One Laptop per Child

Toshiba is testing my favorite laptop design, a dual-touchscreen model: the Libretto W100.   It will be available to the public in a ‘limited run’ later this year, for around $1,100, and will sport a pair of 7″ touchscreens.  They say the laptop will run Windows 7 and offer a variety of keyboards for the ‘bottom’ screen.

It’s good to see this design get out there and effort put into software for it — we will eventually  move away from static keyboards altogether, and I would love to see it happen in this decade.

Toshiba Libretto W100

By Antonio M. Battro, OLPC’s Chief Education Officer

As stated by the Millennium Goals of the United Nations, it is our duty and responsibility to provide a good education for all children. The purpose is to provide at least elementary schooling to every child in the world by the year 2015.

Education is essentially about universal values of truth, beauty and good. These values are embodied in historical times. We must recognize that today a new artificial environment interacts with our planet: the digital environment. The sad fact is that while many of us live in the digital era, many more are excluded. The digital divide is one of the greatest obstacles to overcome in contemporary education, especially in poor communities.

An isolated school without computers and connectivity to the Internet is incompatible current educational requirements. But of course, technology is not sufficient. Technology may have an impact on education only if constructive dialogue is occurring among teachers, students and their families. Moreover, digital technology should be in the hands of children at an early age for them to learn the new digital language as a second language. And it must be mobile (laptops or netbooks, instead of PCs) because children learn in many kinds of settings, not only in the classroom.

Some economists have tried to measure the educational impact of digital technologies, but they have reported conflicting results (cf. Computers at Home: Educational Hope vs. Teenage Reality, by Randall Stross, New York Times, July 9, 2010). For instance, children using computers at school and at home have attained good computer skills while their grades in mathematics and language declined. The more so if they live in low income households. These results need clarification.

First, it is important to understand that time is needed to produce a cognitive transformation in a student. It is possible that some of the reported failures are biased because academic performance was evaluated too soon. Any evaluation must factor in the time span of an entire cohort, which is the basic unit in education. The time cannot be abridged; it requires the entire development of the young mind, from childhood to adolescence, some 10 years since the child enters first grade when most of the connections of the developing brain are made. Many cognitive capacities may be latent for years before they are expressed. Currently, tests are frequently done in static and conventional cross sections during the school year instead of in longitudinal studies of individual cognitive dynamics.

Second, in the digital era we can use digital tools for assessment (e.g., online monitoring of the student activities) but we still need new methodologies to obtain robust results. In particular, traditional statistical comparisons between experimental and control groups (as reported in the quoted studies) are not possible when the digital divide disappears and the entire population of students and teachers of a region or country has full access to the digital environment at school and at home. In that case, the control groups disappear and all students have been “vaccinated.” We must invent new methods of evaluation for the digital era.

Third, scale creates phenomenon. We need to change from microscopes to telescopes in order to encompass the wide spectrum of natural phenomena at different scales. The same is true in education…

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Teacher training is successfully underway this week for three Palestinian UNRWA schools in the West Bank as one of OLPC’s Middle East projects, and it’s been an amazing adventure discovering creative ways of learning and teaching with the XO.

Jumping right into activities teachers explored the Memorize activity during the training and then took their XOs home to spend time developing their own Memorize games. Presenting their games the next morning sparked a great discussion on ways to enhance literacy, spelling, grammar and more through the XO. One teacher developed a Memorize game to assist her students with spelling, by splitting a word in half and asking students to match the pieces in order to form a complete word. Another teacher suggested Memorize as the perfect tool for teaching synonyms and antonyms, while another excitedly noted its merits for teaching English and Arabic.

While curriculum-based activities are always great, particularly when teachers are enthusiastically taking ownership, another teacher in the room noted its significance for social interactions and friendship building between students. For her assignment she went home and took pictures of all the children in her family and built a Memorize game that matched their pictures to their names, fun for everyone in involved! Overall a fun project for collaborating on ways of making relevant content for Palestinian kids on the XO.

What ideas do YOU have for building games with Memorize?

Grand Prairie ISD in Texas is running a saturation 1:1 program, launched in Fall 2009 with two schools: Whitt Elementary and Austin Elementary. They invested in pre-launch efforts, and chose to do everything at once, engaging all parts of the district.

Alisha Crumley, principle of Whitt, reports success and broadly positive feedback for their program.  She describes the process as “pretty seamless, and without challenges… Everyone at the district level that is involved in curriculum, instruction, or technology had a pulse on what was happening.”

That seems a bit rosy without further details.  While they aren’t using XO laptops, they are certainly embracing the spirit of olpc, and I look forward to seeing how they speak about the program in another year.

Pixel Qi and Make ran through their stock of DIY kits for retrofitting a 3Qi screen into a standard laptop, on the first day they were available for sale.  But now the screen kits are back.  Check their list of definitely-compatible 10.1″ laptops, or try it out on your own.

Part of an ongoing series on OLPC in Afghanistan

This past weekend, OLPC Afghanistan reached Baghlan province, working with the Ministry of Education’s deployment team to provide XOs to 280 children and teachers in grades 4-6  at Firdausi High School.  (In Afghanistan a ‘high school’ can refer to any school whose upper grades reach past 9th grade, but can include students in 1st grade as well.) Firdausi becomes the seventh school in the country to take part in the Ministry pilot program.  The Ministry is working on plans for extending this early work into full-saturation regional or national efforts.

The Firdausi project will integrate the XOs into the school’s teacher planning and curricula, as well as in after-school projects.  They may be used outside of school by families to access training, job information, and resources to develop and improve farms and small businesses.

This pilot rollout was assisted by USAID Afghanistan.  At the end of the day, Earl Gast, the national mission director, commented: “These computers are an investment in Afghanistan’s most important resource – its people.”

A post by new contributor Antonio Battro, OLPC’s Chief Education Officer

Recently, there has been much debate about whether computers, video games and electronic gadgets are helpful or harmful to the cognitive development of children. Some naysayers point to a study that says that multi-tasking degrades cognitive performance. The proponents assert that new digital technologies provide new opportunities for creativity and collaboration. This debate is also being played out in ministries of education, universities and classrooms all around the world. The outcome will have a major impact on the education and development of our children.

New disciplines coming from the neurocognitive sciences are changing our theory and practice of education and shaping the new field of neuroeducation. At the same time, new communication and information technologies are changing the way we teach and learn. Millions of children and teachers of the world are sharing and shaping a new neurocognitive digital environment. This formidable transformation has opened a debate that often mixes facts with myths. One of the most disruptive “neuromyths” is that early introduction of computing can harm the brain development of a young child and cause “attention damage.” Some even argue that computing in schools should be introduced only to older children. These are myths that we must replace with facts.

One of the amazing facts is that first and second languages are processed in the same cortical regions of the brain when the second language is learned early in life. Otherwise, the second language is shifted to different circuits of the cortex. In a sense, when humans use a computer and share the same digital environment they are using a second language, or “digitalese.” Postponing the new linguistic skills needed in a digital world contradicts scientific findings in neurolinguistics.
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Part of an ongoing series on OLPC in Afghanistan.

Since 2008, we have worked with the Afghan Ministry of Education to build capacity for OLPC in Afghanistan. The initial pilots over the past year have been with 4th-6th grade students, in MOE schools and community-based education groups.

OLPC has committed  5,000 laptops to pilots throughout the country, starting with Esteqlal High School in Nangarhar Province’s Jalalabad city.   There the program engaged all fourth, fifth and sixth grade students, with a ’3 phase implementation model’ (below) used by the ministry.

The next project involved five schools in Kabul city. Initial feedback has unfortunately only been measured in terms of standardized test results (in math and literacy), but initial results showed a 20% increase on those tests.

In the coming months, national team plans to include schools in other provinces.  They also aim to recruit and train more technical people to help with planning and preparing teachers and connectivity teams for schools across the country.

Parts of this post were drawn from the recent report “Briefing Note – One Laptop Per Child in Afghanistan,” by Lima Ahmad (AIMS), Kenneth Adams (AIMS), Mike Dawson (PAIWASTOON), and Carol Ruth Silver (MTSA)

PaleXO, a team of amazing and enthusiastic volunteers dedicated to working with the XO and supporting childhood education in Palestine, just hosted their first python workshop, cleverly titled PyXO!

One of their members, Mohammad Nawahda, decided to start the dynamic team “to make sure PaleXOers get the proper training about Python to ensure they have what it takes to start developing some great local activities and customizing others.” The workshop appeared to be a great success with tons of members from the community excited to get involved and gain basic python training in order to help develop new activities to help Palestinian children learn with their XOs!

Check out their full blog post here!

OLPC Rwanda organized a capacity-building workshop for 300 teachers this week. The school-head and one lead teacher from each of 150 schools attended. The GC4LL blog has a detailed writeup. I like this quote in particular, since passing on the ideas behind our core principles takes time:

They also are going to learn about the two main points of the OLPC implementation: one laptop per each child and children take laptops home. Those two points are always controversial and it is very important that school’s principals understand the underlining logic behind them. It the school management buy the concept, the success chances of the project in the school increase significantly.

There is also a photoset from the event and a copy of their “training booklet“(PDF) online.

For Afghan kids who receive XOs, their educational time is split between self-study with the laptop at home and sharing their learning experience with teachers and fellow students in the classroom. This blended learning model gives kids sufficient learning time and the support to achieve curriculum.

OLPC Afghanistan laptops are installed with an assortment of materials, including the Ministry of Education’s standard national curriculum of books, health information, and complete localization of all core activities in Dari and Pashto.

And the laptops aren’t just for students. By providing information for parents about economic opportunities, they give parents and kids the chance to learn together.

Part of an ongoing series on OLPC in Afghanistan.

In their recent publication “Briefing Note – One Laptop Per Child in Afghanistan,” authors Lima Ahmad (AIMS), Kenneth Adams (AIMS), Mike Dawson (PAIWASTOON), and Carol Ruth Silver (MTSA) make one thing very clear: Afghanistan requires an innovative approach to improve their education system.

“The conventional remedy of building more schools, training more teachers and providing more materials would require a six fold increase to the education budget (in the order of $1.8Bn USD per year) and would take 10-15 years to yield measurable results,” the report reads. “While a steady increase in teacher capacity and educational infrastructure is expected over time, Afghanistan does not have the luxury of waiting 15 years to produce the work force foundations for sustainable economic growth.”

Photographed by Jacob Simkin

Instead, the authors say, a more cost-effective, accelerated method lies in using OLPC’s blended learning model, which incorporates technology with teaching. If executed, in 12-18 months OLPC can more than double Afghan students’ time to learning, provide feedback on curriculum materials, and provide resources that the students wouldn’t otherwise have.

By adopting this model, OLPC can “finally give children in both mainstream and community settings sufficient learning time and support to achieve curriculum outcomes.”

Make sure to check out the rest of the report here.

As weeping and cheering for today’s World Cup results spread across the globe, at OLPC we are hoping to recover enough to try sOccket’s power-generating soccer ball at our next weekly scrimmage. Since Ghana and Uruguay are XO countries we are exhausted from rooting for both sides.

Yesterday, Jessica Lin from sOccket visited us at OLPC and promised to trade a sOccket ball for an XO, in hopes that someday a XO can be powered by the energy of play.  Learning in play was strong thread of discussion this week at OLPC. We talked to Jessica about 60+ soccer programs around the world (like the Kabul Girls Soccer Club) that help children learn about teamwork, strategy, physics, and statistics as they participate in their favorite sport. Right to Play was another kindred program we met at the UNRWA education conference, which sparked a brainstorming session about how computer games could be incorporated into RTP programs.

So, start up your XOs!  Track stats of the World Cup games, Measure the amplitude of cheering when a goal is scored, or Record a set of videos of your friend’s elaborate soccer footwork!

We all have the right to learn & play…

Make and Pixel Qi are (finally) offering a 10.1′ Pixel Qi hacking kit for $275.

It is guaranteed to work smoothly with the Samsung N130 and Lenovo S10-2 netbooks. You can coax it into working well on many other machines with a 10.1′ display, but it may not always be a perfect fit. If you try it on another model, let us and the Make folks know how well it fits.

Congrats to the Make team for making this available! I can’t wait to try this out on a few spare machines. Of course Bernie’s TwoHundredDollarLaptop has a much larger sunlight-readable display…

Best of Luck to Team One Beep (http://tiny.cc/flay5) next week as they compete in the final international round of the MS Imagine Cup. Their success in transmitting content over FM radio frequencies to an XO is a nice partial solution. Connectivity is a forever problem.

As OLPC continues to develop programs in areas where infrastructure is subject to frequent disruption from natural or man-made causes its use as a communication device is full of possibilities. For the past few months we have been participating in the Global Education Cluster and INEE to position olpc as a solution in the recovery and reconstruction phases of emergencies. Perhaps more significantly olpc has a place in the mitigation and pre-disaster preparation. FM Radio is an effective way to get information and instructions out during emergencies and less likely than Internet service to get knocked-out. XOs plus cheap USB FM radio receivers makes for a great combination for receiving educational content and critical information.

Now if someone can figure out how to make the XO an FM transmitter too…