One Laptop per Child

“I like to use the computers for English and to know about them” says Daphine of Kasiisi Primary School in rural western Uganda.

The Kasiisi Project helps to promote conservation through education around Kibale National Park, Uganda by building classrooms, hiring extra teachers, supporting healthy environments, providing support for 90 students to attend Secondary School, and working with other school support organizations.  Over the past 15 years, Kasiisi has grown from a small, one-building school to a massive compound with a kitchen, library, teacher housing, and now computer classes. Much of the early success of Kasiisi can be associated with a strong Head Mistress and support from the Kasiisi Project.

My name is Jeff Bittner, and I have been working for the Kasiisi Project since October 2008 helping to support Kasiisi and the 4 other schools in the Project.
I have been involved with a variety of activities since my arrival, including the introduction and implementation of roughly 150 XOs (see our Kasiisi blog for more background). As a person working in the schools before, during, and after the introduction of the XO Laptops, I have seen the way that these computers can excite and engage the students, as well as the complications that come with them.

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Our design partners have been developing a new design for the OLPC website, one that draws in contributions from our partner and chapter sites around the world. I saw the latest designs this week, and loved them!  We’ll have more updates about the site soon, once everyone’s back from the Realness Summit and we’ve heard from Mike Massey, our new photo maven.

The biggest change: we’re going to convert the homepage from a big logo to a series of full-screen images from deployments, with background details and links to more information. If you have any amazing photographs or stories you’d like to see featured on our homepage, please post a link to them.

Teasers:

News about the Marvell partnership and accelerated XO-3 roadmap are hitting newswires in other languages (in French, in Spanish, in German); they tend to be confused about what will be available when at what cost.  Still, it’s fascinating to read some of the international views on what this means.

In English, there’s a discussion about the new design online:

Charbax: Marvell openly aims to fulfill OLPC’s design and pricing goal,
Wayan: OLPC will be working to sell Moby tablets,
mavrothal: How XO-1.5 will fare, if new big deployments materialize and what the data show can change everything,
sola: It is enough to customize a well-built reference design and port [Sugar] to ARM… sell the new XOs through every possible sales channel

And even Larry Dignan gets in on the chatter — saying that the real impact of the XO-3 will be to drive conversation about what tablets should do once they are omnipresent.

Waveplace has been putting together a ‘realness summit’ to gather ideas and inspiration from organizers of small pilots around the world. The audience coming reminds me a lot of the early bridge bloggers who came to the first Global Voices summit five years ago.

Christoph Derndorfer and Beth Santos have been in the Virgin Islands since the start of this week, and today the Waveplace Readlness Summit begins in earnest. It sounds as though they are having some amazing conversations already.

You can follow the conference online via Twitter (#xomaho , and Christoph’s other updates on @random_musings) and on the Waveplace blog.

Uruguay’s Plan Ceibal is now offering individual sales of XOs to students, parents and schools. This is handy for students who have lost their XO (under some conditions schools replace XOs for free when they are lost or broken, but only within limits), for parents whose students are in private schools that don’t have XOs yet, or for schools that want to have an extra supply of machines to set up additional computer centers, hardware labs, or the like.

Yama commented that schools can get lots of up to 60 XOs at low cost to keep at the school — which are then owned by the school, unlike the XOs given to children, but they must commit to connectivity:

Schools wishing to purchase XO lots are required to get at least a 3 Mb fixed IP connection. Those [that do and have] already purchased XOs at a higher price will be comped with extra XOs.

I like the sound of that. That’s about what Chester Community Charter School required for every 1000 students they brought online…

This post is now in French on the OLPC France blog – thanks, Lionel!

I’m happy to announce that today we finalized a partnership with Marvell to design a line of education-focused tablet computers. Some of these will be OLPC machines targeted for the developing world, such as the XO-3. The line will be based both on Marvell’s reference design for its Moby tablet and on OLPC’s XO-3 designs (particularly for the low-power end of the line).  (Hat-tip to Charbax for predicting this in March.)

Update: see also this video of Nicholas discussing our current tablet plans. (If you look cexercise/>losely, you can see that some of the highlights were from a talk in the new Media Lab building.)

The first tablets in the line will be based cexercise/>losely on the Moby, ”’not”’ the XO-3, and focused more on children in the developed world. They will be on display at CES 2011 in January, and available next year for under $100. The original XO-3 design is still planned for 2012.  More details after the jump.

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It’s time to take the old meme of $100 computing seriously.

There has been a steady rise in honest-to-goodness $100 computers over the past year, starting with the 7″ Cherrypal Africa (which does indeed exist and can be yours for $100 — we bought 2 which arrived in our Cambridge office, and happily tested them out) and Marvell’s Moby (projected at $99, but the design may change), and 5 new Android devices VIA expects to see come out for between $100 and $150 next year.

At some point, smartphone manufacturers will sit up and take notice — hardware manufacturing is becoming extremely cheap, and it’s worth consolidating further on a few really good designs and interchangeable parts.

What is your favorite sub-$100 piece of technology, present or future? For education in particular: what do you wish you had with you at home or in the class?

Vik Olliver developed the RepRap 3D printer, an early draft of the holy grail of 3D printing: a printer that can replicate itself. Since then, RepRaps have taken hold of people’s imaginations and workshops around the world. Vik currently runs his own out of his basement, driven by Linux software running off of an XO.

To add another layer of awesome, Vik has been turning out gen-3 viewfinders for the XO. Cruder than gen-2, perhaps, but 10x cheaper.  For those of you who don’t regularly use your XO as a camera, here is the evolution of the XOview viewfinder:

• from Mike Lee’s lego construct (modeled here by a fine shock of curly hair)
• to a beautifully precise 3D-printed model by Phil Carizzi, the next month (modelled here by an enthusiastic Cici)
• to this simpler and lower-cost reprapped version, first noticed by us in the taniwha’s hands last fall.

But I just today saw my first of these third-generaiton XOviews, when Mike passed out a stack for our Cambridge office. (Thanks!)

As to how an XO is driving this machine making XO parts, OLPC NZ posted a lovely ‘how do they do that?’ video last fall as well. I’ve watched the video a couple of times, and I still want to see it in person. Are any local reprap owners willing to give a live demo?

Yirkalla is being well-covered by Australian media. TEN Digital devoted part of a weekend episode to the deployment, including this video from the classroom during the first day of the deployment. They catch a priceless expression on this child’s face 1:10 in, as he either learns to play Maze (as the shot suggests) or discovers Rick Astley for the first time.

A team of Bikaner LUG members rolled out 200 XOs at Kikarwali school two weeks ago, realizing the dream of the India Foundation which sponsored the project. Nitesh Bhardwaj shares details about the 5-day workshop he participated in with members from the local Bikaner Linux User Group (lugb).

This was a single-school independent pilot. It is great to see people writing about field work in India, and working with the strong local Linux communities.

Also in Arabic: في اللغة العربية

After a 10-month wait for approvals, the UNRWA OLPC core team, administrators, parents and children of Rafah took part in a brilliant beginning to the UNRWA OLPC program in Gaza, with a celebration event on April 29th. I was fortunate to spend the days beforehand with this team and their community. They worked tirelessly – children, parents, teachers, developers, and administrators – and it was inspiring to work with them.

The Palestinian people have the optimism, resourcefulness, and dedication to turn a speck of dust into a garden. Not just any garden, but one that the entire community shares.

And the XO has a special feature beyond its tech specs and activities – it can energize a community to have hope for their children.  One member of the core team, Jamil, remarked;  “This is XO is a humble machine, we can take it and do great things with it.”

They did.

In a mere 12 weeks after their first intro to the XO, the Gaza core and community team:
- prepared infrastructure
- designed and gave workshops for 200 teachers and 12 administrators
- introduced the XO to 2000+ students
- helped these children introduce the XO to their parents
- created a digital library
- ported their own ILP learning games to run on the XO
- integrated Memorize, Chat, Browse, & Speak into classroom activities
- helped teachers begin distributing homework via the XO
- witnessed initially skeptical parents begin to advocate at shops and mosques for XOs for all the children of Gaza

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The screen's so bright, they've gotta wear shades

From OLPC Australia, Sridhar Dhanapalan reports on the latest deployment in Yirkalla — a follow-up to earlier work done [two months ago] in 3 comunities in East Arnhem Land.  This is the first proper deployment of 1.XO-5′s anywhere in the world!

Sridhar’s report is worth a read – though I’m looking forward to hearing more about how the 1.5′s are being used in class.  (Sridhar: I’d love to have a guest post from you with more about how the laptops are being used, and how the initial handout went) Over the weekend, there was a nice short writeup of the progress in the deployment there by the Daily Telegraph.  They took some gorgeous photographs while they were visiting the schools.  And here’s a lovely video from the same part of the country.

And I just saw the updated map of all of the major and minor deployments in Australia — aside from the icon selection, this map is fantastic.

A google map of OLPC schools in Australia

Here’s some research into long distance data transfer over radio frequency, from university students in Auckland New Zealand, that could be applied to future OLPC deployments.  They are currently preparing to compete in the final international round of the Microsoft Imagine Cup, which will take place in Warsaw July 3-9.

Team One Beep, made up of fourth year undergraduates Vinny Jeet, Steve Ward, Kayo Lakadia and Chanyeol Yoo, worked through the summer break to prove their idea could work. Their proposal was to send streams of data across the readily available FM/AM frequencies to impoverished communities.

Their project addresses a common problem encountered by the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) charity. The charity makes education more available to third world countries by delivering low cost laptops to remote and poor communities. They have distributed 1.2 million laptops already, and the number is growing. However a lack of infrastructure, such as broadband or even telephone lines, makes it nearly impossible to update the educational materials on the laptops.

Read the full article here.

Team One Beep intend running field trials in Australia and the Pacific Islands. Solomon Island OLPC deployment has made contact and is interested in collaborating with Team One Beep.

In 2008, the city of Birmingham started an OLPC project for their 15,000 elementary school students, to bridge the city’s digital divide. Last summer, the NSF funded a two-year analysis of Birmingham’s deployment, focusing on 4th and 5th grade students across the city.

The research team, led by Shelia Cotten, includes Julian and Shani Daily of g8four, who ran the initial workshops in Birmingham and spent the following year there getting the project off the ground, and the University of Alabama at Birmingham, which has been advising the deployment for some time.  You can read more from Ellen Ferrante’s early report.

The Birmingham community remains the largest in the US, and holds regular school-based events, such as this year’s spring break XO camp in the West End Library.

At the end of last month, we were invited to sign an MOU with the East African Community (EAC) at the East African Community Investment Conference in Kampala. This was the follow-up to last November’s meeting in Arusha, Tanzania for the 10th Anniversary of the East African Community and Legislative Assembly (EALA). Lidet has been organizing this series of meetings, and helped schedule the week around this latest event.

There was a press conference and signing, with Matt, Lidet, Julia and Sam from OLPC Rwanda, the Secretary General of the EAC, the Speaker of the EALA, Ministers from several countries, parliamentarians from five countries, and Uganda’s Ministers of Education and Technology. Coverage of the event was extensive in Uganda, with some international coverage, and press questions were enthusiastic.

The seriousness of the EAC and EALA was striking. So often lip service is paid, promises to follow up are pledged, but at the end of the day, conversations slip away. But both the Speaker and the SG pledged to move quickly, spoke passionately about the future in education for East Africa, and discussed how to work with individual countries and with the EAC collectively. They also publicly stated olpc East Africa (30 million children) as a goal for 2015.

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I was looking through Uruguayan videos online for a recent full-length TV episode on Ceibal.  I didn’t find it, but here is the tireless Miguel Brechner presenting at TEDx in Buenos Aires last month – well worth a watch.  And there was a news episode on Argentine television late last year.

I also found this surprise: “Aprendiendo con Ceibal“, an unusual half-hour post-modern classroom experience…

(hat tip to Bob Hacker)

Part of our ongoing series on OLPC in Afghanistan

The ISAF Logo:

In Kabul I met with General Stanley McChrystal, current commander of the
International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).  Joining us were other top brass including Rear Admiral Greg Smith, chief of telecommunications, to discuss OLPC in Afghanistan.

The OLPC concept is predicated on the idea that technology can reach this generation of children and teach them to think critically, and analytically, and can connect them to each other and the world’s body of knowledge. If these things were to come to pass for this generation of Afghani children, the world will look very different in ten years than it does now.

McChrystal and Smith and others acknowledged that this is not a normal war. It is a war where the US is engaged in building better lives for the people of the country, a war which seeks to build social capital between the government and its people, a war which seeks to build peace by building education and
ultimately prosperity.

All were hugely receptive to the idea that OLPC could: 1) Educate this generation of children right now, 2) end the isolation of the Afghani people, and 3) build social capital between the people and the government.

I asked McChrystal to be a champion of OLPC in Washington and in Kabul, and asked him to think about ways to fund every child in Afghanistan. He
asked for the dollar figure. I said it would cost $1 billion to connect every child. He didn’t blink. It can be done. In his words, “Our job is to end violence, and this is one way we can do it.“

Coming up in this series: Building partnerships and future preparations.