The size and extent of this month’s Handheld Learning event in London showed just how rapidly this area is developing in education. Graham Brown Martin and his team put on an interesting event, even if one or two of the speakers seemed to project aural Valium during their presentations.
Two speakers who kept their audiences entertained and informed were US author and games developer Marc Prensky and more unusually Tim Pearson of RM. Prensky told some really funny jokes, something entirely missing from most of the other presentations. His levity didn’t mask many of his more serious messages, particularly what he sees as the failure of schools to engage students with technology (‘kids tell me that they have to throttle back at school’).
Tim Pearson’s unveiling of RM’s new ASUS MiniBook impressed many observers, especially when Pearson used a diagram to show how RM were positioning the MiniBook midway between handhelds and desktops. RM’s MiniBook will either come as an appliance (with Linux, Firefox and OpenOffice) or a computer with Windows XP and all the usual bells and whistles.
While RM are trying to push into the space that MIT’s $200 One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is trying to open up, their partners ASUS have also launched their own US$199 EeePC. Both of these machines have their genus in Intel’s Classmate programme which also has partners like Haier in China and Elitegroup in Taiwan (Elite are an investor in Haier and actually produce their Classmate laptops).
Like the OLPC machine the price point announced by ASUS is for large government deals only with the standard machine costing between US$250-$400 depending on spec and configuration – how odd that it’s almost the same price as the MiniBook they are making for RM.
www.asus.com
www.ecs.com
www.haier.com
www.rm.com
