One Laptop per Child

Chuck Lawton at Wired writes about 2 years of the XO, after getting his hands on one for the first time.   Some of the review is the normal shock of changing window managers and interface styles, but he has a sense of how many details we have changed with education in mind.

What amazes me most through my experimentation with the XO is that attention to detail that the hardware and software designers have made when developing the product. To unthink how we do things and present the software and interfaces in a way that becomes intuitive to someone with out exposure to Windows is quite an accomplishment.

Two years ago, people were excited about the XO because of the prospect of a $100 laptop. But I think in that excitement, they missed the point. At the time, before the netbook explosion, all they were buzzing about was a cheap laptop. But the XO laptop is not a hardware experiment. What One Laptop Per Child has done is create an ecosystem whereby kids can learn through doing and sharing. They have organized a group of talented hardware and software developers and challenged them to invent something new. They have created a philanthropic organization to achieve their goal of production and distribution. The cost is only one part of the equation - a barrier that must be broken in order to make that ecosystem accessible. And it’s that ecosystem - their vision - that deserves more credit than many of the tech blogs are willing to discuss.

This promises to be a three part series with a focus on hardware next.   I hope by the time it finishes he covers Sugar in more detail and uses in the classroom (which is where the intro seems to be heading).

A recent publicity push and a number of public demonstrations of Sugar on a Stick (which recently released its Strawberry edition) have attracted many interested new developers and a lot of intrigued parents and teachers.  I’ve seen it mentioned on digitial library lists and public education channels, in contexts that wouldn’t normally be discussing laptops or computers.

Sean Daly writes about a recent round of feedback from a local community of children and parents.  Chat and Maze seem the most immediately attractive to this community of computer-savvy children.  Some comments of interest:

The principals were interested in jabber collaboration which they had never heard of.

One mom expressed frustration that dropdown menu choices found by mouse rollover could not be validated with the Enter key.

Several parents and a teacher asked about translation tools.

Some parents who had already heard of OLPC asked where the crank was. [still!]

It’s worth a read.

The Kigali press have been attentive to our new learning center there, and the New Times has run a number of reports after the opening ceremony with quotes from Kagame and his staff, a series on education by David, a spotlight on children and their XOs, and a Sunday feature.

There have been local radio interviews with the staff of the center as well ( ICT in education ). More images after the jump.
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This summer, OLPC is starting two projects in Africa.  One is OLPCorps, which we have covered over the past few months and which you will be hearing a great about from the participants themselves.  The other is the founding of a learning center that has just been founded at the Kigali Institute for Science, Technology and Management [KIST].  As part of this process, the OLPC learning team, including David Cavallo and Juliano Bittencourt, have been in Kigali for some time, laying the groundwork for this week’s public launch.  President Kagame himself came to open the center — here is the official press announcement:

LAUNCHED IN RWANDA BY HIS EXCELLENCY PAUL KAGAME, THE PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC OF RWANDA

OLPCorps Teams to Assist in Providing New Educational Opportunities in 17 Countries in Sub-Saharan Africa

Kigali, Rwanda, June 9, 2009 — One Laptop per Child (OLPC), a nonprofit organization whose mission is to help provide every child in the world with access to a modern education, in collaboration with the Government of Rwanda, is launching in Kigali, Rwanda, a Global Center for Excellence in Laptops and Learning. The purpose of the Center is to create the highest quality examples of learning with connected laptops in schools and communities, support ongoing laptop implementation plans in Rwanda, and create an African regional laptop network.

Leading the world in exemplifying laptops for learning, Rwanda is the natural base for this new center. The government of Rwanda has committed to providing all 2.2 million of its primary school children with laptops by 2012 and to serving as a model for other countries to copy, improve and further innovate. The Center also will develop senior fellows, community learning specialists and technology specialists who will return to their countries to lead efforts nationally, regionally and locally to extend laptop learning programs.

“OLPC has experienced great success when support for our mission comes from both the government (top down) as well as from grassroots (bottom up),” said Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman of One Laptop per Child. “The partnership with Rwanda represents a substantial commitment by both OLPC and Rwanda to bring learning to the grassroots and country level, which is exactly where it should be.”

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Yesterday Sébastien Adgnot sent me a lovely message about Dailymotion’s drive to make Theora encodings available for all of their videos. Blizzard sums up the implications nicely:

Today Dailymotion, one of the world’s largest video sites, announced support for open video. They’ve put out a press release, a blog post on the new openvideo site as well as a demo site where you can see some of the things that you can do with open video and Firefox 3.5.  They are automatically transcoding all of the content that their Motion Makers and Official Users create and expect to have around 300,000 videos transcoded into the open Ogg Theora and Vorbis formats.  You can view the site they have up at openvideo.dailymotion.com.

This is fantastic news; it is a continuation of work DM started with a theora portal for a certain mean green machine, and means another 300,000 videos that will play natively on XOs out of the box.

PSNR comparisons of x264 v theora

More importantly, this is only the start of a wave of free codec adoption.  Theora has been making great technical strides at lower bitrates, with steady support from RedHat, Mozilla, and Wikimedia.  Expect similar updates to come over the summer, perhaps as early as June’s Open Video Conference in New York.

Congratulations to everyone at Dailymotion who helped make this milestone happen!

OLPC.tv is a collection 362 videos about OLPC from around the world.  It has been updating since January 2007 by fan and volunteer Nicolas Charbonnier, of Denmark.  Now its efforts are being expanded to include other Sugar and 1:1 Computing videos.

If you have a video to suggest to add to the ones already posted, please send them to olpctv <at> laptop.org.  If you are at an OLPC event, school, or meetup, help take videos of the people there (with the consent of teachers and parents, of course).  You can also hack Record to let you capture videos of higher quality with your XO.

A view of goods available in the market

Food Force 2, an open source sequel to the World Food Program’s popular Food Force game, is available to try out with complete art and storyboard.   The game leads players through improving the health, shelter, education, and other elements of a small community.

The game has been under development for the XO since our second Game Jam, and gameplay and collaboration are still being worked on.   The latest beta was tested in a school this month at the Delhi Police Public School, facilitated by Vijit Singh.

Congratulations to developers Manu Gupta, Mohit Taneja and Deepank Gupta, and to Silke Buhr who has been the art director and driving force behind the game - it’s looking beautiful.   The team welcomes your suggestions — please download it and give it a spin.

Last week, Jim Rex, State Superintendent of Education in South Carolina announced that South Carolina would be expanding their One Laptop per Child project. A generous donation from Blue Cross Blue Shield is funding the expansion of South Carolina’s current laptop program.

Blue Cross Blue Shield donation helps expand One Laptop per Child project

An initiative to improve student achievement by making laptop technology available to every elementary school student in the state is expanding this month with the addition of 12 schools.

One Laptop per Child /South Carolina is a partnership between the nonprofit Palmetto Project, Blue Cross Blue Shield and the State Department of Education.  State Superintendent Jim Rex and Steve Skardon of the Palmetto Project accepted a $500,000 donation today from Blue Cross Blue Shield division president and COO David Pankau to help fund the expansion.

The laptop program was piloted last year in rural Marion School District 7.  That rollout has been highly successful, garnering positive response from students, parents and the community.  School officials expect test results at the end of the year to show students are performing better since technology has been integrated into teaching and learning.

To read the latest news about the South Carolina deployment, see their website at http://www.laptopsc.org.

Photo by Terry O'Sullivan, Creative Commons: Non-commercial, Share-alike

Flickr User Terry O’Sullivan came across this child near Arat Kilo, Ethiopia: “and I was pleasantly surprised to see some of them carrying these OLPC laptops, so I stopped to ask them about it.”

See more of Terry’s photos

Martin at Moodle Moot '08

Martin Langhoff — our School Server Architect, and long time core Moodle developer reports:

The Moodle UK community just had one of the best MoodleMoots ever. I had the good chance to keynote there, to tell the community about my almost-year away working on XS plumbing, and how it’s now the time to turn the XS into a learning tool.

Social constructivism runs strong in the Moodle community, so when we talk of opening doors to our users’ curiosity, they know first hand about it. And it is a good thing to be able to pierce through the media doom and gloom stories and tell them about the good things that are actually happening on the ground.

The feedback was fantastic, and I am hoping to form a “Moodle-on-XS” test team, and to draw together many very active teachers from the K-12 space to help map out how to make Moodle better for primary schoolers.

You can watch the keynote on video — select the “Moodle and OLPC” video here: http://cardiffschools.net/~tv/cy/moodle.htm

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