The Global Center for Laptops and Learning in Kigali has been updating their blog recently. This past week, Brazil and Rwanda students met via Skype for the first time.
Juliano Bittencourt, who spent a year in Rwanda with his wife, recently posted a lovely email about Rwanda developments to the OLPC Brasil mailing list.
He points to Silvia Kist’s personal blog (in Portuguese) as a source for more information about the work there, along with the ‘laptop learning’ photostream.
“The photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know.” -Diane Arbus
I am starting to appreciate how difficult it is to find compelling photographs that capture the spirit of learning. How do you represent collaboration and learning by doing? Basic interactions among children are often similar across different environments — with features and dress and surroundings the greatest change from town to town. But collaboration can happen between students sitting next to each other, across the room, or kilometers away… Great photography captures and makes you wonder about what is not seen in the image.
Some of the more exciting images are of children discovering something new on an XO; or share with their neighbors something they have discovered. I love to see their looks of delirium:
There is a beautifully lit image of a student posing with her laptop, the water stained ceiling of the classroom telling of the need for a new roof:
Or the picture of children on the steps of a red clay mud dwelling exploring together, with a yak grazing in the foreground.
We have a new Flickr gallery of photographs of children learning in deployments, where you can see more as they are submitted. If you have a great set of photos from your own deployment, please post a link to it.
An update on Uruguay’s deployment of olpc in high schools: Plan Ceibal has posted some details and images of the laptops that will be used in this project. Some schools will use the new blue XO-HS laptops, and others will use Magellans — the only implementation of the Classmate design that has been used in large scale deployments (in Portugal and Venezuela).
You can see their take on a feature comparison of the machines. While there’s no check box for “sunlight-readable screen”, robustness, or power management, it’s a good look at how schools perceive their options. I would be glad to see classrooms worldwide adopting any platform like this — both can share the same software and materials.
I just landed, and Mike Dawson picked me up at airport. Immediate flat tire on airport road. Much help from Afghani soldiers. So begins my second trip in a month.
Flat tire at the airport
Bernie Innocenti and the team in Paraguay have released build 180py of their Fedora 11 + Sugar desktop. It is fast, offers both Sugar and Gnome desktops, and includes many recent features from the past year into a build that isn’t too large.
Some call it ‘the best XO OS ever’ – and it is indeed fantastic. Everyone who has an XO-1 should download this build and try it out. (but don’t forget to back up your files and any customized activities first!)
At the same time, Sugar 0.88 is being designed to work on both the XO-1 and the XO-1.5, and is currently available for testing and development. Bernie needs help with finding “a more pronounceable name than F11-0.88″ – describing the combination of Sugar 0.88 and stock Fedora 11 – so once more, please share any good naming conventions. If your name is chosen, I will personally ship you one of the near-mythical Red XOs.
Teachers and assistants at the Universidad Evangélica de El Salvador
El Salvador, which began a 400 XO pilot last year, has been in the news again this week. Their vice-minister of education Erlinda Handal gave an interview about their program “Cerrando la Brecha del Conocimiento” (Closing the Knowledge Gap), and mentioned hoping to expand their olpc project to cover all primary students in the country over the next four years.
“Children being able to take the ‘laptop’ home is something new, expected to amplify the process of learning, and this opens greater opportunities, better prospects for success.”
I hope to see more news from El Salvador, or at least more videos like these, in the future.
We have been working on a new XO laptop for high school students — one with a larger and more responsive keyboard better suited to the hands of older students. And Uruguay’s Plan Ceibal, expanding into high schools across the country, will be the first recipient — they’ve ordered 90,000 of the first production run.
These XO-1.5 HS machines are largely the same as a regular XO-1.5: they are VIA machines with Sugar and Gnome desktops, running both Sugar activities and Gnome apps. Only the bottom half is different: they have ‘clicky’ rather than membrane keyboards by default, and the base has been redesigned so that keyboards are much easier to swap out or clean — there are two screws you can access from the battery compartment that release the keyboard, then you can pop it out. No more 10-minute teardowns!
The new machines will be shades of dark and light blue; the factory is still working on getting the plastics and dye selection just right. I saw an early stab at this design, and it was very sexy — but I haven’t seen the final keyboard model they are using yet. As a keyboard fanatic (I can get 70wpm on my XO-1), I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled for the first one back in the office and will post a review for you.
Now that we have a half-dozen designs or models, we’ll need to come up with a better naming scheme… I’m taking suggestions for names and themes.
On Saturday, June 12, several OLPC supporters trekked out to New York City’s Governor’s Island for this month’s New York meet-up. OLPC Volunteer Hannah Stern talks about the day’s events:
This past weekend, One Laptop per Child’s New York group spent the day at the Figment Arts and Creativity Festival on Governor’s Island, right off the southern tip of Manhattan. Throughout the day, festival goers had the chance to show off their creative sides on the XOs, whether through producing their own digital art or music.
Costumed festival attendee tries out OLPC
The Festival was my first OLPC event and I didn’t know what to expect. Based on what I knew about OLPC advocates, I had pictured a conference room full of IT managers talking tech, writing code, and developing new open source applications.
However, our audience was nothing like what I had envisioned. I was pleasantly surprised to find our setup to be more like a neighborhood block party. Lots of people and families passed by, asking questions about the XO and stopping to play with the devices.
This was my first time getting some hands-on experience with the XO in its many forms (several of the volunteers brought their own XO models from the past several years). After a few quick pointers, I found the operating system and program functions fairly intuitive and had a great time trying it out.
As much as I enjoyed playing with the XO, I had an even better time watching other people use it. There’s no question that my favorite part of the day was watching the adults and kids each take their turn trying to open the laptops.
After about a minute of fumbling, the adults would look at us, clearly frustrated, and ask “I don’t know, can you just show me.” The kids on the other hand caught on right away, looking for moving parts and typically prying open the devices in less time than the adults.
While I had always thought that the primary purpose of the XOs is to teach kids to use the Internet or to type faster, this simple demonstration proved otherwise. It showed just how the XO is built to stimulate the creative and reason areas of a child’s brain. It’s about teaching them to think logically but creatively; its’ about teaching them how to get the most out of the tools available to them.
The OLPC-NYC grassroots community welcomes you to hang out and/or join us anytime!
The eKindling project, a classroom XO project on the island of Lubang in the Philippines, is making good progress. They are supported by roughly 100 donors and organizers from across the Philippines. After a consultation visit this past winter, they recently purchased XOs for their school. They wrote up a project checklist, a 5-day teacher workshop schedule, and formed contacts with OLPC Friends, OLPC New Zealand, and Squeakland.
Recently they published a debrief of their weeklong teacher workshop. You can follow this and other progress through updates to their project page (thanks to Mafe and others).
Julia has posted a half-dozen recent updates to her excellent Rwanda blog, about her work, thoughts on access to knowledge, and efforts with the Kigali Institute of Education. She includes some interesting photos of students showing off their Etoys storybooks and drawings.
She also reminded me of the CMU student group that visited Nonko School last month to run classroom workshops – an interesting model of community service.
Network World compiled this montage of clips and interviews with Nicholas about the XO-3 and our latest Marvell collaboration. If you didn’t pick it out of the original announcement, it’s worth a watch — and it’s a good short summary of where we are heading.
The Chester Community Charter School in Chester, Pennsylvania, with roughly 2500 students, is the largest pilots of XOs in a charter school, and one of the largest single-school pilots in the US. They began in 2008 with 1400 students in 6th through 8th grades, and have since added over 600 more students in 3rd through 5th grades.
They planned their infrastructure and teacher preparation carefully — adding a high-bandwidth network connections within their school to handle the dramatic increase in Internet usage they expected, and running regular workshops with the head teachers from their 3 initial grades to develop new materials to make use of laptops in and out of the class. And they have engaged city and state policymakers and other potential supporters in their area from the beginning.
I helped them with the initial deployment and a school-wide demonstration we gave to the students — and I still remember the joy with which they glommed onto the new machines; the teachers full of ideas after some brainstorming, and the students pepped by our demonstration of a competitive two-player Maze session. They recently asked to test out the 1.5 and future tablet models, and seem to be growing their student body steadily at over 10% a year. I hope to visit with their teachers again soon to see how this has changed their views of teaching.
Rwanda aims to complete deployment of their next 100,000 children by next summer. National project coordinator Nkubito Bakuramutsa was interviewed this week for an article in the Irish Times.
They discuss recent successes and policies at the Rwandan schools that have deployed the first batch of XOs in the country. Kagame and the teachers involved are both optimistic that they will transform their society into a leader in technology advances. Kagame aims to triple the nation’s economic output over the next 10 years.
بعد انتظار ١٠ اشهر حتى الموافقة، شارك كلٌّ من الفريق الأساسي لحاسوب محمول لكل طفل التابع للأنروا، إداريين، اهل وأطفال رفح في بداية لامعة من برنامج أنروا لحاسوب محمول لكل طفل في غزّة. وجرى احتفال لهذه المناسبة في ٢٩ نيسان. كنت محظوظة لأنني أمضيت اياماً سلفاً مع الفريق والمجتمع. لقد عملوا بجد-أطفال، أهل، معلّمون، مطوّرون فنيّون، وإدارّيون-إنّ مشاركتهم العمل أمرٌ ملهمٌ جداً.
يتميّز الشعب الفلسطيني بالتفاؤل، الدهاء والتفان لإنشاء شيء جميل من لا شيء. والأهم أن يتشارك المجتمع بكامله هذا الشيء.
لدى حاسوب الاكسو ميزة خاصّة الى جانب مواصفاته وأنشطته التقنيّة -فهو يدفع المجتمع ان يتفاءل بأطفاله. علّق جميل، عضو من البرنامج الأساسي، التالي: “هذا الجهاز متواضع, بإمكاننا خلق أشياء رائعة بواسطته”
لقد حققوا ذلك.
في فترة ١٢ اسابيع بعد اول مقدّمة لهم للأكسو، قام الفريق الأساسي والإجتماعي في غزّة بالتالي
تحضير البنية الأساسيّة
تصميم وتقدمة حلقات العمل ل٢٠٠ مدرس و ١٢ إداري
تقديم الأكسو لأكثر من ٢٠٠٠ طالب
مساعدة هؤلاء الأطفال بتقديم الأكسو لأهلهم
تصميم مكتبة عبر الحاسوب
نقل الألعاب التعليمية الخاصة بهم الى الأكسو
ضم تذكّر، دردشة، تصفّح، و تكّلم إلى جدول النشاطات في الصف
مساعدة المعلّمين ببدء توزيع الفروض المنزليّة عبر الأكسو
ملاحظة تأييد الأهل للأكسو في المحلّات التجاريّة والجوامع بعدما كانوا يشكّون في قيمته
بدأ الإحتفال بفتحي، مركز مصادر التعلّم للأنروا القائم في رفح، وبمثل صيني: اعط رجل سمكة وتطعمه ليوم واحد. علّم رجلاً كيف يصطاد وتطعمه لمدة الحياة
كان اليوم مليئاً بأجهزة الأكسو والصور. تمّ تصميم المنصة على شكل الأكسو مفتوح مع لوحة المفاتيح ممتدّة خارجاً-وانتهى الحفل بمشاركة كعكة عملاقة ومذهلة زُيّنت بشكلٍ دقيق لتضمّ النقاط الموجودة على الغلاف الواجهي. وقد علّق شخصاً من المجموعة بتلك النكتة: أتساءل متى وكيف أحضرنا كلّ هذا عن طريق الأنفاق
The WFP has been developing some lovely materials to support their work with OLPC in Nepal. In a recent animation short, Nim Doma Sherpa (the youngest woman to climb Mt. Everest) and an acrobatic yak (who seems to have been working with her for some time) snowboard down a mountain to deliver XOs to a school of children. Priceless.
Thanks to Flavio Danesse, one of the CeibalJAM developers, children can now stream TV and radio to their XOs using the new Sugar activity called JAMedia. This Sugar activity is a music and video player that can stream online TV or radio broadcasts, or play local media from the Journal. The result offers quite a fine video-watching experience, and for now offers access to over 25 television and 70 radio streams.
CeibalJAM recently made headlines by receiving an honorable mention from the Prix Ars Electronica annual awards for “Digital Communities”.
