One Laptop per Child

I became a Save the Children sponsor this week, both because I admire their good works, and because I want to see how they connect donors to specific recipients — something they do as well as any international donor agency. They strongly encourage small recurring donations over larger one-time donations, and I understand why: this is a reason to stay in touch, a reliable predictor of future support, and forges more of an identity than a one-time gift.

This week Brand Labs in Michigan also started a weekly donation to OLPC – giving one laptop a week. Co-founder Dane Downer said of the project:

“The entire world is rapidly going online and the more people that join the Big Conversation, the better off we’ll all be. If we can do a little bit to add some new voices to the chorus, we’ll be extremely proud… We haven’t put an end date on the program because we don’t want it to end.”

We receive a number of one-time donations of more than $10k, but there’s something compelling about this sort of steady project. Thank you to Brand Labs, and to everyone doing what they can each week to support projects they care about.

High school student Mohammad Sharif speaks about why students in his highschool need computers, despite not having electricity or running water, in this short video.  He attends Hazrat Noman, a high school in Charikar City in Parwan Province.

Columbia/NYC/filmmaker volunteer Jay Corcoran says this film changed his entire view of Afghanistan. Some remixes of his work: remix 1 and remix 2

Our series on OLPC in Afghanistan will continue over the weekend.

For those who haven’t noticed Scratch taking over the world, OLPC France published a lovely essay about the contest and the value of Scratch and Etoys for young students.

La promesse selon laquelle le projet CEIBAL donnerait aux élèves du pays des perspectives de réduction du fossé numérique et d’inclusion numérique n’est pas vaine, puisqu’ils sont désormais en mesure d’échanger d’égal à égal avec les jeunes créateurs Scratch appartenant à une communauté internationale à laquelle on doit déjà près d’un million de projets (projets Scratch) de par le monde.

The promise that CEIBAL would address the digital divide and digital inclusion for the nationls’ students is not in vain, since they are now on an equal footing with the young  Scratch artists in an international community which has produced nearly a million Scratch projects.

In Uruguay, Efecto Cine and Plan CEIBAL are running an “ANIMATE” contest through June 15 for the best Scratch submissions by students across Uruguay. Ten winners will be announced, with the top four receiving mini-DV cameras for their schools. (Rules)

Meanwhile, an updated Scratch activity is being developed with full Journal and camera integration, and a new activity release is expected within the week.  Kudos to everyone working on the project.

Alicia Casas de Barran, the Director of Uruguay’s National Archives, speaks today about “what happens when all students and teachers have their own laptops” at the World Bank in DC.  She has set a good standard for countries interested in digitizing national learning and government material, and it is great to see the national libraries and archives joining the public discussion.

Uruguay continues to build on its success, which last month reported a tripling of access to the Internet in the country’s interior, and that 85% of all children were online. Plan Ceibal continues to expand its vision for the program to include older children.

This is the start of an ongoing series on OLPC in Afghanistan –sj

I travelled to Kabul, Afghanistan last week with two purposes: To assess prospective partners on the ground, including the Ministry of Education (MOE), in order to get a sense of both intent and capacity; and to meet with potential supporters for OLPC in Afghanistan, and craft a strategy for the coming year.

I)  Introduction

Afghanistan is a hugely complicated part of the world.  Regional politics are impacted by the politics of India, Iran and Pakistan, and the geopolitical wrangling of America, Russia and China add an entirely different element into the mix.  Combine this with decades of virtually uninterrupted war, limited natural resources, and low rural literacy, and you have a country that needs dramatic change in education.

Although relatively rapid progress has been made recently in the education sector, just over half (52%) of primary school aged children are enrolled in school.   Furthermore, due to a shortage of schools and teachers, schools are forced to operate in “shifts”, the average being three “shifts” per day, meaning that each child generally receives only 2.5 hrs (5 x 30min periods) of school each day.  The time constraints imposed by the shift system, combined with the fact that teacher-student ratios are often as high as 1:50-75, result in Afghan children receiving only about half the OECD recommended average time in school. In addition, many teachers in Afghanistan  have an education level only a few years greater than the students they are teaching.  The result is a cycle of rote education, with limited opportunities for innovation.

The conventional remedy of building more schools, training more teachers and providing more materials would require a six fold increase to the education budget (over a billion USD per year), would take 10-15 years to yield measurable results, and would be prey to some of these same problems.

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Tim Falconer and Waveplace are hosting the upcoming “realness summit” (about the realness of small independent pilots with XOs, which are quite different from OLPC deployments) on the Virgin Islands at the end of the month. It’s worth a look, though it aims to be offline – Internet junkies may have a hard time either attending in person (and suffering withdrawal) or following the four-day event on Twitter.

Update: Waveplace also regularly recruits mentors to help run their school projects, and have put out a call for mentors for the coming year, with a minute-long video spot.

Julia recently travelled to Kagugu and Rwamagana to work with the OLPC schools there.

In Rwamagana she ran a week-long workshop, working with the students on programs and storytelling. In Kagugu, she took part in a larger review of the project, and helped them update their XOs with an assist from veteran globetrotter Daniel Drake – exercising the nandblast scripts and gathering data on laptop repairs.

I wonder what Bruce would say about the project today.