Sebastial Dziallas organized a day-long session on Open Education at LinuxCon last week. They spent half the day discussing the needs of teachers and Sugar development. Caroline Meeks, Karlie Robinson, Colin Zweibel and others presented.
Mairin Duffy wrote up the event well, and the OpenSource Education channel offers lovely newsmag-style overviews as well.
Samantha Harris is a rising star in the Australian modeling world, recently on the cover of Vogue Australia, and proud of her Aboriginal heritage. Â She supports OLPC Australia’s work, which is primarily focused on Aboriginal communities on the mainland and on surrounding islands. Here is a recent interview she gave to Napoleon Perdis.
Toshiba is releasing a Libretto W100 series of laptops this fall, taking after the XO-2 in form factor and design. It’s great to see this make it to market.
Unfortunately, the many interface niceties they have implemented seem to be written only for Windows for now.
This week, Argentina’s president Cristina Kirchner oversaw the launch of the La Rioja deployment and the handout of XOs to roughly 2,000 students. This was the public start to the 60,000-student deployment announced this spring, named the JoaquÃn V. González program after the distinguished politician and educator. The program will provide an XO to every primary school student and teacher in the province by next year.
Sabrina DÃaz Rato reported on the event, with shout-outs to Claudia Urrea and Martin Langhoff, who are currently in Argentina helping the learning and technical teams of the project get off to a good start. But the most interesting part of the article comes at the end, where she summarizes related efforts by Walter Flores, Argentina’s Education, Science and Technology minister.
Christina Kirchner presents an XO to a vested young girl
Flores sees La Rioja’s program becoming a model for an implementation that is interesting to other regions, and mentions some specific neighboring provinces looking for advice – the Argentine provinces of Catamarca, Corrientes, and Mendoza, Chile‘s Atacama region, and the Bolivian municipality of Yacuiba.
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Thanks to eBay for keeping us in its spotlight this month. OLPC is one of the 3 nonprofits featured in their Giving Works Spotlight on Education. A portion of all proceeds bought or sold through that page will go to OLPC.
And we will again be one of the nonprofits on display at checkout during the second week in August — an invitation for eBay users to donate when checking out with PayPal, which has so far raised roughly $20k.
We are also talking to Causecast about ways to make OLPC more visible as a force for educational change, particularly within the US. If you have a story about an OLPC fundraiser you have participated in or want to share, let us know.
Sri Lanka’s Virtusa has been working with our support gang over the past six months to provide a team of testers to help improve test depth and quality for new Sugar releases. They have been working with both XO-1 and XO-1.5 machines, and are now testing our upcoming 10.2.0 release.
Update: Fast Company just picked up this story over the weekend. Thanks again to the Virtusa team!