One Laptop per Child

The Belinda Stronach Foundation has launched a new OLPC Canada website describing their current plans, partners, and development of learning materials (and a new Sugar-like interface using aboriginal designs…)

Thanks are due to BMO Financial and the Ontario government, and the other partners who helped bring the TBSF plans to fruition – most recently with a $750,000 grant. They have published a map of the schools involved in their first-round pilot (some 2800 students and teachers in all), and are planning to expand it to 5000 participants before it ends.

It’s great to see all of these developments in North America at last. Mexico is also seeing an expansion of their program into Nayarit on the western coast, with their initial workshops beginning soon.

OLPC’s global community of contributors and volunteers is gathering for its largest ever meeting to date, on the weekend of October 22-24, in San Francisco! Thanks to the OLPC San Francisco Community led by Professor Sameer Verma, and our gracious host San Francisco State University.  If you want to take a stand for global education rights For All in this 21st century, now is your time — OLPC’s Global Community is a friendly and supportive network inviting you too to Stand & Deliver:

The OLPC SF Community Summit 2010 will be a community-run event bringing together educators, technologists, anthropologists, enthusiasts, champions and volunteers. We share stories, exchange ideas, solve problems, foster community and build collaboration around the One Laptop per Child project and its mission worldwide.

Now we’re taking the next step, bringing together the voices of OLPC experience, Sugar Labs, the Realness Alliance — and yourself. Check out our growing list of social entrepreneurs who’ve already signed up from Uruguay, Peru, Paraguay, Argentina, Nicaragua, Africa, Afghanistan, India, Philippines, France, UK, Italy, Belgium, Austria, Canada, Birmingham and beyond.  Then please consider joining us, adding your own contribution/testimonial and photo!

Saturday’s OLPC Repair Fest clinic and training was a HUGE Success! Thanks to all those from around town who attended. Check out several videos & photos of the event care of Azamat Abdymomunov.

This Saturday we’re holding a repair workshop and presentation — if you haven’t torn down your XO and rebuilt it from the motherboard up, now’s your chance to try on someone else’s machine — and to learn how to break down and rebuild one in under half an hour, with nothing but a Phillips screwdriver!

We’re holding a workshop Saturday through the early afternoon. RSVP if you’re planning to come. The machines worked on will primarily be XO-1′s, since those are still the machines most likely encountered in the field. The major differences on the 1.5 make these sorts of repair much easier, not more complex — there’s little reason to take apart the bottom on a 1.5, for instance, since the keyboards just pop out.

OLPC Australia is in the middle of providing 300 children and teachers with XOs in Doomadgee, Queensland. This continues their work in Aboriginal regions across the continent (see their amazing school-by-school map).  I always look forward to the updates of that particular map – which colors every school deployment by whether it is completed or not.

At OLPC this morning Rumi Chunara, PhD, a Research Fellow at HealthMap and Harvard Medical School gave an inspiring introduction to her work - http://healthmap.org/en/. It’s a live site that tracks global health issues through local submissions — tracking needs that are pressing a community most direly.

OLPC has been conducting research and fieldwork that focuses on education for children in crises, cutting across areas of crucial needs such as health and shelter. The effects of tools like Health Map and Ushahidi linked to an XO for family and kid support can have untold benefits for providing life saving information to a community. Health Maps can be localized for region and epidemic and we hope to collaborate further on what information can be provided through the forum for XO users in environments at risk across the world.

Informal learning for children is at the core of One Laptop per Child. Recently, Health Maps used their tools to track school closures in the United States as a result of the H1N1 epidemic – by linking school closures with the informal learning opportunities facilitated by the XO we aspire to facilitate uninterrupted access to education for all of the world’s children!

Click here for Rumi’s full presentation!

OLPC learns and grows from every distribution, small or large, and actively seeks out feedback, documentation and analysis. OLPC partners and communities are critical contributors in this feedback loop and likewise are usually interested in how monitoring and evaluation studies from different countries can offer insight into successes and challenges of one laptop per child programs. The learning team decided to compile an assessment report of the existing m&e literature to compare different projects, generate discussion, and gain inspiration. Check it out!

If you have your own overview of an OLPC project not featured please consider sharing for future updates to our assessment report!

With roughly 4,000 laptops deployed, we’re still in the beginning stages of the initiative. It’s a good stage to be in, especially for building our technical support in advance. So what’s the best way of doing that?

One idea that has been proposed:  setting up partnerships with students at Afghan universities. We’d recruit teams of student volunteers to provide ongoing support to teachers and pilot projects. Throughout the whole process, OLPC would provide ongoing support, feedback, access to spare parts and technical advice.  Of course there are still a lot of details to iron out.  Right now we’re planning to call it the Afghanistan Children’s Connectivity Project, involving individual Connectivity Centers in community hubs in each region.

This year, the United States Government requested $105.9 billion for military operations in Afghanistan. The numbers break down into $68.1 billion requested by the Department of Defense for 2010 and a $33 billion supplement requested by the Administration to support the 30,000 person troop surge in the area. It’s funny to think that providing every child in the country with an XO would cost about $800 million — or 3 days of that military spending.

Part 2 of a review of the XO-1.5

Over 90,000 Uruguayan high school students will receive a new XO-1.5 HS (High School edition) laptop.  So how is it different from the XO-1 that their younger classmates have?

From the outside, the XO-1.5 HS has the same feel — it’s the same size, and the same antenna ears… though they feel different somehow in dark blue.  The color variation on the backplate is more limited — there may be just one set of colors to match the dark blue casing.

To make it easier to use for high school students, the keyboard features larger keys for larger fingers — and it’s now a standard responsive, ‘clicky’ keyboard rather than a waterresistant membrane. Its light/dark blue color scheme represents Uruguay’s national colors, more subtler than the bright green of the other XOs.

Since we redesigned the keyboard, we took the opportunity to make a few other handy changes. The new keyboard screws in and pops out without dismantling the bottom of the XO — taking 2 minutes rather than 15 to swap one out.

I tried it myself during my first XO teardown – the keyboard was probably the easiest thing for me to get out. We did a half tear down and photographed it, so we can also add guidelines for upgrading your disk on the 1.5′s motherboard. And now people seem to be making hybrids of XO-1.5s with the new keyboard (see our Flickr stream for more). I’ll post again when the new repair guide section is ready.