A team of Bikaner LUG members rolled out 200 XOs at Kikarwali school two weeks ago, realizing the dream of the India Foundation which sponsored the project. Nitesh Bhardwaj shares details about the 5-day workshop he participated in with members from the local Bikaner Linux User Group (lugb).
This was a single-school independent pilot. It is great to see people writing about field work in India, and working with the strong local Linux communities.
Also in Arabic: ÙÙŠ اللغة العربية
After a 10-month wait for approvals, the UNRWA OLPC core team, administrators, parents and children of Rafah took part in a brilliant beginning to the UNRWA OLPC program in Gaza, with a celebration event on April 29th. I was fortunate to spend the days beforehand with this team and their community. They worked tirelessly – children, parents, teachers, developers, and administrators – and it was inspiring to work with them.
The Palestinian people have the optimism, resourcefulness, and dedication to turn a speck of dust into a garden. Not just any garden, but one that the entire community shares.
And the XO has a special feature beyond its tech specs and activities – it can energize a community to have hope for their children. One member of the core team, Jamil, remarked; “This is XO is a humble machine, we can take it and do great things with it.”
They did.
In a mere 12 weeks after their first intro to the XO, the Gaza core and community team:
– prepared infrastructure
– designed and gave workshops for 200 teachers and 12 administrators
– introduced the XO to 2000+ students
– helped these children introduce the XO to their parents
– created a digital library
– ported their own ILP learning games to run on the XO
– integrated Memorize, Chat, Browse, & Speak into classroom activities
– helped teachers begin distributing homework via the XO
– witnessed initially skeptical parents begin to advocate at shops and mosques for XOs for all the children of Gaza
The screen's so bright, they've gotta wear shades
From OLPC Australia, Sridhar Dhanapalan reports on the latest deployment in Yirkalla — a follow-up to earlier work done [two months ago] in 3 comunities in East Arnhem Land. This is the first proper deployment of 1.XO-5’s anywhere in the world!
Sridhar’s report is worth a read – though I’m looking forward to hearing more about how the 1.5’s are being used in class. (Sridhar: I’d love to have a guest post from you with more about how the laptops are being used, and how the initial handout went) Over the weekend, there was a nice short writeup of the progress in the deployment there by the Daily Telegraph. They took some gorgeous photographs while they were visiting the schools. And here’s a lovely video from the same part of the country.
And I just saw the updated map of all of the major and minor deployments in Australia — aside from the icon selection, this map is fantastic.
A google map of OLPC schools in Australia
Here’s some research into long distance data transfer over radio frequency, from university students in Auckland New Zealand, that could be applied to future OLPC deployments. They are currently preparing to compete in the final international round of the Microsoft Imagine Cup, which will take place in Warsaw July 3-9.
Team One Beep, made up of fourth year undergraduates Vinny Jeet, Steve Ward, Kayo Lakadia and Chanyeol Yoo, worked through the summer break to prove their idea could work. Their proposal was to send streams of data across the readily available FM/AM frequencies to impoverished communities.
Their project addresses a common problem encountered by the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) charity. The charity makes education more available to third world countries by delivering low cost laptops to remote and poor communities. They have distributed 1.2 million laptops already, and the number is growing. However a lack of infrastructure, such as broadband or even telephone lines, makes it nearly impossible to update the educational materials on the laptops.
Team One Beep intend running field trials in Australia and the Pacific Islands. Solomon Island OLPC deployment has made contact and is interested in collaborating with Team One Beep.
In 2008, the city of Birmingham started an OLPC project for their 15,000 elementary school students, to bridge the city’s digital divide. Last summer, the NSF funded a two-year analysis of Birmingham’s deployment, focusing on 4th and 5th grade students across the city.
The research team, led by Shelia Cotten, includes Julian and Shani Daily of g8four, who ran the initial workshops in Birmingham and spent the following year there getting the project off the ground, and the University of Alabama at Birmingham, which has been advising the deployment for some time. You can read more from Ellen Ferrante’s early report.
The Birmingham community remains the largest in the US, and holds regular school-based events, such as this year’s spring break XO camp in the West End Library.
At the end of last month, we were invited to sign an MOU with the East African Community (EAC) at the East African Community Investment Conference in Kampala. This was the follow-up to last November’s meeting in Arusha, Tanzania for the 10th Anniversary of the East African Community and Legislative Assembly (EALA). Lidet has been organizing this series of meetings, and helped schedule the week around this latest event.
There was a press conference and signing, with Matt, Lidet, Julia and Sam from OLPC Rwanda, the Secretary General of the EAC, the Speaker of the EALA, Ministers from several countries, parliamentarians from five countries, and Uganda’s Ministers of Education and Technology. Coverage of the event was extensive in Uganda, with some international coverage, and press questions were enthusiastic.
The seriousness of the EAC and EALA was striking. So often lip service is paid, promises to follow up are pledged, but at the end of the day, conversations slip away. But both the Speaker and the SG pledged to move quickly, spoke passionately about the future in education for East Africa, and discussed how to work with individual countries and with the EAC collectively. They also publicly stated olpc East Africa (30 million children) as a goal for 2015.