I just landed, and Mike Dawson picked me up at airport. Immediate flat tire on airport road. Much help from Afghani soldiers. So begins my second trip in a month.
Flat tire at the airport
Travelling to Afghanistan
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Yearly Archives: 2010
Updated XO software: “180py”
Bernie Innocenti and the team in Paraguay have released build 180py of their Fedora 11 + Sugar desktop. It is fast, offers both Sugar and Gnome desktops, and includes many recent features from the past year into a build that isn’t too large.
Some call it ‘the best XO OS ever’ – and it is indeed fantastic. Everyone who has an XO-1 should download this build and try it out. (but don’t forget to back up your files and any customized activities first!)
At the same time, Sugar 0.88 is being designed to work on both the XO-1 and the XO-1.5, and is currently available for testing and development. Bernie needs help with finding “a more pronounceable name than F11-0.88” – describing the combination of Sugar 0.88 and stock Fedora 11 – so once more, please share any good naming conventions. If your name is chosen, I will personally ship you one of the near-mythical Red XOs.
OLPC in El Salvador
Teachers and assistants at the Universidad Evangélica de El Salvador
El Salvador, which began a 400 XO pilot last year, has been in the news again this week.  Their vice-minister of education Erlinda Handal gave an interview about their program “Cerrando la Brecha del Conocimiento” (Closing the Knowledge Gap), and mentioned hoping to expand their olpc project to cover all primary students in the country over the next four years.
“Children being able to take the ‘laptop’ home is something new, expected to amplify the process of learning, and this opens greater opportunities, better prospects for success.”
I hope to see more news from El Salvador, or at least more videos like these, in the future.
XOs for High School: new design, Uruguay snags 90,000
We have been working on a new XO laptop for high school students — one with a larger and more responsive keyboard better suited to the hands of older students. And Uruguay’s Plan Ceibal, expanding into high schools across the country, will be the first recipient — they’ve ordered 90,000 of the first production run.
These XO-1.5 HS machines are largely the same as a regular XO-1.5: they are VIA machines with Sugar and Gnome desktops, running both Sugar activities and Gnome apps. Â Only the bottom half is different: they have ‘clicky’ rather than membrane keyboards by default, and the base has been redesigned so that keyboards are much easier to swap out or clean — there are two screws you can access from the battery compartment that release the keyboard, then you can pop it out. Â No more 10-minute teardowns!
The new machines will be shades of dark and light blue; the factory is still working on getting the plastics and dye selection just right. Â I saw an early stab at this design, and it was very sexy — but I haven’t seen the final keyboard model they are using yet. As a keyboard fanatic (I can get 70wpm on my XO-1), I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled for the first one back in the office and will post a review for you.
Now that we have a half-dozen designs or models, we’ll need to come up with a better naming scheme… I’m taking suggestions for names and themes.
Figment ArtsFest in New York
On Saturday, June 12, several OLPC supporters trekked out to New York City’s Governor’s Island for this month’s New York meet-up. OLPC Volunteer Hannah Stern talks about the day’s events:
This past weekend, One Laptop per Child’s New York group spent the day at the Figment Arts and Creativity Festival on Governor’s Island, right off the southern tip of Manhattan. Throughout the day, festival goers had the chance to show off their creative sides on the XOs, whether through producing their own digital art or music.
Costumed festival attendee tries out OLPC
The Festival was my first OLPC event and I didn’t know what to expect. Based on what I knew about OLPC advocates, I had pictured a conference room full of IT managers talking tech, writing code, and developing new open source applications.
However, our audience was nothing like what I had envisioned. I was pleasantly surprised to find our setup to be more like a neighborhood block party. Lots of people and families passed by, asking questions about the XO and stopping to play with the devices.
This was my first time getting some hands-on experience with the XO in its many forms (several of the volunteers brought their own XO models from the past several years). After a few quick pointers, I found the operating system and program functions fairly intuitive and had a great time trying it out.
As much as I enjoyed playing with the XO, I had an even better time watching other people use it. There’s no question that my favorite part of the day was watching the adults and kids each take their turn trying to open the laptops.
After about a minute of fumbling, the adults would look at us, clearly frustrated, and ask “I don’t know, can you just show me.â€Â The kids on the other hand caught on right away, looking for moving parts and typically prying open the devices in less time than the adults.
While I had always thought that the primary purpose of the XOs is to teach kids to use the Internet or to type faster, this simple demonstration proved otherwise. It showed just how the XO is built to stimulate the creative and reason areas of a child’s brain. It’s about teaching them to think logically but creatively; its’ about teaching them how to get the most out of the tools available to them.
The OLPC-NYC grassroots community welcomes you to hang out and/or join us anytime!
eKindling makes strides in Lubang, Philippines
The eKindling project, a classroom XO project on the island of Lubang in the Philippines, is making good progress. They are supported by roughly 100 donors and organizers from across the Philippines. After a consultation visit this past winter, they recently purchased XOs for their school. They wrote up a project checklist, a 5-day teacher workshop schedule, and formed contacts with OLPC Friends, OLPC New Zealand, and Squeakland.
Recently they published a debrief of their weeklong teacher workshop. You can follow this and other progress through updates to their project page (thanks to Mafe and others).