India’s HRD Minister Kapil Sibal spoke recently of a $35 tablet for Indian students. In response, Nicholas published this open letter to India. (Read it also in Hindi, Spanish, French, and German.) Read the rest of this entry »
David Leeming of OLPC Oceania has developed detailed deployment docs for a recent pilot in Kosrae, Micronesia, over at Wikieducator. It is an excellent summary of what has been learned in the region to date, and useful guidance for anyone trying to organize a deployment for anywhere from 10 to 10,000 students. I hope to see more great things from this project.
UPDATE (Aug 20): David has published an excellent Teacher Training Manual based on those notes.
Sugar has been moving steadily to many platforms and distros beyond the XO and Fedora. Last year Guy Sheffer helped to get it working on the Nokia 810. This February it was repackaged for Ubuntu. And Mirabelle, the latest version of ”Sugar on a Stick”, is a bootable image for a USB key that lets you use almost any computer to run Sugar.
Have you tried the latest Sugar Activities on your favorite laptop? Give it a try, run an intro session at show-and-tell or a local computer lab, or introduce it to a child you know who is learning to use computers… and let us know about it.
Yesterday a subsection of the OLPC Learning Team for the Middle East had an exciting meeting with representatives from Shara’a Simsim, the Palestinian branch of Sesame Street. In the United States, Sesame Street is well-known for its beloved characters like Cookie Monster and Oscar the Grouch, who help prepare young children for school and instill in them a love of learning from the earliest ages. Less well-known, however, is Sesame’s work around the world, including what Sesame Workshop refers to as “Muppet Diplomacy.” Muppet Diplomacy may sound like a funny phrase, but it refers to the very serious efforts that Sesame dedicates to helping children around the world develop into respectful, contributing members of an increasingly interconnected world. Building on Sesame’s efforts to promote respect and collaboration across racial lines in the US, international versions also seek to break down children’s perception of the “Other.” Shara’a Simsim follows in this path, promoting respect for differences. Although the show doesn’t directly address the region’s conflicts, it does aim to provide Palestinian children with positive role models. Producers state that these efforts are particularly important for boys in conflict situations because they often feel the additional exercise/>lose-weight-exercise/>weight of social pressure to remain strong and defend their families. Shara’a Simsim has dedicated episodes to helping children cope with fear and to developing positive images of themselves and their communities.
Sesame continues be a leader in producing high quality multimedia learning tools for children. Panwapa is a recently developed website for children that is functional in five languages. Children can learn basic household vocabulary and the numbers 1-10 in five different languages by playing Hide-and-Seek with Cocoa the Penguin. They can watch videos about children growing up in different countries around the world. The Palestinian Sesame team is working to develop additional interactive content for children in Arabic. OLPC is eager to build upon our relationship with Sesame Street. We are looking forward to pooling resources and sharing advice so that together we can make the highest quality learning tools available to the children most in need all around the world. Yella bina!
Recently posted by Beth Santos at the end of 10 months at São João school on the West African island of São Tomé e Príncipe on Step Up OLPC:
…São Tomé, man. Something about this country, it was like the XO laptop was made specially for them.
The cabinet should be finished next week. I can’t wait to hear about it. I hope it’s nice.
At the teacher meeting, the teachers also took a second to reflect on the past year. They were amazed, really- just as amazed as I am. They said the kids are so computer literate now, after just one year. Many of them use email regularly. Lots of them are very familiar with the Internet. It’s almost shocking how much progress these kids have made. The teachers say that there is a visible difference between students in the computer class and other students at the school. It’s such a huge difference that it impassions the teachers more and more to get enough for everyone else to use, too.
I would not mind seeing five computer programs at five schools. I would also not mind if we could hire five coordinators for these five schools so that we can start building a little economy…and a country-wide initiative. I told the teachers how proud of them I was. They brought the kids this opportunity and they really did it!
During her time at the São João, Beth and São Tomean computer professor Miguel Afonso da Boa Esperança trained teachers and lead weekly Saturday classes for a group of 100 6th graders.
Setting up the computer classroom, São Tomé, Nov 7, 2009 by Beth Santos
As noted here last week, India’s Human Resource Development Minister Sibal announced an interest in distributing a $35 touchscreen tablet to students across India. Charbax demonstrated the reference design used is likely from AllGo Embedded Systems, which recently displayed a matching ARM device.
While Fast Company, Wired, (and later All Things Considered) have responded skeptically to the proposed cost, let’s assum that one day we will be able to make such tablets, just as we now have $100 laptops. (I don’t think they are far off – we likewise think we can have a more powerful, rugged tablet for twice that cost by the following year.) What I want to know is: will the government invest in a national deployment, in providing equal access to rich and poor, and in the connectivity infrastructure needed to make this a truly empowering shift?
Some of the statements made suggest the government are considering a nation-wide 50% subsidy and promotion across over 5,000 schools. That’s a fantastic start — I hope their interest persists long enough to start such a project in earnest.
Update: We would be glad to share any of our tech and experience with an India project to help their vision succeed. Nicholas published an open letter to the Ministry inviting them to Cambridge.
In early May, Save the Children‘s State of the World’s Mothers 2010 report ranked Afghanistan last among the 160 countries surveyed, in terms of how easy it was to raise children.
While medical care is often limited, and being an infant in Afghanistan poses many risks, it is also a tough place to grow up. Only 52% of primary aged school children are enrolled in school, where classes are often made up of more than fifty students. Despite the extraordinary restoration of public schools and teachers over the past decade, there is still a lack of teachers and school buildings, and children receive an average of 2.5 hours of school a day. That is half of what children in developed nations (OECD) receive.
These numbers reflect a vast improvement from when the Taliban controlled the country – over the past three years, school enrollment has grown from 800,000 students to 4.5 million. But youthful curiosity is not bounded by time spent in school. We are working to make sure that, district by district, these children have tools and projects to explore and to experiment with, so they can have time to learn even when school does not have time for them.
A class of Afghan girls at work on their XOs. Photographed by Elissa Bogos
Note: Some information comes from the latest OLPC Afghanistan Briefing Note.
Part 1 of a limited series
Gillian and I spent part of the day taking apart an XO-1.5 (HS edition!) and putting it back together. We’ll be showing you how to do everything from a (2-minute!) keyboard replacement to a flash drive upgrade. Stay tuned for the photo series and guide.
Gillian removes the new keyboard
Me swapping out the XO-1.5 onboard storage (that's a 4G Micro SD card)
Humane Reader‘s $20 offline reader : needs only an external display, cables, and keyboard for a 38x25 monochrome display of Wikipedia or whatever text you please. Offered in XO green, it has been designed more as a tool for hackers than a scalable solution for offline reading. From its own website:
The palm-sized device comes with an SD Card reader for storage and a micro-usb connector for both power and USB device action! The expansion headers break out maximum hackability, and are compatible with most Arduino expansion shields. Use most existing Arduino software, or write from fresh to take full advantage of the audio, video, IR, and keyboard capabilities of the platform.
And there’s talk of a $35 touchscreen tablet : Minister of Human Resource Development Kapil Sibal is personally promoting a reportedly $35 tablet computer, which he says will be available sometime in 2011. Charbax makes the case that he is referring to (and demoing) an AllGo reference design, which was on display in June’s Freescale Tech Forum. They are still looking for a manufacturer.
Fast Company is extremely skeptical, since India’s last $10 computer was overhyped and misleadingly promoted. It wasn’t a laptop or even an entire computer, it was… hey, wait a minute… it was a cheaper Humane Reader, only done in white and with no industrial design!
These look like fun, but not something I would necessarily want to use for too long at a stretch. In contrast, I’ve been toting my XO-1.5 HS around all week, and it is very satisfying… more after the jump.
Read the rest of this entry »
A MOUTH-WATERING TRANSCONTINENTAL ADVENTURE:
Bronx Brunch: Sunday @ noon
Today marks the end of the first-ever XO Summer Camp in the Amari Boys School in the West Bank city of Ramallah. Following the teacher training last week, children came school this week to get familiarized with XOs well before the start of their new school year. The schoolteachers did an amazing job relaying their new skills with the XO to the kids along with help from our amazing volunteers at PaleXO!
The children spent three days learning and exploring activities on their XOs both at home and in the classroom, and took to mastering the programs even faster than their teachers! Kids loved connecting and sharing with each other through the Mesh Network and had a blast playing with the various activities, even learning how to type their names in Write was a joyful game. When showing children the Record activity, featuring a camera, kids were thrilled; unanimously across classrooms kids began to break out dancing in their seats for the camera!
They were so excited to begin; all the students began lining up outside their school as early as 7am each morning to start their day of fun and learning. This was a great opportunity to make learning fun and stimulate school attendance, even in the summer time! As a great finale to the summer children’s parents were invited to attend today’s session in order to maximize community participation in the OLPC project. Children were excited to show their parents what they had learned, and the principal hosted a brief orientation session in order to explain the importance of the project to the future of their children’s education.
Next week we begin our XO Summer Camp at the Amari Girls’ School!
Tech Crunch TV interviewed Maureen Orth recently on the introduction of OLPC in rural Colombia on their tl:dw videocast.
This was a timely reminder that Colombia has been building a network of supporting pilots and foundations in the years since this first urban school began implementing OLPC. The largest projects are in Medellín (perlas), in Caldas, in Altos de Cazucá, and in Itagüí (1, 2). Some of these are much more rural, and required helicopter drops to get them underway.
Caldas also produced this great video.
Children relaxing outside of class at the Marina Orth school
The Maureen Orth Foundation‘s Medellin pilot is not very large, but she talks about connected laptops as “the most wonderful tool they could possible have”.
Names can be confusing at times. Take “One Laptop per Child“: should the per be capitalized? This was debated long after logos and t-shirts had been designed. OLPC has included two separate non-profits since its inception:
At first, most OLPC work was associated with the Association (ha!) and the Foundation dealt only with fundraisers and the like. Last year, we started dividing effort between the two bodies. Our projects focused on the poorest countries, remote access, and rebuilding after disasters and conflicts, moved to the Foundation. Rodrigo Arboleda Halaby, a supporter of OLPC since its inception, was invited to lead the Association, which took more explicit responsibility for long-term support for stable deployments and work in Latin America. They set up headquarters in Miami, originally with a staff of two. Now they have a solid team, a new Board, and the first OLPC baby…
This week the Association hosted a coming out party in the South Floriday community, with a debut breakfast for supporters, featuring Samuel Dusengiyumva from the OLPC Rwanda team, who spoke about Rwanda’s plans for the future.
This past weekend, we had a country meeting in Cambridge – the sort of gathering of national project leads, and honest sharing of lessons and challenges, that I love best about OLPC. It ranged from the familiar to the unexpected. It is fascinating to observe the with Gaza and Afghanistan providing useful perspectives on what is easy and what is hard in very dense and very sparse regions, under economic and military pressure.
It left me with a lot to think about regarding how we scale passion, awareness, and the practicalities of deployment — we saw a few different successful models for scaling to hundreds of thousands of children and teachers, and discussed social and political pitfalls to avoid.
At the same time, Juliano wrote up a very personal reflection on the recent teacher training sessions he has helped organize in Rwanda. He comments that last week’s work felt more effective than any he had done so far, but that it made him think about the challenges of scaling training to an entire country.
Peru is planning to expand their OLPC program to reach every primary school in the country next year. Last week, during a meeting with regional leaders from the country’s 24 departments, Oscar Becerra commented on plans for the program to reach over 16,000 primary schools across the country – though not every child in each of those schools will have an XO at first.
Peru is working with the department leaders to help them organize regional programs to complete the saturation of their schools. They are also expanding their awareness and training programs for teachers, with an event last Friday for over 500 teachers. Walter and Rodrigo were both present for some of last week’s events (Walter has been visiting many of the South American OLPC deployments, as anyone following the Sugar digests will know), and the general vibe and feedback from both administrators and teachers was quite positive.
A recent report ranks Rwanda’s broadband connectivity speeds third on the continent, ahead of its neighbors in East Africa. This seems to be changing rapidly; I recall that just over a year ago, when we hosted the OLPCorps summit in Kigali, it was difficult for attendees to find hotspots to upload videos of any length.
Rwanda keeps on surprising its neighbors. It intends to be an ICT hub for the region, and is moving in that direction full speed. Kudos to Kagame and his young crew for making that dream real, year by year.
Christoph Derndorfer, widely known for his ministry to young XO pilots, fashion sense, and active speaking / writing /editing about OLPC, has recently kicked off a Latin American Tour. (Todd Kelsey, where are your tour-badge-printing skills when we need them?) He plans to visit all of our country partners in the region with significant deployments this summer, documenting his experience.
Christoph’s travel reports are enchanting. Take for instance the recent photoessay from Montevideo’s eXpO photo exhibit in Uruguay – composed entirely of photos taken with XOs by students in 4 primary schools. And with his iconic beard, long hair, and thousand-meter stare (seen below by the pool at the Fame Factory), Christoph is becoming as known for his xoly presence as for his love of good design and Sugarized icons.
ChristophD preaching the End Times (or at least the Shutdown Screen Icons)
To stalk with him across the southern slopes, deployment by deployment, you can follow his online writings, photos, and twext. He is looking for personal contacts along the way, especially people who have played a role in OLPC deployments, so please get in touch with him if you know someone he should meet.
