[Linux-aus] [SLUG] $11.7m for OLPC Australia in the federal govt budget

[Gregory Orange]

On 9 May 2012 11:13, Paul Shirren <shirro at shirro.com> wrote:
> On 9/05/12 12:19 PM, Sridhar Dhanapalan wrote:
> And if you want to get involved in an education project, Raspberry Pi
> has a much more interesting focus on stimulating interest in programming
> and engineering careers. And despite the closed source Broadcom
> contribution the project is much less of a cathedral and has actively
> sought out community involvement whereas OLPC, apart from a few
> conference give aways to the lucky few, is inaccessible to most of us.

And yet it is OLPC that is the right 'shape' to attract this batch of
government funding. Perhaps it takes a wide variety of approaches to
further good use of IT, and supporting school kids in far flung
corners of the country (and globe).

I reckon OLPC and RasPi[1] are both miles ahead of iPad in terms of
broad usefulness to schools and kids, but I have a sneaking suspicion
that a lot more government money (via education budgets) is going to
iPads at the moment - particularly in private schools and
wannabe-private govt schools (e.g. my old school). Maybe that's the
difference though - iPads for 'rich' schools, more useful devices for
the rest :P

-- 
Gregory Orange

[1] Although to be honest I haven't seen much of this grass roots
stimulus - Paul would you mind sharing a link or two?