But those same kinds of disruptions are moving into new areas, and education is one of them. From university classes via YouTube and startups like Udacity to the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, there are more ways than ever for children to educate themselves, even in remote villages in Ethiopia. Despite the inevitable criticisms such efforts get both from within the education system and outside it, it’s part of a powerful and growing phenomenon.

One example: At a recent conference on emerging technology at MIT, Nicholas Negroponte — the former head of the MIT Media Lab and founder of the OLPC project — talked about what his group noticed about the villages in Ethiopia, where some devices were dropped off. The Motorola Xoom tablets, which were distributed along with a solar-charging system, were delivered in boxes to two isolated rural villages about 50 miles from the capital of Addis Ababa, where Negroponte said the children had never before seen printed English words — not even packaging or road signs with printed letters.

Even with no teachers, students taught themselves

Although the OLPC founder says the group expected most of the children to spend their time “playing with the boxes,” in a matter of minutes they had powered up the devices and, within days, they were using a number of apps included with the system. Even more remarkably, within weeks, they had figured out how to “hack” their way around restrictions built into the software to change the laptop’s display background. Thanks to the tablets, they were singing ABC songs and even spelling words in English. Said Negroponte:

“Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child, per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs in the village, and within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera, and they figured out the camera.”

Negroponte later admitted that this small test in two villages wasn’t enough to reach any hard conclusions about the success of such an effort, but, as several commenters at MIT’s Technology Review — and in a discussion at Hacker News — noted, this is not the first attempt to do such a thing: Dr. Sugata Mitra, a professor of educational technology at Newcastle University, launched a project called the “Hole In The Wall” in 1999 in the slums of New Delhi that provided a single computer to children nearby. With little instruction and no formal background in computers, they were able to learn a surprising amount.

In fact, Mitra’s experiences were one of the inspirations for the OLPC approach in Ethiopia, according to OLPC’s chief technology officer Ed McNierney. And, while the experiment has drawn a fair degree of criticism on a number of fronts — from those who believe the money for such projects should go towards teachers and schools instead of laptops, or from those who question whether OLPC can scale large enough to make a difference — Pando Daily founder Sarah Lacy says that she has seen laptops in use in places like Colombia and Rwanda, and they have changed lives for the better.

“I’ve actually seen OLPC laptops being used on the ground in countries like Colombia and Rwanda — and when you see lives so dramatically changed by something, it’s pretty hard to dismiss it as not world-changing enough.”

Education even finds a way around governments

A second example of how a seemingly innocuous technology like YouTube — especially when combined with a social network — can change lives comes from Time magazine, which wrote recently about an 11-year-old girl in Pakistan who was taking an introductory university-level physics class through an educational startup called Udacity. Unfortunately, just as Khadijah Niazi was about to complete the final exam for the course (along with 23,000 other people), her country’s government cut off access to YouTube, which Udacity uses to distribute short instructional clips.

In less than an hour, according to Time, a young man who was taking the same class in Malaysia started posting descriptions of each video and the test questions involved. Meanwhile, a physics professor taking the same class in Portugal tried to find a way around the YouTube blockage — and when that failed, she downloaded all of the videos and then uploaded them to a non-censored site that Niazi could access, a process that took four hours. The next day, the young girl passed the exam with flying colors and became the youngest ever to complete the Udacity course. As Time describes it:

“None of these students had met one another in person. The class directory included people from 125 countries. But, after weeks in the class, helping one another with Newton’s laws, friction and simple harmonic motion, they’d started to feel as if they shared the same carrel in the library. Together, they’d found a passageway into a rigorous, free, college-level class, and they weren’t about to let anyone lock it up.”

Udacity and the OLPC project are only two of the many startups and other ventures that are trying to change the way education occurs — not just in North America, but everywhere. There is also the Khan Academy, which started with Salman Khan using YouTube videos as a way of teaching his young niece about mathematics and now has delivered more than 200 million individual lessons. And there is Coursera, which is designed to allow any educational institution to offer online instruction. Although the latter ran into a brief regulatory roadblock in Minnesota, there are signs that these kinds of innovative efforts are being accepted: Udacity courses are now being approved for credit by some universities, including one in Colorado.

Whether it’s moribund educational institutions or governments or just bureaucratic red tape, what examples like these show is that the disruption of education continues whether such entities like it or not. Students will find a way to learn if they are given the opportunity, and technology and the social web are providing some powerful ways of doing that.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Vince Alongi and One Laptop Per Child

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What InToTally CEO Alvaro Lopez-Medrano has done is solve the outer loop power control problem of CDMA and UMTS/HSPA networks. If sounds complicated, that’s because it is. But let’s break it down:

CDMA towers and handsets are constantly boosting their power to overcome adverse network conditions. So, say you walk behind a building and your signal strength suddenly drops: the tower antenna boosts its transmission power to maintain your data connection or voice call. Whenever that power boost occurs, your connection may improve, but the connection of everyone else in the cell degrades.

“During this period of so-called variance, you’re introducing interference into the network,” Lopez-Medrano said. “More power means more interference.”

Maintaining that balance between the individual connection and the network as a whole is what CDMA networks are all about, but there’s a fundamental imbalance: while the network is quick to react if there is a connection problem, when that problem goes away it takes several minutes for the network to correct itself and scale back its transmit power to normal levels. Lopez-Medrano likened it a thermostat in your air conditioner. If the temperature falls below 70 degrees, the network blasts cool air, but if the temp is well below 70 to begin with it doesn’t do anything at all.

So what we wind up is a network that at any given moment is blasting high-powered signals to bunch of subscribers that don’t need the extra juice, introducing loads of interference in the process. InToTally has developed algorithms that allows the network to react dynamically to those changing mobile conditions, drawing in power just as quickly as it amplifies it. Think of it as your AC and furnace working in tandem, keeping the network a comfortable 70 degrees at all times, no matter how much the outside temperature fluctuates.

With InToTally’s software in place, a congested CDMA or HSPA cell can boost its capacity by as much as 40 percent, Lopez-Medrano claimed. That additional capacity can manifest itself in many ways: A tower could handle more and better quality calls, for one, but most importantly in the mobile broadband age, the tower can pile on the bandwidth, hosting more data connections while increasing the speed available to each of those connections.

Oh, the damage a smartphone can do

The weird thing is Lopez-Medrano figured out the math in 2002 when he first founded InToTally in Spain. By 2005, he and a team of engineers from Polytechnic University of Madrid had perfected the technology and tried to sell it to infrastructure and handset vendors, but no one was interested, Lopez-Medrano said. 3G networks weren’t really overloaded at the time so their inherent power control faults were overlooked. InToTally, now headquartered in Silicon Valley, had raised $1.25 million from friends and family as well as a few angel investors to develop its technology, but for most of the last decade it just sat on its patents and supported itself by offering consulting services to carriers like Telefonica.  Then along came the iPhone.

The smartphone revolution took a tremendous toll on operators’ 3G networks, prompting the mad dash to LTE we’re witnessing today. While LTE has largely solved those power control problem, 3G networks aren’t going anywhere. Carriers are searching for ways to pack as much capacity into them as possible. So InToTally was finally able to bend a carrier’s ear – and not just any carrier. Vodafone is the largest operator in the world in terms of revenue and hosts 439 million subscribers on multiple continents.

How the Big V will shift the wireless industry

Vodafone has ordered two of its four major infrastructure vendors to begin upgrading their networks in June with software licensed from InToTally. Lopez-Medrano wouldn’t reveal which two, but he said together they account for 30 percent of the base stations Vodafone has deployed worldwide. Meanwhile the startup is negotiating with the remaining two. Vodafone will start in its big European markets — Italy, the U.K. and Spain – and then expand to other countries. Vodafone is also making an equity investment of an undisclosed amount in InToTally.

By upgrading its network base stations, Vodafone only gets the capacity advantage in the uplink. In order to achieve big bandwidth gains in the downlink Vodafone will have to get Into Tally’s technology into its handsets. Confused? It would seem that the two should be reversed, but the way network feedback loops work means that the tower ultimately dictates the transmit power of the device and the device dictates the transmit power of the tower.

Vodafone isn’t far behind on the handset side of the equation, though. Lopez-Medrano said a radio chipset vendor has already licensed InToTally’s tech, and that chipset should make it into the first Vodafone devices within a year. Achieving InToTally’s promised downlink capacity increase will be more difficult because Vodafone needs a critical mass of upgraded handsets in the network before it will see any gains. Lopez-Medrano pegs that cross-over point at 30 percent, which will take a couple of years even if every new handset sold were to contain its technology. Vodafone is doing its best to prod its handset makers along. According to Lopez-Medrano it will eventually favor devices that utilize InToTally’s technology over devices that don’t.

Given Vodafone’s enormous scale, handset makers are sure to fall in line. Vodafone’s backing of InToTally also could have much broader implications for the global wireless industry. InToTally isn’t selling software or a chipset to Vodafone’s vendors, which they would then deploy in Vodafone’s network. They’re licensing InToTally’s intellectual property, which means they can incorporate it into all future network infrastructure and devices. So while Vodafone is implementing InToTally first, AT&T, Verizon and every other carrier in the world may not be far behind.

Racecar photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Christoff

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“I was flabbergasted to learn that today computer science isn’t even taught as standard in U.K. schools,” Schmidt told the audience in Edinburgh, Scotland. “Your IT curriculum focuses on teaching how to use software, but it doesn’t teach people how it’s made. It risks throwing away your great computing heritage.”

The heritage he refers to is rich, but often ignored today, since West coast companies dominate. But Britain did play its part in the development of the industry: the U.K. was the home of the first computer that could store programs, The Baby; the place where computer science pioneer Alan Turing lived and died; and the site of the first commercial business computer, LEO.

It wasn’t just stiff upper-lipped boffins meddling around with machines during the war, either. Britain was also the place where huge and unlikely institutions helped fire the home computer revolution of the 1980s.

Take a look at what the BBC did when it took on a mission to help educate and inform people about this coming revolution, for example, by embarking on what was known as the “Computer Literacy Project”. In 1981 one of the world’s foremost broadcasters produced a regular TV show about programming (yes, really) and at the same time threw its lot in with a local computer firm, Acorn, to produce a range of machines that could get people coding, and ended up in homes and schools across the country.

It was a move that brought massive dividends, helping breed at least two generations of bedroom coders, hackers and programmers and boosting a series of companies and technologies that ended up resulting what we know as chip maker ARM.

Now, 30 years on from that move, it seems the BBC is considering whether it should try again — by embarking on a new digital literacy initiative that could spark another revolution and help Britain respond to Schmidt’s criticisms.

The corporation is apparently undertaking a consultation to work out if it should back a ‘new BBC Micro’ scheme — and how it might do so.

The project, which is not yet live, is being led by academics at Manchester Metropolitan University. The group has been contacting people in the industry to ask them for ideas and contributions, according to this email reproduced on the Teach Computing blog.

If you were to make hardware available to schools in the same way as the BBC Micro in 1981, what sorts of hardware would you think was essential to develop the skills and understanding needed?

If you were designing a tv programme today that sought to have the same effect as The Computer Programme in stimulating interest in the most important new area of technological development, what area would you expect it to address and what topics would you expect it to cover? Would it still be in the field of computer science? What areas?

The ambition is fairly clear: “developing a project with the specific purpose of encouraging an interest in computers, computer science and computer programming amongst young people”. But the mail makes it obvious that the process is still incredibly early on — and, as a consultation, there’s clearly no guarantee it will end up with any tangible result.

But it does hint that some of Britain’s biggest institutions are trying to fix a serious issue. Indeed, on Twitter, Professor Keri Facer, who is leading the project, suggested the government and private companies may get heavily involved too. She was sure that partnership would be important, she said — “after all, the govt paid for the last BBC Micro project”.

Whatever happens, the scheme does tap into a wider movement trying to improve computer education — not just in Britain, but worldwide. One Cambridge-based consortium is already developing a low-cost computer known as Raspberry Pi, which is intended to help children learn to code. There is also, famously, the One Laptop Per Child scheme that span out of MIT.

It also chimes with a number of media critics and academics who suggest that not only are open technology systems vital to a healthy democracy — but that we need to make sure the next generation of computer users can really get inside those systems. As Douglas Rushkoff says: “Program or be programmed”.

BBC Micro photo used under Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user Soupmeister

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Braben, one of the men behind 1980s classic Elite, is now head of U.K. studio Frontier, but he’s continued his lifelong fascination with trying to help people learn how computers really work. That’s why the non-profit group has assembled an entire computer inside a USB stick, which it hopes to sell for just £15 ($24.50).

The whole thing seems barely large enough to carry a fully-functioning computer, but that’s what it is. Inside it there’s a 700MHz ARM-based processor, 128MB of RAM and a fully functioning operating system (the Ubuntu version of Linux). With an HDMI port at one end, it can be plugged into a screen, and the USB port allows it to be connected to a keyboard. There’s even an SD card slot for storage. Of course, these items add to the overall cost as well. The system is currently being prototyped, but the barriers to production seem fairly small.

It’s quite astonishing, really — and shows how fast technology has moved in the 30 years of personal computing.

Braben says projects like this are vital for introducing children in both the developed world and developing countries to real computing and to real programming, without a prohibitive cost barrier.

In this video, he explains the idea to the BBC:

The idea is that a cheap, lean machine allows children — who now spend more and more time learning to use pieces of software such as Microsoft Office that are many layers of abstraction away from the machine — to really start to understand how the computer works and get at the guts of it. According to Braben:

“You can use it to learn programming, to run Twitter, Facebook, whatever — but also to be able to understand the whole process of programming. A lot of things have been obfusticated [sic] these days, in the sense that you can’t get at them. There’s so much between you and doing something interesting or creative that it gets in the way — and hopefully this device will be one of the pieces that helps change that.”

I have a real soft spot for projects like this, whether it’s high-end attempts to rebalance the global education system such as the One Laptop Per Child project spun out of MIT, or the attempt by groups such as PlayPower to recondition existing low-cost hardware and open programming to a generation of kids in developing countries. I think they’re massively important in challenging our conceptions of what technology means, and vital in helping those who are capable of advanced programming to realize their abilities.

But there’s always a niggle or two. Are cheap computers really what the world needs? Is the gap between proprietary software and bedroom coding really the barrier that we need to vault?

Many people in developing countries already have access to a low-cost computer, in the form of the mobile phone. There are billions of devices out there, already in people’s hands. And though they may not be as open as education advocates would like, they are powerful and often programmable to some degree. Raspberry Pi and projects like it are laudable and necessary, but would they be better off harnessing the devices that are already out there?

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Kay’s interest in Apple’s upcoming tablet is only natural. His 1968 Dynabook is widely regarded as the conceptual basis of today’s notebooks; indeed, the first cardboard model of the machine featured a tablet-like form factor. And he went on to become part of a small team of computer scientists at Xerox PARC in the 70s that invented much of our current computer technology, including the graphical user interface that Steve Jobs famously fell in love with during a visit to the facility. I interviewed Kay late last year, and while he didn’t mention the tablet by name, he did share a story about the unveiling of the iPhone, to which Steve Jobs invited him in early 2007:

“When the Mac first came out, Newsweek asked me what I [thought] of it. I said: Well, it’s the first personal computer worth criticizing. So at the end of the presentation, Steve came up to me and said: Is the iPhone worth criticizing? And I said: Make the screen five inches by eight inches, and you’ll rule the world.”

It’s not just the screen size of Apple’s upcoming tablet that will please Kay, but the fact that Apple is reportedly selling its tablet with a 3G data plan. This fits right in with Kay’s vision of using computer technology for education, a goal he’s been championing ever since he came up with the idea of the Dynabook. In fact, it’s been the challenges faced by the One Laptop per Child project in particular, for which he’s an adviser, that have solidified his believe that the PC industry needs to move away from just selling hardware and towards a service-based model that could be used to establish an educational infrastructure. “It’s all about long-term, sustaining relationships,” he told me, something that mobile phone companies have been practicing for years. Apple’s tablet could be the first major computing device aside from today’s smartphones to move towards such a service-based model.

Kay still wasn’t sure whether Apple would actually come out with a tablet when I talked to him late last year, noting that such a device could theoretically compete with the company’s iPhone business. But, he added: “I bet a thousand dollars that they had a five-by-eight-inch version for the last couple years in house.”

Post image courtesy of Flickr user jeanbaptisteparis.

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It’s called vaporware, and that would include the long-rumored Apple tablet. That tablet, like other Apple products that actually exist, has been getting all the attention as of late, and that’s a shame. There are a number of other existentially-challenged tablets not out there right now. Here are my top five, ranked by the likelihood they will remain in the ether for all time.

#5 CrunchPad/JooJoo

Michael Arrington’s CrunchPad was supposed to be “a dead simple tablet for $200,” but has ended up as a combo $500 webpad and Silicon Valley legal drama. Arrington’s partners, FusionGarage, dumped him and claimed ownership of the renamed JooJoo, which means “magical device” in “African.” Note to FusionGarage: “African” is not a language.

Overhyped by Popular Mechanics as one of the “most brilliant” products of 2009, there’s really nothing magical about JooJoo’s specs: 2.4 pounds, 12” display, 4GB SSD, Wi-Fi, camera, up to five hours of battery life. The OS runs a customized Ubuntu and WebKit browser. It’s the ‘browser as the OS’ concept, similar to what Google’s doing with Chromium/Chrome, but without the backing of a company worth $200 billion.

Despite perpetually shipping in “8 to 10 weeks” since early December, and the uncertainty of litigation, JooJoo probably will ship in early 2010. That earns it fifth place among vaporware tablets today.

#4 Freescale Smartbook

Nothing says vaporware like “reference design,” and that’s the Freescale Smartbook. The former Mac PowerPC fabricator showed off a tablet prototype—another vaporware synonym—at CES. Freescale claimed the tablet could be made for $200 and reach market by summer, easy to say when you’re not doing the making.

The Smartbook is built around a 7” display and weighs less than a pound. Internal specifications include a 1 GHz ARM CPU, 512MB RAM, 4 to 64GB storage, microSD slot, Wi-Fi, 3G modem option, and camera. All-day battery life is promised. There’s also an optional keyboard and docking station that when combined with the giant bezel makes the screen look minuscule. The operating system demonstrated at CES is custom Linux, but doesn’t appear much customized for touch.

Unlike the CrunchPad, the Smartbook probably won’t even make it to the perpetually shipping phase of the vaporware life cycle, but at least one has been built.

#3 OLPC XO-3

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organization has provided the world’s poorest children more than a million computers and counting, and the XO-3 will never be one of them, but then it doesn’t have to. “We don’t necessarily need to build it,” OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte told Forbes. “We just need to threaten to build it.” With a design goal like that, how can you fail?

Hypothetically available in 2012 for $75, the XO-3 “will feature a new design using a single sheet of flexible plastic and will be unbreakable and without holes in it.” The page-sized display, 8.5 by 11 inches, will have “both reflective and LCD capabilities,” making it viewable in the sun and as an e-reader. Internally, the XO-3 supposedly will have an ARM CPU running at 8 GHz, though Negroponte admits that’s a “provocative” target. You think? People in the Star Trek reboot don’t have kit like this, so yeah, provocative works as well as vaporware.

#2 Microsoft Courier

In 2001, Bill Gates introduced the Tablet PC to the world, and nearly a decade later Steve Ballmer did it again, but not with this device. Instead, a wildly gesticulating Ballmer claimed the “Slate PC” moniker at CES, showing off a nameless, nothing-new tablet from HP that will be available sometime this year, not that anyone cared. People wanted Courier.

That’s the name of this device, as first reported by Gizmodo in September. The booklet—so much for Slate PC—has two 7” displays connected by a hinge, multi-touch and stylus input, camera on back, maybe inductive charging for power. The OS appears to be designed for the device, so it’s not a Windows 7 tablet, and there are plenty of applications designed for it, so it’s not Windows 7 tablet. No word on battery life, price, or availability, except that it’s supposed to be in the “late prototype” stage of development, which makes one wonder why Courier wasn’t at CES.

Just watching the concept video for Courier, how could one not declare Microsoft the winner in the Battle of the Vaporware Tablets? Because once again Apple has been there and done that.

#1 Apple Knowledge Navigator

Even twenty years later, the Apple Knowledge Navigator concept reigns supreme among vaporware tablets. Opening the booklet reveals a pair of magical panels that appear to merge into a single display, that display having speakers on the sides, web camera and data card slot on the top. Nice touch how it tilts upward for typing, but touch is almost an afterthought.

Most of the machine-human interaction is done via a bow-tie wearing “agent,” or AI, through voice. This is vaporware at its finest, not just a demo, but like living in alternate reality, just like Apple in the late ‘80s under John Sculley. We will see whether Apple under Steve Jobs, who killed Apple’s first tablet, the Newton, can do better. Don’t expect talking heads in mock-turtlenecks, but it would be unwise to bet against the real Apple tablet in 2010.

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The news comes via Australian paper The Sydney Morning Herald, which reports that Apple is providing technical details about the tablet multimedia device (which remains unconfirmed, despite all the buzz surrounding it) to media providers in the hopes of sussing out how strong interest is.

No one representing the Australian companies approached would actually go on record about the recent sales pitch by Apple, but presumably the Herald’s source is someone from one of them speaking off the record. The source clearly wasn’t privy to the specifications themselves, or I’m the sure the Herald would’ve printed those, too. Instead, the paper just mentions existing rumors about the device’s size, touchscreen and purpose.

Also mentioned is the Kindle, which had previously attempted to make the same kind of overtures in Australia that Apple is supposedly now making. The problem with the Kindle was that Amazon wanted a 70 percent cut of revenue from all media sold for its device, while Apple is said to be looking for the same 30 percent that it asks of developers selling applications via the App Store. That’s one of the benefits of being a hardware company first and foremost, I suppose.

The content will apparently be delivered via individually branded apps that will allow for in-app purchases and direct digital distribution — which reinforces rumors that the tablet will be based on iPhone OS, not on Mac’s desktop and notebook OS X. Personally, I’m finding it harder and harder to pinpoint exactly where this device will fit in with current customer needs. It seems sort of like a Nokia Internet Tablet or Archos’ recent Android-based media player.

Earlier this week, it was reported that New York Times editor Bill Keller mentioned the “impending Apple slate” in an off-the-record meeting with newsroom staff, and many NYT executives and book publishers have made comments in the past year about Apple approaching to take the temperature for a tablet-type device.

Long story short, the storm clouds are gathering, and now there’s little else we can do but watch and wait for the rain to start, unless Apple has found little reason to make it rain at all. All of these rumors talk about Apple gauging the interest of media companies in such a device, yet none talk about how the companies in question responded to said inquiries. If an acceptable level of interest wasn’t present, could Apple shelve this tablet before it ever sees the light of day?

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It may not have the charitable underpinnings of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative, but Ivan Kristic couldn’t have asked for a better follow-up job than at Apple. Cupertino just snatched up Kristic following his time at OLPC, where he was the architect behind the Bitfrost security specification. He wrote about his new job in a post on his personal blog Monday, and began work at Apple on the same day.

Bitfrost was responsible for password protection, prevention of data loss, hard drive encryption and security updates for the OLPC, which, while not a specific target for hackers, did take an innovative approach to security that Apple could be very interested in learning more about. Somewhat like Google’s Chrome browser, Bitfrost runs every active program on a computer in its own virtual OS instance. As a result, a virus or malware in one program can’t hop to another, or infect the computer’s core files and spy on sensitive data.

The new hire could mean that Apple is looking for ways to safeguard its reputation for better security not just now, but in the future, too. Recent advertising efforts show that it considers its lack of security issues one of its primary selling points. At the same time, Apple must be aware that if its user base continues to grow, hackers will become more and more likely to target OS X vulnerabilities, and that reputation could quickly evaporate.

An innovative, compartmentalized approach to security like the one used by Bitfrost could go a long way to making sure Apple is perceived as a security leader even if user numbers shift in their favor. Don’t expect new measures to be implemented anytime soon, though. Kristic is probably coming on board now in order to work on solutions that will be implemented in whatever OS installment takes shape after Snow Leopard, which is probably at least another couple years off.

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