One Laptop per Child

On Tuesday, Nick Doiron, Mark Battley, Adam Holt, Benaja (visiting from Haiti) worked on building our grassroot map. Nick, now a Carnegie Mellon Senior, is the genius energy who created the new interactive OLPC Map.

Thank you Mark for your organizational skills and creativity. And thank you Nick for patiently listening to our ideas and feedback. I am impressed that you are so freely able to integrate the many ideas of others into your growing project.

Q: What does this Map Represent?
Q: Who should use this map?
Q: How can I use this map if I am new to OLPC, if I interested in starting  a project, interested in donating,if I have a project or am a child in a project, and if I am an OLPC volunteer?
Tuesday evening we watched a wonderful film Premier “On the Line” and had a lively discussion with the filmmaker, Audubon Dougherty. The portrait of computer and Internet throughout rural Peru was heart-rendering and very thought provoking. The needs and obstacles are so great. So where are the XOs that have been sent to Peru.

Adam presented gifts to the winners of the fun and instructive OLPC Map/Sugar Trivia Contest…

Read more about the event on Nancie Severs’ blog.

Grovo.com, a new online training site, is running a campaign to help generation XO around the world.  They are donating $1 for every person who signs up (the service is free) between now until December 31st.  They are also thinking about how to help new XO users learn to use the Internet in different ways.  On January 2, Grovo will announce the results on their blog.

Visit www.grovo.com/olpc to get started, and if you like what they’re doing, help spread the word!  There are a number of cool mentor/tutor projects in the works, and I expect to see a flowering of results and active mentor networks in the coming year.

Here’s some background on Grovo from one of their early case studies.  I can’t wait to see is a series of tutorials like this on how to use, say, the most popular sites in a very different online stting, like Nigeria or Korea (where I have a hard time figuring out the social and procedural norms).

The greatest project you’ve ever built. The most explosively dynamic volunteer you’ve ever met. The greatest school system you’ve ever heard of. Even your own mom’s Haiti school dream?

How should each appear on our community’s global map of 21st century EduTech innovators? How can you help them visually catalyze OLPC’s informal but global deployment community, from Kigali to Kathmandu?

Put YOUR Learning on the Map!

If you cannot attend Boston’s olpcMAPmaking Sprint Dec 27-31 in person, and Audubon Dougherty’s premier Peru film presentation (preview), we invite you instead to inject your inspiration today — and watch your ideas grow — as our volunteer community sets itself to work, night and day showcasing OLPC/Sugar’s deployment doers’ greatest accomplishments worldwide.

So who’s on the front line of our planet’s DIY Foreign Aid Revolution today? Hint: http://olpcMAP.net was built entirely by volunteers, in the last 2 months, its community stories sparked but barely begun. Now they need your help bringing silent heroes’ creative outpourings to light — in and around rising 21st century schools everywhere, no matter how rich or poor — that you personally know are fighting to make a difference!

Whether you join these educational volunteers worldwide, seeding learning community networks one country at time, co-designing our Open Geospatial Infrastructure — or only have time to follow our grassroots pioneers’ mailing list, or just adding your your local insights into our suggestion box — we thank you profusely for your holiday generosity to our still-new-century’s kids emerging!

(adapted from this recent mailing list thread.  this is a sweet build; try it out.)

Peru’s latest deployment to urban schools is underway, expanding the total reach of their federal program to over 8,350 institutions and 813,000 children and their teachers, across the country.  The program focuses on a few classes in each of a large number of schools, to ensure that the schools are all part of the program.  Many of these schools will not have saturation (yet), but this will make ULUN much more a part of everyday school life in the capital.

The latest banners up around Lima announcing the project are bold.  I can’t remember the last time I saw a major public ad for a national education program in the US.

Tim Falconer, back from his recent tour of his partner schools in Haiti, makes the case for focusing on learning in Haiti, rather than physical schools.  This is not to say that schools aren’t important — when a community needs a central place for scores of children and teachers to gather, study, or break bread, clearly they need a comfortable space if not an entire school.  But Tim notes out that many children never go to school.  Ever.  He asks:

[In Haiti] why are we still talking about building schools? Why aren’t we talking about training adults to use laptops instead of chalkboards? Why aren’t the teachers going to the children, to teach in small local groups?

I would like to see recent data on this that consolidates private and public school information; but it’s fair to say more than half of all school-age children are not in school at a given time.   (I am reminded for a moment of the remarkable UNICEF game Ayiti: the Cost of Life , which deserves more development and attention.)  If you have thoughts on home schooling, or community schooling and mentorship, stop by and leave him a comment.