One Laptop per Child

This Saturday, Bergen Community  College is hosting a free and open-source education event, HFOSS@BCC, with discussions and presentations about OLPC and Engineers Without Borders.

This event will bring together students, members of OLPC groups in NYC and Princeton, and Computer Science teachers in the CSTA across the US and NJ.  The OLPC project at Princeton will discuss their recent OLPC library in Ghana, and math teacher John Sincak will talk about his work with XOs.  Lunch is included.

For those taking the train: a few people are travelling together from Secaucus Station (just W of Penn Station) and meeting promptly at 7:30 AM on Saturday, most taking the 7:14 Northeast Corridor train (#7821) from Penn Station.

For those driving: the event is at 400 Paramus Road, Paramus NJ 07652, in the Technology Education Center – Room 128

Two weeks back, the Financial Times posted an essay by Gillian Tett about OLPC, titled “Billions of children could be transformed by cheap computers” (and later, “Why logging on should be child’s play”). The article eventually concludes that children’s lives could be transformed, and that being able to ‘log on’ to the Internet should probably be child’s play for all children — but was much more ambivalent than the titles suggest.

They ran a long reader response to the article the following week, which is worth sharing:

As a fellow anthropologist in the financial sector, I am surprised by Gillian Tett asking “Could the idea fly? Should it?” regarding the distribution of $200 connected green laptops to children in the developing world. I similarly question her implication that this is a local Latin American initiative by One Laptop Per Child, as part of a grand “intellectual vision” recently developed by neuroscientists.

In the 21st century, we cannot separate computer literacy from the traditional “3Rs”. The luxury of computer literacy is the competitive edge of the developed world’s affluent children…

One Laptop Per Child’s mission statement has no neuroscientific technobabble: to supply cheap, green, durable, connected laptops for “collaborative, joyful, and self-empowered learning … [and] a brighter future”. Currently, 2.1m XO computers have been deployed to children and teachers worldwide in Latin America, Africa and Asia.

For Ms Tett to ask “if” or “should” this happen is like asking if the horse Goldikova should race. The little green laptop has legs – and it’s a winner.

OLPC MéXicO (yes, it’s a play on letters) has been writing about their current work (in San Luis Potosí, Nayarit, and Mazahuas) and future plans on their website.  Recently they’ve hinted at getting children in Mexico to program robots using their XOs, following in the footsteps of Peru and Plan Ceibal.  That was always my favorite part of construction class…

They’re also maintaining an active Twitter feed, with their favorite quotes and clips from OLPC’s history as well as from education projects in Mexico today.  Both are worth following.

Red Hat is sponsoring summer POSSE bootcamps (Professors’ Open Source Summer Experience), a brainchild of Mel’s, to introduce students to open source development and projects. Most POSSE projects have supported Fedora, Mozilla, or Sugar Labs in some fashion. At RIT, bootcamps this summer continue to build on the FOSS@RIT group’s efforts to develop tools that will support better hacking on tools for children in Sugar.

In particular, the group at RIT has been working for the past two years on tools to improve communication for deaf and hard of hearing children with XO laptops. Alumni of 2009 and 2010 workshops, bootcamps, and other events, worked with RIT’s Lab for Technological Literacy (LTL) and took a couple field trips to our Cambridge office, to develop a videochat activity with sufficient quality to support readable sign language over videochat.

It’s great to see this program thrive, and that OLPC and Sugar continue to be part of the motivation for some of the good work being planned.

What a great meeting of 14 minds on Friday, March 11 at 6PM at OLPC office, One Cambridge Center (right above the Kendall/MIT Red-Line Stop), facing OLPC’s most serious challenges.

Meeting agenda:

1. eBooks on Sugar Realities (New Read 89)
2. olpcMAP Jams: Los Angeles, Philippines, and each OLPC/Sugar CITY that will follow in March/April (Paris, then French Africa, etc!)
3. West Somerville eToys training by Solution Grove
4. Uruguay Summit May 5-7
5. Intel/Computer Clubhouse’s new global mentoring network (“starting soon right here in town”)

One of the topics was about using eToys or Scratch to engage older kids and/or adults with programming. Nick Doiron summarized some ideas on this topic for the group:

There are a lot of ideas out there about how to do intro-to-programming and I like what people have done with eToys at the primary school level (if you haven’t seen Waveplace’s experiences in Haiti, read about them online! )

As you target middle school level students or above, they’re interested in the internet and media. Some are interested in technical details – ask any programmer you know when they started. You can make a high school kid an expert in eToys, but they won’t be any cexercise/>loser to making their own website or Space Invaders game. If you would give someone a power tool in shop class, you should give them a real programming language on the computer.

Mozilla’s Hackasaurus program is designed for learning HTML at this level. Two amazing workshops in the past month:
http://spotlight.macfound.org/featured-stories/entry/at-hackasaurus-jam-mozilla-encourages-young-programmers-to-change-the-web/and http://brettgaylor.tumblr.com/post/3526122151/web-made-movies-at-bavc

They have information about setting up your own workshop at hackasaurus.org. Also, check out http://palpable-video.appspot.com/sample

This meeting had tremendous value for all participants as it presented an opportunity to connect to people who are interested in similar edu-tech ideas.

This week a team led by Uruguay’s ceibalJAM! (including Gabriel Eirea, Pablo Flores, Gonzalo Odiard, Fernando Sansberro, and Andrés Ambrois) and including Walter, Adam, Christoph, and David Farning, made progress in organizing an education hacking summit in Montevideo, Uruguay.

The name of the event will be eduJAM! 2011 and will take place from Thu May 5 to Sat May 7. Please include the eduJAM! and ceibalJAM! logos below if blogging or writing about the event.

The main objective of the summit is to strengthen the free educational software developer community, with a focus on Latin America and the Sugar + olpc communities. The event will feature discussions around future directions and strategy, hacking on specific projects, and exchange of experiences among different deployments.  The event is being planned in more detail on the sugarlabs wiki.

Registration is not yet open.  Alongside the eduJAM! a couple of extra activities are being planned to make the most of the attendees gathering for the summit (we already know of people from 10 countries who will be there):

A “Conozco Uruguay Tour” is being organized by members of volunteer group RAP Ceibal and the OLPC community, between Sat April 30 and Thu May 5.

There will also be a Sugar code sprint starting Sunday May 8, right after the summit, expected to continue to Monday May 9 if not beyond!

Sponsors are welcome; Activity Central has already offered to be a sponsor, and the organizers are looking for other sponsors both at the national and international level.  We hope you can join us and are looking forward to your comments and suggestions!

A team of high-school students at the Institute at Havergal is helping to implement an XO program this August at the NOAH’s Ark orphanage (Nurturing Orphans of AIDS for Humanity) in Molweni, South Africa, near Durban.  A group of students taking part in the Havergal South Africa Global Experience Program will take XOs with them, which they are currently learning how to introduce to students.

Using these laptops, they will continue conversations with the NOAH youth all year long.  They have a standing relationship with the orphanage and are being mentored by Mark Battley and a team in Ntugi.

Mobile App team bottle rocket borrowed an XO for a few months to play with it and test out their apps on it.  They recently sent it back along with a donation from their amazing staff.  Their founder Calvin Carter writes:

“Recently I was having dinner with a client.  [H]e had his OLPC laptop with him. The waitress recognized the laptop and started asking him questions… While my friend was proudly demonstrating the newest model to her, I was reminded of one of Bottle Rocket’s core beliefs: exceptionally innovative technology not only enhances the way we do things – it redefines the way we live our lives. I realized that these laptops can truly change lives. What a perfect way for Bottle Rocket to give back. The next day, four laptops were on their way to tease out the imagination and ambition of their new owners.”

bottle rocket staff posing with a test XO

That’s a great photo!  I wonder when some of their apps are going to appear alongside Batovi‘s in the Sugarlabs Activity center…

Last April, “In Tecno” compared the OLPC (‘of Uruguay, where it is in all primary schools’) and the Classmate (‘of Argentina, where it is in all 4th, 5th, and 6th grades’).  It’s one of the few direct comparisons I’ve seen recorded, and worth watching.

Since then, Argentina has expanded its program to cover all primary schools as well – the largest deployment of laptops in primary schools in the world.   It has also had one province (La Rioja) experiment with 60,000 OLPCs instead of Classmates.  It is great to see Latin America embracing the idea of olpc so throughly; I hope that Argentina’s enthusiasm and successes give confidence to their neighbors, such as Bolivia and Brazil.

The school board of Eastern Townships, Canada, under Ron Canuel, has been pursuing a one laptop per child school program for over eight years, today reaching roughly 2,700 students and teachers.   A research paper recently released by Karsenti and Collin suggests their decision to give children their own laptops was a primary cause of the student’s success to date, which has included a 40% reduction in their dropout rate over 4 years.

While they aren’t using XOs in their classroom, I’ve met some of their team more than once and shown them around our offices; they were certainly right at home.  It’s great to see this sort of long-baseline research coming out.  The only thing better would be similar research from many different facets of the same country or environment, as I hope we will see from Uruguay in another year.