The idea is that every kid doesn’t have to puzzle this out by themselves, but is with other kids all looking at each other’s screens and saying, “hey, how did you do that?!” If there are interested teachers/adults around, so much the better. Your daughter is in a unique and unfortunately lonely situation. It’s hard to replicate the context of having a vibrant collaborative community.

It’s also a common misconception that constructivism/constructionism means that you never instruct or guide a child. It’s just not true. Besides Cavallo’s work, you might like to read The Connected Family, by Seymour Papert. It was written for parents.

Those of use who got the G1G1s are going to have to remember to balance our comments and temper our expectations with the fact that whatever we do is completely irrelevant to every other implementation.

So, what might a child with photo capabilities do? Who knows? They might create a guide of dangerous plants to teach younger kids what to avoid. Or, they might create a mini-dictionary of pictures/words for a parent who can’t read. Regardless, it’s not the end result that’s important. It’s the process of asking questions and coming up with solutions. Who cares if a video is “sharable?” A child who writes a script for a play and directs her friends in acting it out is learning something and the video process may be the catalyst for that learning. Having a sharable end product is not a good indicator of learning.

I also think you underestimate children and their capacity to learn without an adult hovering over them. I’m not sure how old your daughter is, but if she needs your help navigating the computer, she’s either too young or she’s learned that it’s not ok to make mistakes. A child who has no fear of “breaking something” or “doing the wrong thing” and who is old enough to physically manipulate a machine will explore freely and figure it out. They’ll click on everything they see and find out what it is. For children who have never used a computer, the XO is an open slate. They aren’t worried about ITunes and MySpace and all of the things that keep other kids from actually learning something.

My husband and I were discussing our experiences on early PCs in the 80’s. We both learned to program, with pretty much no assistance from adults (who had no idea how the computers worked) by trial and error. We had no fear of breaking the machines or destroying something (perhaps we should have) and there was no “right or wrong” answer. We were free to wonder… “What will happen if I…?” and then to actually find out.

I’m sorry this is so long, but I have become fascinated by the number of adults who cannot let go of their pre-conceived notions of what a computer should DO (and what it means to learn). For some, it’s a word processor, for others it’s a video game. You mention Flickr and YouTube. What is lost is the memory that there was a time when we didn’t have any of those things… someone had a vision and CREATED something brand new. Let’s stop trying to turn the XO into a Windows-laden word processor or a Macbook and see what the kids will do with no constraints. And, you know what? A lot of playing is good too… that is the way that children (and some adults!) learn.

Also, I think it is hard for people who aren’t programmers to understand the extent to which this software is not finished. I don’t even feel comfortable calling the system as a whole “beta quality.” Even within given applications, like Write, some parts are very mature (the core AbiWord engine) and other parts were built on sand (Sugar integration in Write). The scope of their ambitions for the software was completely out of line with the time they had to develop it. Not even close, really, but you could say the same thing about the hardware, which I think turned out wonderfully.

So what happens now? Who knows? A year from know most OLPC deployments may be running a much more conventional Linux desktop. Or maybe in January 2009 we’ll all love a vastly improved Sugar. Or maybe it’ll drag down the beautiful hardware like an anchor. Nobody has done this before… we’ll see.