A former ZDNet blogger, George Ou, blogged some thoughts on recent developments at OLPC and Larry Dignan’s and my concerns about Windows XP on the XO. His blog was titled “Children won’t have a say on whether Windows goes on the OLPC but so what?” and he asked, in a nutshell, why children should actually be involved in the decision-making process related to OS choices.
In fact, they really aren’t in a position to decide. That’s where us Ed Tech folks come in. It’s our job to decide what makes sense for our users, whether students, teachers, or staff. My real problem with OLPC’s offering of XP on their laptops is that it won’t be people in the business of making educational technology decisions choosing Windows or Sugar/Linux for a deployment. Rather, it will be politicians and bean counters, whose knee-jerk reaction will be to give kids the perceived “real world” OS of Windows XP.
by Christopher Dawson
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