful, because it is so good to find a deserted location free from crowds of tourists. I didn’t surf, but I really enjoyed scrabbling on the granite rocks until we found a cave with natural air conditioning.

It is still very hot and the sun is very strong. Hainan is the only place in China that has all year summer.

We also spent some time at Yanoda. Yanoda manages to do a fine job of taming a rainforest without ruining it. The paths in the forest made it accessible without being like a twee theme park. We saw Banyan trees, vines, ferns, rocks and complex ecosystems. The headsets used a geolocator to trigger each commentary, but they should have recruited a native English speaker without the syrupy and repetitive use of ‘Dear Visitor’. All the staff were also welcoming and ultra polite, but they don’t need to make the Yanoda v-finger symbol to everyone on every occasion.

We spent a night camping at Yanoda. Our students are living in the gilded cage of affluent Shanghai expat life so living in the great outdoors is a much needed antedote to the soft living that these teenagers are so familiar with. We didn’t really rough it, however. The camp site had great eco-friendly toilets and hot showers. The camp staff also prepared an amazing barbecue of fish, meat and vegetables. The local villagers even put on a show of Li music and dancing that I must upload at the earliest available opportunity.

Every group also had the chance to go canyoning on rocks and through streams wearing funny straw shoes that look like a cross between flip flops and mini boats. They managed to keep us on our feet mostly.

Going back to Hainan was an amazing experience. Our school organises activity week trips at the beginning of each November. It is always one of the highlights of the school year, because it opens up our students’ horizons while developing their social skills. The best memories and lessons often happen outside the confines of a formal classroom. The best thing about our school are the students who are some of the nicest young people you could ever hope to meet. The only thing I would like to change about future trips is that it should be a little more difficult for them so they are even more challenged as they develop their social skills and sense of adventure.

Learning 2.008 is South East Asia’s gathering of educators and learning technologists. It’s an international technology conference that focuses on learning. Last year’s event at Concordia International School was an inspiring and successful weekend of demos, dialogues, twitters, blog posts, podcasts and reflections about the future of learning. (See this summary)

We are planning even more interaction this year as the sessions will be driven by spontaneous unconference conversations rather than stand and deliver PowerPoint lectures. We are lucky to have top draw presenters such as David Warlick, Clarence Fisher, David Jakes and Marco Tores.

I’m particularly excited by the preconference Edubloggercon, which Jeff Utecht of The Thinking Stick has been talking this up on his blog.

Also I’m proud to announce that this year we will be running an EduBloggerCon. It will take place Thursday September 18th at 9am. Matt at Catshanghai and Amanda at From the Outside Looking In will be helping with the planning.We’ll start at 9am and we’ll go until we’re done or until we need to leave to head over to the conference at about 4:30pm. What a great opportunity to meet other bloggers, talk Web 2.0 and just hang out in Shanghai. So come join us!
The Thinking Stick | Jeff Utecht – Shanghai, China

The Edubloggercon exists outside the conference and the best thing is that it is free, although you’ll have to buy your own coffee. We’ll get the presenters to hang out with us, but we’d like to get local bloggers to come such as Kenneth Tan from Shanghaiist, or Wang Jian Shuo.

I’ve been given the job of finding a suitable venue for the Edubloggercon. Here are the criteria:

• Accessible from Hongqiao or downtown Shanghai
• Open in the morning at 9am
• Decent free wi-fi Internet access
• Power strips and sockets for bloggers to recharge their laptops and gadgets
• Space for 20 to 50 people to sit and chat in relative comfort (We will not know final numbers for ages)
• Good coffee
• Quintessentially Shanghainese or Chinese to remind us of the city we are in

It would also be nice to find a venue with a garden or terrace where we could sit and enjoy the late summer sunshine, but a good indoor venue would also be great. After some thought, here are a few contenders that need further investigation:

• Diage (Donghu Lu) – Elegant colonial mansion/ Japanese wine bar restaurant with fantastic outdoor garden. Does it have wi-fi?
• Element Fresh (Dong Hu Lu) – Great views of the city from the roof terrace and an indoor area if it rains
• KABB (Xintiandi)
• Kathleen’s 5(On top of Shanghai Art Museum) – has just been renovated and it has a roof terrace overlooking People’s Park
• Kommune (Taikang Lu) – has a coutyard terrace surrounded by lanes, art shops and cafes, which would be perfect if the weather was good
• Spago (Nanjing Xi Lu) has wi-fi, a projector and lots of space for meetings, but it is indoors
• The Door (Hongqiao)
• Shanghai Sculpture Space/Beca (Huai Hai Lu/ Hongqiao Lu)

If anyone has any better suggestions then I would like to know so we can find ourselves somewhere to kick off the conference. Here is the registration website if you would like to come along. It will help us with numbers.

The Edubloggercon should be seen as a taster for the weekend at Learning 2.008. International educators should still go to the Ning site to register for the main conference. $300 ($250 for EARCOS/ ACAMIS members) is great value for such an event, especially if you are in Shanghai and your school is paying.

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Tags: learn2cn, Shanghai, education, technology, edubloggercon

Personal Stuff
We started the year renting a flat in Jianguo Lu and we spent all of our weekends after Chinese New Year looking at places to buy in the Luwan and Huangpu districts. Eventually we found our dream home near Nanpu Bridge, but we had to deal with bankers being stupid about transferring money and the general house buying marathon. It didn’t stop there. Even though we bought our appartment in July, we didn’t move in until November after a team of workmen gutted and renovated the place making it the nicest house we have ever
lived in. Shanghai feels more like home than ever. I am enjoying getting around by walking, on bicycle and the wonderful new metro service that opened two days ago.

We adopted Chog the cat in the spring and he is enjoying the heated floor in our new appartment. It is an amazing feeling to have a cat greet you when you arrive home after a tiring day at work.

Jenny also moved her studio from Shanxi Nan Lu to Taikang Lu. More information about the new studio will be posted here in the next day or so.

Relevant Posts
Buying a House In 13 Steps
State of the Renovation

Learning
Education is my livelihood and I got turned on by the possibility of student created digital content and learning communities as engines for learning. This is still very much a concept and is something that I want to take much further in 2008 given that you need lots of bandwidth to make these things happen. The IBO Information Literacy and Shanghai’s Learning 2Cn really inspired me that learning can be fun, exciting and international.

Relevant Posts
Blogging For Schools
How Many Computers Does It Take To Turn On A Teacher?
Are You A Digital Immigrant Or Digital Native?

The Internet
This has been another great year for Internet tools including Twitter, Google Calendar, GMail, Google Reader, Firefox, Firefox extensions, the Flock browser, RememberTheMilk, Fring, Facebook, Shozu and blogging. It has also been a frustrating year, because the Internet offers the possibility to cater all my information, communication and entertainment needs in one big cloud. The truth is that DRM, censorship and bandwidth continue to be obstacles that prevent normal Internet users in China and elsewhere from getting everything that the Internet can offer. I don’t know how many hours have been wasted by slow Internet connections, blocked sites and timeout errors. I hope we have a much better year for connectivity in 2008 and that different services become far more inter operable.

My favourite website of the year has definitely been Lifehacker for excellent technology and productivity tips. Leo Laporte’s TWIT network continues to produce high quality shows, but I have also been enjoying Tekzilla from Revision 3. There is still a gap in the market for a child friendly Internet tech video show.

Gadgets and Desktop Software
I became an obsessive Windows Mobile user, because it kept me blogging and connected on long bus journeys, although it often crashes at inopportune moments making me curse it as much I enjoy it. I had a look at the Iphone and admired it, although I am not prepared to invest in one given that I spent a fortune on buying and renovating a house. I would love to buy a tripped out MacBook to run Windows, Mac and Linux on the same box, but I will keep that in check while I save up spending money for our planned European vacation. In the meantime, I bought my wife a fantastic Asus Eeepc for 3000 RMB and gave my old Dell more mileage by running Ubuntu Feisty and Gutsy Gibbons on it. Ubuntu has served me well as a robust open source OS serving my everyday computing needs, although I screwed up an upgrade, which lost me a little data (and lots of time). I ended the year by setting up a robust and ridiculously cheap offline backup solution using Jungledisk and Amazon’s S3.

Relevant Posts
Lifehacker on Windows Mobile
Windows Mobile Must Have Apps

Music and Film
I continue to enjoy my Emusic monthly subscription. $10 a month entitles me to 30 unprotected MP3 songs and it works on Ubuntu. Highlights of the year have included Fridge’s “Eph Reissue” and I am a Robot and Proud’s “The Electricity in Your House Wants To Sing”. We have access to more films than we could ever, which we enjoy on our new big screen projector that has turned our living room into a cinema. We have recently enjoyed “Rescue Dawn”, “Zoo”, “Shortbus”. Films is going to become an even bigger part of our life as we start to show our favourite crazy movies to friends in Jenny’s studio on a weekly basis. I regret not writing more film and music reviews, although it has been a busy year and I feel my blog lacks a focus.

I wish anyone who reads this has had a great year and can look forward with enthusiasm to an even better 2008.

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Tags: Shanghai, culture, blogs

Bookmarking 1.0 (1990s to 2004)
Bookmarking was adhoc. Early browsers allowed you to bookmark favourites, but this was useless if you moved between computers. Roaming profiles allowed your bookmarks to follow you around a LAN, but many of us tried and failed to maintain a list of links on a Word document.

Early weblogs were nothing more than a list of published links and Yahoo was first setup in the mid nineties as a directory of essential websites.

Bookmarking 2.0 (2004 to Present Day)
Delicious allows you to annotate, save and share your favourite websites on the Internet, either publicly or privately. This means you do not have to be tied down to a single computer to see all of your bookmarks. The inclusion of the Delicious Firefox and Internet Explorer extensions allow you to bookmark a page from anywhere on the Internet.

Many of us are still getting to grips with collecting bookmarks, but my ITGS students have been using Delicious to keep track of sources for their portfolio assignments.

There are other ways to organise the webpages you look at. For example, signed up users to Google services can look back at their search history to find out what they have been looking at in the past. Digg users can use this website to vote for their favourite Internet stories and Youtube users can rate everybody’s videos.

The Internet is changing so quickly that it is reasonable to speculate that the next generation of filtering and organisation tools are being refined or even invented as we speak. Let us imagine the near future by listing some of the features we would like from these new tools and call it Bookmarking 3.0.

Bookmarking 3.0
Some of our students are using Delicious to summarise and organise webpages, but it could do so much more to develop research skills.

Keeping it REAL
Alan November has developed an excellent framework called REAL for critically evaluating websites and pages by checking the web address, the contents, the author and the links. See yesterday’s post. It’s time that we brought this critical thinking to collecting information. Imagine a version of Delicious that prompted you to check the reliability of a website as part of the bookmarking process.

Keeping it Original
Let’s go further by anticipating a future version of Delicious that acted as an anti-plagiarism tool. It would work by taking your text and comparing it with the original source. If the two were identical or very similar, it would force you to attribute the reference as a quote or it would ask you to change your notes to become an original piece of writing. Turnit.com offers a checking facility, but it is currently aimed at teachers and examination boards looking to catch students out. It is too easy to copy and paste extracts from other people’s writing. A checking feature built into a bookmarking service would be a far more positive way to help students become better researchers by prompting them to make appropriate notes or references.

Would anyone like to have a go at building critical thinking into Internet bookmarking tools?

The Internet makes the quest for truth less certain. Anyone who has read or listened to Andrew Keen’s the Cult of the Amateur (See this Amazon link) may sympathise with his rant that anyone is free to publish lies, mistakes and distortions on blogs, forums or podcasts. He argues that the Internet has been reduced to an echo chamber of gossip where rumour is picked up and spread within hours, even minutes. I do not agree with Andrew Keen’s tone that lay people should leave self expression to well trained experts, but I accept that there is a lot of content on the Internet that is misleading, deceitful, nasty and essentially useless.

I am not going to get into the question of how to block dishonest and inappropriate content, because the most important issue is how to be able to find the truth from all the content that is out there given that much of it is false. This is where we need to rely on a systematic process that checks the validity of the websites and sources we look at. Alan November of Novemberlearning.com has devised an excellent framework that makes the process of checking websites very clear and thorough. Here are all the steps that you should go through when checking information on the Internet. Alan November calls this process information literacy.

R – Read the Web Address
You can find out just by looking at the web address or URL. Anyone can buy a .com or .org address, but a website ending in .gov or .gov.uk will have been setup by a national government, which should hopefully be more reliable. Universities also have their own extensions at the end of a web address. UK universities have addresses ending in .ac.uk and their US counterparts end in .edu.

E – Examine the Content
Here are a few questions to ask when looking at the information on a webpage or site:

1. Is the information on the website useful for your topic?
2. Is the site current? Do you know when it was last updated?
3. Do you think the information is accurate or does it have obvious mistakes in names, dates and places?
4. Are the facts different from information you have found elsewhere?
5. Is the site trying to sell you something?
6. Are there obvious signs of bias?
7. Has the site changed over time? Go to www.archive.org and check the history of the site on the Wayback machine

A – Ask About the Author
Go to www.easywhois.com to find out who owns or wrote the site and do some background checks on them using some different search engines.

L – Look at the Links
Check the links to other sites to see if your source is using biased or faulty information and find out who is linking to this page by using the link command in the Alta Vista search engine.

eg link:http://www.zapatopi.net/treeoctopus shows what sites are linking to http://www.zapatopi.net/treeoctopus

It would take a great deal of work to check all these factors every time you looked up a fact or read a news story on the Internet. I recommend you ask two or three questions of every source you read. If you see that something does not look quite right then it is a good idea to go through the REAL process in more detail. It is helpful to have the point of view that anything you look at on the Internet, on the television, in books or even in newspapers may contain errors or have a biased agenda.

I have seen students use lots of different tools and methods to take notes when they are researching information from the Internet.

The most common method I have seen is to copy and paste extracts on to a Word document. There is nothing wrong with this, but there is a danger that the copied text will appear in a piece of work without a link or reference. It can also be difficult to keep track of old documents and you have to open up a new program to start taking notes. This takes time and interrupts workflow.

I have listed some of my favourite tools that make notetaking on the Internet fun and more effective.

Delicious Bookmarking
Delicious is a social bookmarking site, which means you can use it to keep all of your weblinks organised on the Internet. If you find a useful page, you can bookmark it, add some notes and searchable keywords called tags that make it easy to remember what you have been looking at later. Delicious has a plugin, which you can download into your browser to bookmark a page without having to go to another website or open a different program.

Google Notebook
If you have a Gmail or google account, you can write and store notes that can be viewed at any computer with an Internet browser. I find this very useful for making a quick record of a telephone number or idea when I am looking at a page.

Stikkit
Stikkit is similar to Google notebook except that it reads your text and organises it into addresses, calendar events and todo lists. It knows what I mean when I write the following note:

Meeting with Britney Spears
On Friday at 11:30
Britney Spears: 861352865444
Britney Spears: Britney@Britney.com

It knows that I have a meeting with Britney on Friday at 11:30. This will be put in my calendar. It will also know that I am adding a new contact called Britney Spears, including her telephone number and address.

Imified
Imified runs inside your Internet Messaging program. It works with MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger and Google Talk. You can then use your chat program to login to your favourite websites to add or view data very quickly. For example, I can add a new event to my Google calendar and make a note of a new task, which I need to complete that day. I use this, because it works on my cellphone.

Twitter
Twitter is a website that simply asks the question “What are you doing now?” in 140 characters or less. It is a cross between a blog post and a text message. A lot of people use it to tell the world about their cat’s fleas, but you can also use it to ask questions to a community of people who are following your twitter messages. I also use this on my cellphone.

You may have noticed that we’ve been getting our secondary students to set up blogs or weblogs as part of their ICT classes. I want to get as many people in the BISS learning community blogging as possible. I have been writing Catshanghai for the past year while I enjoy reading and participating in other people blogs on a daily basis. I’d like to shed a little light on the practice of blogging, why I think it is an amazing communication tool and share a few tips that I have picked up along the way.

Blogging is just a way of publishing new information on a website. That information is often text, but it can also include photographs, sound recordings, videos and even interactive animations or games. Previously, you needed to be very good at writing webcode or using complex software such as Dreamweaver to make webpages and websites. Blogging tools make it much simpler and quicker for normal people to write and maintain their websites, because you can add text or pictures just like you would in a Word document or PowerPoint show. It is becoming easier all the time.

Two weeks ago, I talked about the increasing power of the Internet to give ordinary people a voice for the first time. Blogs are a great example of this, because you can reach an audience of thousands or even millions as long as you have the imagination and passion to say something worthwhile that other people want to look at. Getting an audience is just half of the story. The medium becomes really powerful when the readers start participating by writing comments back. Such conversations can then develop into meaningful relationships and communities between people who are located anywhere. My favourite examples of blogs that behave this way are Lifehacker and Techcrunch.

From a learning point of view, it is really powerful to imagine students sharing ideas and solving problems by finding an expert and getting the answers to their questions. Alan November goes further and suggests that learners will be far more motivated if they make their own content that is published to a wider audience on the Internet. A podcast show that is going to be publicly available through the Itunes store is going to have more meaning to a student than an essay in an exercise book that is only ever read by two people.We’re starting to make steps along this path by setting up our own blogging website. Students have been receiving Email invitations from me to setup accounts on this website where they can keep their own blogs. It is already on the Internet for BISS students to look at and comment on each others’ blog posts. I am starting to get students to write diaries of what they have been doing in their ICT lessons, but I would be really happy if the student blogs were used to write about anything that they are interested in. We need to make sure that everybody knows how to blog safely before we open it up to anyone on the Internet wanting to see our blog posts and give comments.

What do I mean by safe blogging? There are scary stories about teenagers being befriended on the Internet by unsavoury adults pretending to be teenagers. Fortunately, such incidents are less common than headlines would lead you to believe. A more common problem is cyberbullying where children and adults receive threatening or humiliating messages in Emails, instant messages, blog posts and Internet videos. Fortunately, there are some sensible precautions that students can follow to keep their Internet use trouble free.

1. Think carefully before you write anything, because when it is written other people can find out what you have been writing.
2. Only write or publish information that you would be happy for your parents, friends and teachers to read, see or listen to.
3. Avoid using the Internet to bully others or spread false rumours.
4. Do not use the Internet to give out information about yourself, including telephone numbers, addresses or even photographs.
5. If you come across a harmful message, tell your parents or teachers immediately.
6. Go back and make sure your blogs and Internet sites do not give out personal information.

Parents can support safe Internet use by keeping an eye on the websites that their children are looking at, which I am sure they already do.

With these safety tips in mind, I’m really excited about the meaningful conversations that are starting to open up as our students (and maybe some of our teachers and parents) start blogging with each other.

The topics covered included podcasts, wikis, cyberbullying and making exciting lessons within a technology setting. Issues related to laptop schools may seem irrelevant to most of us, but the event is groundbreaking inasmuch as it is probably one of the largest and most significant English language technology conferences that has ever been held in China. It is the fruition of 18 months of planning between several technology coordinators at the Shanghai American School, Concordia and the Shanghai Community of International Schools.

Highlights included Alan November’s seminar about learning the grammar of Internet searching to uncover agenda, filter out commercial spam and forge meaningful international relationships. We encouraged him to make his new student learning pack available in Mandarin. If you want to do your bit to foster critical thinking among net users then come forward and we’ll hook you up.

It is easy to take it for granted that a room full of tech curious educators would embrace new Internet tools without equivocation, but a number of salient concerns emerged. Our new friend Jamie Mackenzie is worried that too much Internet content is nothing more than meaningless blather. Other speakers noted that schools are spending lots of money on new facilities without adapting their teaching and learning paradigms. Filtering and control issues were also prevalent throughout the conference.

The underlying sentiment was still upbeat. Will Richardson’s final presentation on self directed learning was full of encouragement that our RSS feeds can be our teachers and libraries rolled into one.

We liked the event’s efforts to make the sessions interactive by laying on an open wireless network giving delegates a channel to write collaborative notes, comments and questions on their Ning and Twitter sites. There were also ‘unconferences’ that were scheduled to allow us to participate in spontaneous sessions on a whim.

The growing pains of international schools may seem a million miles away from the needs of everyday Shanghainese school children. We would be keen to know about similar events and networks within the Chinese speaking community. We wrote about a local Barcamp in a previous Shanghaiist post.

Jon Zurfluh of SCIS spoke about wanting to keep the conference alive through the website long after this weekend has passed. Hopefully, there will be future opportunities for inter community projects and partnerships.

Flying in speakers from the US does not come cheap so there was a steep USD 300 (USD 200 for EARCOS or ACAMiS school members) fee, which is fine if you are part of an organisation that can foot the bill. If you were not able to attend, then you might like to go to Learning2cn to catch up with the presentation notes and podcasts. We are looking forward to next year’s conference already.

Disclaimer: The author is a Shanghai based international school tech teacher.

Computers are everywhere. We can see and enjoy their impact on the way we study, teach, work, communicate and amuse ourselves. I am always impressed by new products and inventions, whereas our students acknowledge the cool factor of a new cellphone or website, get over it and get to grips with it while the rest of us are still figuring out how to turn make it work. Speakers at conferences like to talk about the divide between our students’ generation of digital natives who are fluent technology users and digital immigrants who first started using computers much later in life.

Rather than accept this divide, I have spent the last decade learning as much as I can about hardware, software and the Internet however I can and from whoever I can. However much I learn will never be enough and it will never be upto date, because technology is developing so quickly and the rate of change will continue to accelerate.

The Internet is a great example of how quickly technology is changing itself and reshaping our culture along the way. In the past, information and knowledge were mediated through people in authority such as priests, newspaper editors, politicians and television controllers. All that is now being turned on its head through changes in the way that people are using the Internet and sharing information. Musicians can use computers to record and sell their music without relying on a record company. Anyone can become an author by writing a blog or an entry on Wikipedia. Ze Frank and Askaninja were last year’s self made video stars whose shortclips were viewed more often than CNN. Meanwhile bad restaurants and shops will get bad reviews from unhappy customers that will be viewed by hundreds and thousands of people. The power relationship is changing so that everyone can have a voice and learn from each other, not just from the experts or the people in authority. I find this trend very exciting.

I would like to use this column as an open platform for students, teachers and parents to share ideas about ways to make better use of technology we use in our daily lives. It could be a useful website, advice for digital camera users or a hint for getting Youtube videos onto a big screen. Any piece of advice is welcome. Just E-mail your technology tips to me and I will include them in future columns.

China should be an obvious beneficiary of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Scheme, which seeks to provide robust $100 portable Internet computers to children in developing countries. Behind the headlines of double digit growth and urban prosperity, two thirds of Chinese still live in the countryside and two hundred million people earn less than a dollar a day. Still, the Chinese government has not signed up to this project.

The OLPC XO-1 laptops are being made in China by Quanta Computers (from Taiwan). Mass production is just beginning, although the first prototypes were actually produced in Shanghai late last year. According to Linux Insider News, the current cost is still $176, but this is expected to fall as production gets underway. Countries such as Thailand, Uruguay and Brazil have signed up to buy the laptops in bulk, which they will then redistribute to children who qualify.

It looks like Chinese children will only be able to get hold of the XO-1s by buying it if it goes on sale at Christmas for $350 or $525. Profits will be used to buy laptops for children in countries that have signed up for the programme. We’d like to get our hands on this laptop. Even at the higher price, you get a rugged wi-fi laptop with its famous rabbit ear antenae, an AMD processor, 10 hours of battery life running a modified version of Fedora Linux called Sugar. It has flash memory rather than a hard drive, but you can plug extra storage devices into its 3 USB slots.

The vision of the OLPC XO-1 is firmly routed in the ‘learn by doing’ educational philosophy of the project’s director Nicholas Negroponte who believes that children will flourish if they are given appropriate hardware and software tools to develop studying and problem solving skills. Negroponte makes his case in terms of development. It is much more cost effective and educationally beneficial to give children a $100 laptop that will last for five years compared with buying them $20 of books every year over the same time frame.

We’re totally behind the charitable aims of Negroponte’s project, but we’re not sure you can turn children into geniuses just by throwing computer equipment at them. If that was the case then UK sate run schools would be teaming with little Einsteins. The UK spent billions on IT investment before they started to realise that they had to retrain teachers and reinvent learning methods.

Critics such as Om Malik have criticised the OLPC project for overlooking more important development priorities of food, housing, clean water, security and healthcare. Others see this project as a patronising attempt to bestow inferior technological cast offs on third world countries and there is a worry that corruption will see the misappropriation of these devices.

China’s slow response may be a case of wait and see what happens as a stream alternatives begin to appear in the low cost computing market. The OLPC is not the only contender in this arena. Let us consider some of the others.

Intel Classmate
Before Intel kissed and made up with Negroponte by joining the OLPC board, they were developing their own low cost laptop called Classmate at $225 that was running a modified version of Windows or Linux. See this Wikipedia entry.

Yellow Sheep River’s Municator
Why should China rely on American do gooders when they can build their own cheap laptops? Yellow Sheep River has come up with a spec for a $150 Chinese Linux laptop with a 40 GB hard drive. It has Chinese Godson chips that offer similar performance to Pentium III chips that were around in the late nineties. This device also plugs into televisions. Read more here.

Dream Dragon
We don’t know much about this product except what we read on this website.

The “Dream Dragon” computer, being developed as a joint venture by the Jiangsu Menglan Group and China’s Institute of Computing Technology (ICT), is currently set to cost about US$131. It utilizes a line of low cost central processing units (CPUs) named “Loongson” being developed by the ICT and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Like the Classmate and XO-1, it runs on Linux, though it is aimed at low income and rural Chinese students. See: this Speroforum post.

Sinomanaic
This is a Chinese branded laptop that will go on the market for $129 to $392.

Asus 3EPC
This is yet another Flash memory based Linux laptop that is designed for web surfing. Unlike the other offerings, it has been manufactured for the global mass market, not just developing countries. It costs $199. We want to play with one.
See: Read more.

Cellphones
Let us not forget the humble cellphone. One billion of them were sold last year and China has the biggest mobile phone market on the planet.

The cellphone may not be as powerful as a fully featured laptop, but it is still a computer that is capable of accessing the internet, taking photographs, getting directions, listening to music, watching movies, keeping contacts, playing games and editing documents.

Don’t expect to see children from poor villages in Anhui walking around with an Apple Iphone in the next couple of years, but they may have an affordable handset that is just as powerful and even more useful as they use it to carry out a virtual science experiment in Chinese and English. It will probably plug into a big screen or TV and have handwriting recognition or an extra keyboard.

Future Prospects
China may have 140 million Internet users, but it’s going to take a few years and plenty of low cost initiatives to make communication technologies accessible to everyone in China. We suspect that prices are going to carry on tumbling while cellphones become even more versatile. Bridging the digital divide is an important step, but it needs to result in better learning opportunities and living conditions.

More Links
OLPC Presentation to Google Staff
OLPC News – Independent blog
Cranky Geeks vodcast often takes potshots at the OLPC project