Yearly Archives: 2010

San Francisco declares October 23 “One Laptop per Child Day”

Posted on by
2

Mayor Gavin Newsom has declared tomorrow, October 23, “One Laptop per Child Day” in San Francisco, in recognition of OLPC’s service to communities around the world — and in honor of the upcoming community summit. Special thanks are due to Carol Ruth Silver and Sameer Verma for their work with the city to make this, and the weekend’s events, possible.

San Francisco has been a nexus of creative energy and support for the olpc movement since the early days of the project, when fuseproject took on our industrial design. It’s fitting that the city is hosting the international summit this weekend, and an honor to have the mayor name a day after the project — or really, if you read the text of the proclamation (and I woinder: who writes these things?), naming one after our global network. Thank you to everyone who is helping to carry the message of universal education and connectivity forward, around the world.

If you are coming to the summit this weekend, please remember to register online — we have about a dozen spaces left.

And don’t forget: we are opening with a reception tonight at 5pm. I look forward to seeing everyone soon!

Reminder: OLPC Community Summit this weekend @ SFSU

Posted on by
Reply

Sameer Verma and OLPC-SF are putting the finishing touches on what’s going to be an amazing community event at SFSU this weekend — an international Community Summit for OLPC hackers, implementers, and researchers from dozens of countries and projects. We’ll kick off with an evening party tonight and then with a full agenda from tomorrow morning through Sunday night.

Mike Lee, Andreas Gros, Tim Falconer, Tabitha Roder, Marina Zdobnova and others have been taking part in the Books in Browsers event, so I can confirm that people from a few different countries have already arrived. And we will have some nice surprises for attendees tonight and tomorrow morning… so please join us early!

Books in Browsers @ the Internet Archive

Posted on by
Reply

I’m at the Open Content Alliance‘s annual meeting, this year about Books in Browsers, hosted at the Internet Archive in SF. It’s an encouraging gathering, with a lot of the technical and social implementations lining up as people give their short presentations.

I spoke yesterday about the olpc use case of rural and offline schools (you can find my slides online on the OLPC wiki), where bookreaders and the books they can find are often all that students have in the way of a regional library. Others in the audience added that there is also often no historical division between receiving stories and creating your own, or a tradition of ‘received knowledge’ that publishers have decided is worth distributing.

A few wonderful bits of news: the Internet Archive’s bookreader, which is one of the best browser-based readers around, now works with touchscreen input (NTS: get them a 1.75 model once they’re available!; some of their sliders are too small/close to the screen edges for the XO bezel). Mary Lou brought a new Pixel Qi screen with her from Taiwan (she and John will both be @ SFSU tomorrow). And a lot of people in attendance (including many people who are building the next gen of bookreader) are working on one of the core ideas of modern collaboration — that everyone is both reader and author at different times.

My favorite quote from the event so far: “Before the writer was ‘author’, before the invention of [literary] ‘genius’, artists simply transmitted culture that preexisted: spongs, dances, text, stories, poems that didn’t ‘belong’ to anyone. And their skill was the skill to transmit, not of invention, and attributable to a [muse], not to personal genius.”

I hope to see some of you tonight at 5pm at the opening party for the community summit!

Rwanda on track to deploy 50,000 XOs to 150 schools this year

Posted on by
Reply

Nkubito Bakuramutsa, OLPC project coordinator at the Rwandan Education Ministry, talked to the Rwanda New Times this week about the first 10,000 students and teachers who had received laptops through the country’s OLPC program. Rwanda is on track to distribute XOs to 50,000 students by the end of the year, with another 50,000 following soon after.

Laptop preparation in Kigali

Laptop preparation in Kigali

The national deployment team recently finished setting up their software build, and is now flashing 2,000 XOs a day. This is a good milestone for the team — learning how to rebuild all parts of the system on their own is important, and as Zehra can attest the first time you get a NANDBlast production line up and running is memorable.

The schools are including materials from OLPC, Sugar Labs, India’s Azim Premji Foundation, the National Curriculum Development Centre, and the Rwanda Education Commons, with customization help from Microsoft and Rwanda’s Green Hills Academy network of schools.

Education in Emergencies & the XO

Posted on by
2

A child’s path to becoming a strong and self-determined learner can be difficult in even the best conditions.  Now, imagine you are a child trying to read after soldiers have interrogated your teacher, again.  Imagine you are a child who just lost a home, school, and half your friends in the instant of a massive flood. Families coping with emergencies and war consider education as life saving as water, food, shelter, and medical supplies. Education builds back community, gives children tools to cope, and provides a link to a future beyond their current stresses.

This week One Laptop per Child took part as a new partner in the bi-annual meeting of the Education Cluster Working Group, a UNICEF and Save the Children led initiative for Education in Emergencies born out of the EFI. New friends in the Cluster shared their education relief efforts in Haiti, Pakistan, occupied Palestinian territories, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo over the past two years.

Stay tuned for news of OLPC’s input to the Cluster on open-source material for learning, protecting education from attack, and community participation for education in emergencies. After all, the XO was built to provide learning opportunities for children in the most remote and difficult circumstances.

Dextrose released for the XO

Posted on by
1

Paraguay’s national deployment, run by Paraguay Educa, has been developing its own build of a Sugar operating system for its students, with help from Sugarlabs. They are calling it Dextrose. The newly-formed Activity Central group, a Sugar-development consultancy, is helping with this work, and supporting some local developers in Paraguay.

Dextrose is a spin of the core Sugar build that will focus on teacher tools and content in Spanish.
While initially developed with feedback from classrooms in Paraguay, this will hopefully become a platform that other deployments in Latin America can use. While Peru has been shy about frequent software upgrades, preferring to have something stable for years at a time, Uruguay and other smaller deployments are good candidates to start using Dextrose as well.