Last week twenty volunteers joined the OLPC Asia team to return to the OLPC pilot school in Sichuan. OLPC donated 1000 XOs to children and teachers at the school, which supports students whose schools were destroyed by the 2008 earthquake. The visitors spent a few days at the school, meeting with the school community and helping them update and repair their machines. Here’s a snapshot of them at work:
Paraguay’s vice president, Federico Franco, recently presented an award to Giulianna Pozzoli, the recent winner of the Nickelodeon-OLPC Scratch animation contest, and other student leaders. This was held Caacupé, home to the country’s first large deployment of children’s laptops.
At 0:39 you can see one of the children in the audience filming his speech on her XO; another is typing as he talks. Others have hand cameras. He talks briefly about how everyone needs to work together to help improve children’s education, for a better future – and this an essential part of it.
The eKindling grassroots group gave a lovely update of their work in the Philippines, last month in San Francisco. They have been working with the province of Occidental Mindoro for some years. This began with the Lubang pilot, spearheaded by Mayor Juan Sanchez and financed by his friends from National Computer Center Community Outreach, Metrobank, and many other anonymous donors. eKindling’s counterpart contribution in this pilot was the education programming and training of teachers, students, parents, and local support team.
More recently, Governor Ramirez-Sato has begun an expanded initiative on Mindoro Island. Elementary schools of the four southern municipalities, San Jose, Calintaan, Magsaysay, and Rizal, will be receiving another 550 XOs later this year. With Lubang in the north and these four in the south, can the rest of the province be far behind?
They took photos of their visit to the San Jose Pilot Elementary school. Two of my favorites:
Photos by Ideals.ph
The new pilots are being advised (kindled!) by eKindling and managed by the local school system, an excellent example of government/grassroots collaboration. Thanks to both groups for capturing this day in the life of the schools, and for making it possible.
Following last week’s announcement that the education department is “phasing out” support for OLPC in the South Pacific island nation of Niue, OLPCA is reaching out to the community there, looking at options of how to manage the ongoing communal ownership of the laptops for the benefit of everyone on “The Rock“. OLPC is working with its Pacific partners to conduct a needs assessment to ascertain the status of the program there, and how they could move forward. We will work with all partners in Niue to ensure the XO contributes to its ongoing educational progress.
We understand the XOs, and all essential associated network infrastructure on Niue, remain in robust working order — and firmly in the hands of the island’s children. It was there that we learned that the OLPC principle of child ownership needed tweaking in the Pacific, where traditional cultures often value the group over the individual. In Oceania children are usually “custodians” of their laptop, with a responsibility to safeguard it on behalf of the community, and further to share it with that community. These lessons come directly from our first experiences in Niue.
The Niue Department of Education and its partners had put in place a comprehensive and technically competent deployment. Eucators have said the OLPC program “went well” for two years and the XOs produced real educational benefits among students. We are keen to ensure that we document and build on this success, both in Niue and elsewhere in the Pacific. And no matter what direction the program takes we want to ensure it aligns with OLPC Oceania’s Community Participation Guidelines, especially the need for environmentally responsible solutions.
Both OLPCA and the Pacific countries that today are introducing the XO are incorporating lessons from our first Pacific pilots. We are comparing it to the progress we see elsewhere in remote Australia and in Micronesia in the North Pacific, where the largest donor (the United States) is now working with countries on OLPC. The fact that a funding shortfall was key to the Niue decision has spurred a broader debate in the region on aid to Small Island States like Niue, and has allowed us to raise the issue with other stakeholders in the region.
In a quick 6-minute video, Charbax tests out the latest XO-1.75 prototype, while walking around outdoors in San Francisco.
Post via Silvia Kist
Seymour’s Papert ideas are a source of inspiration for many teachers and researchers in Brazil and had a big impact on how the country’s computer lab program was shaped in the past. One Laptop Per Child brought to life Papert’s vision for a Children’s Machine, and also inspired many teachers and academics in the country.
Because of this history, the strongest characteristic of the OLPC project in Brazil is the involvement of universities researching how laptops can create powerful educational experiences, and promote cultural change around learning. Many research labs from Brazil’s top universities are working with OLPC in this challenge, and have developed field studies: including LEC/UFRGS, NIED/UNICAMP, LSI/USP, CERTI/UFSC, UFC.
One of the first investigations in Brazil, was conducted under the supervision of Prof. Léa Fagundes. It studied how the XO impacted the reading and writing learning process of 6 year old children in a public elementary school at Porto Alegre. The full study was published in Portuguese. A summary:
They hypothesized that each child having their own laptop would change the practices of reading and writing by students, impacting how they create concepts about the written language. Student practices were observed and analyzed in two ways: practices proposed by the teacher and things that students did spontaneously.
After 7 months of observations, the research concluded that daily use of networked laptops allows children to use writing and reading in real life situations, differently from artificial activities in school. This kind of usage builds a symbolic environment helpful for understanding the function and meaning of written language (fluency) and leads to a conceptualization process driven by the need to understand others (literacy). In the class that was analyzed, the teacher’s proposals and some other conditions were necessary for that to happen. Project work, laptop ownership by students, connection to the Internet, and the use of a virtual learning environment were among them.
Niue, a small island nation in the Pacific, became the first country to provide one laptop per child, over two years ago. At the time, OLPC Oceania was just taking shape; since then, another 8000 children and teachers have implemented programs across the Pacific.
Last week Niue’s acting Director of Education, Lisimoni Togahai, said that although the first two years went well, they were phasing out the program. “The school could not afford to pay for the high cost of maintaining the V-SAT that’s connected to the satellite for the internet access.”
Niue supported child ownership, and children there take their laptops home and keep them when they graduate. About half of the 500 XOs deployed belong to students who are still in the school system. While schools may be phasing out their subsidized connectivity, the children can use their XOs elsewhere. The country has abundant free wifi – it was touted as the first “Wifi nation” in 2003 for the availability of wifi in all of its cities.
Michael Hutak, coordinator for OLPC Oceania, has been in touch with them hoping for further background. He recently posted a summary of lessons learned so far from Pacific pilots. An excerpt:
* There is country-level demand and political and community support for OLPC in the Pacific;
* Small pilots provide an insufficient evidence base for policy makers;
* Monitoring & Evaluation should be integrated at the outset of an OLPC programme;
* Broad-based regional technical assistance is needed to aid country capacity building;
* Laptops and hardware peripherals should be centrally maintained in the region to efficiently support trials;
* There is suppressed demand for internet connectivity in rural and remote schools.
See also ChristophD’s take and Michael’s followup.
The rural OLPC school in Doomadgee, Queensland more than tripled the number of 3rd grade students demonstrating proficiency in numeracy — from 31% to 95% — from 2010 to 2011. This coincided with a renewed focus on the school, including providing every student with an XO.
As Michael Hutak reports, Australian MP Rob Oakeshott highlighted this in a statement to Australia’s Parliament, calling for national support for OLPC and similar initiatives to improve access and partiipation and close the education gap across Australia.
OLE Nepal has focused on health activities for some years now. Recently they undertook a project to develop a suite of them with educators from the UN’s World Food Program. In their August newsletter they announced that project’s successful conclusion:
OLE Nepal has completed the development of interactive digital learning activities designed to promote awareness in agriculture, food security and nutrition amongst school children. This set of thirty activities were developed with support from [the WFP] and are correlated with the Grade 5 “Science, Health and Physical Education” subject prescribed by the national curriculum.
OLE Nepal developed the activities in both Nepali and English. [They] have already been integrated in OLE Nepal’s larger E-Paath activity suite, and distributed to all OLPC program schools.
This is great news. Now we just need to upload them to the Sugarlabs Activities Hub and help get them localized into more languages. The E-Paath bundle and wiki pages could use updates as well.
Peter Brantley of the Internet Archive, who hosts the annual Books in Browsers conference, published a lovely reflection on the Bookserver project over at Publisher’s Weekly. He notes the ongoing debate about centralized aggregation (the global digital library model) vs. distribution of local silos of books (the traditional physical library model), noting the ways in which bookservers that support syndication and syncing have a foot in both worlds.
An excerpt:
“The SheevaPlug Bookserver gets books closest to those who will use them. In areas with minimal networking, or where privacy matters, and the choice of reading materials may have immediate ramifications for liberty and survival, there are compelling reasons to get libraries down to the smallest, socially cohesive level. In many parts of the world that would be a village; in other societies, individualism makes the notion of walking around with all the books in the world in a single handheld device the ultimate distributed library.”
The whole article is worth reading.
Since Pixel Qi, our display manufacturer, announced the recent investment in their work by 3M, that connection has made a few headlines. 3M has noted that “the vision of ubiquitous displays comes much closer to realization.”
Since then Pixel Qi have partnered with All American, a global distributor, and with ShiZhu Technology, who are designing a family of four tablets around Qi screens.
I hope this means new lineups and screen sizes will come more easily. I am looking forward to seeing this display tech become standard in handhelds and laptops of all sizes. And I’m also looking forward to the latest screen designs in the new XOs — it seems the already low power draw has dropped by half again.
The OLPC Association welcomes Roberto Interiano, a long-time advisor, as Senior VP of Operations. He has extensive experience in international public and private sector work, particularly in Central America, and shares an infectious enthusiasm for our work.
You can read more about his past experience in the press release.
In La Rioja both platforms coexist in great harmony, due in fact that the leaders of the XO team with their expertise are also in charge of the netbook implementation in the secondary schools. A good model to follow in other settings for a smooth transition when the children finishing primary school return their XO (to be recycled and given to the new cohort in first grade) and receive instead their new netbook for the secondary school. In fact in many families children and adolescents use both equipments in the «expanded school» at home and outside, in the public places with wifi. A new digital landscape is unfolding. I have seen a remarkable video of a show with hundreds of children walking on the streets of La Rioja by night with their XO shining like candles in the dark.
It was really moving to see today the schools transformed in an immense XO laboratory. Classrooms, yards, gardens, corridors were blooming with the green laptops and hundreds of children with their parents and teachers around. The media followed the visit of the Minister who gave several interviews. I also was interviewed working with the children who were fascinated with my blue machine and …my white hat. I was impressed with the immediate reaction of the students. Many wanted to have my blue XO and some told me that the blue keyboard was much better. I agree. One discovered that I had a new program to «play games with numbers». In fact we will test it in the next weeks in some schools of La Rioja. It is a remarkable software produced by a team at the University of Buenos Aires under the leadership of Mariano Sigman, a member of the scientific advisory board of OLPCA. If the result is satisfying we will distribute it to the whole OLPC community around the world.
A continuous flow of information came from remote parts of the province, all the 380 elementary schools were today performing a fantastic concert of digital ideas. A day to be remembered as the celebration of the program Joaquin V. Gonzalez, who started only one year ago and now has fully integrated the whole province, every child without exception, in the digital world. I hope La Rioja will become a leader in the Andean region and we discussed with Minister Flores the possibility of expanding the XO experience to the near province of Catamarca and even to Atacama in Chile.
At OLPC we are educators without borders.
Sridhar Dhanapalan is giving a talk next week about OLPC Australia, pitching it as “Australia’s toughest Linux deployment“. It certainly is that. He notes their aim to reach each of the 300,000 children and teachers in remote parts of Australia, over the next three years.
From his abstract:
OLPC Australia aims to create a sustainable and comprehensive programme to enhance opportunities for every child in remote Australia… by 2014.
[T]he most remote areas of the continent are typically not economically viable for a business to service, hence the need for a not-for-profit in the space.
This talk will outline how OLPC Australia has developed a solution to suit Australian scenarios. Comparisons and contrasts will be made with other “computers in schools” programmes, OLPC deployments around the world and corporate IT projects.
By promoting flexibility and ease of use, the programme can achieve sustainability by enabling management at the grass-roots level. The XO laptops themselves are… repairable in the field, with minimal skill required. Training is conducted online, and an online community allows participants nationwide to share resources.
Key to the ongoing success of the programme is active engagement with all stakeholders, and a recognition of the total cost of ownership over a five-year life cycle.
Since 2009, OLPC Greece has provided one laptop per child in 35 classes and groups around the country. 580 XOs in all, with the inolvement of many teachers. They have kept us updated via our wiki and regular emails, and shared some interesting work from their students.
My favorite post is from the 3rd graders at the Sminthi School — they made large tiles of stencil art, rearranged it on a school wall, and turned it into stop-motion animations with Scratch (video). Their professors Psychogios, Rigas, and Aspioti, brought this work into with their math, informatics, and art classes.
Recently the OLPC Greece team published a short summary of their work from the first two years, and their goals for the coming year. They note the need for local hardware labs, software updates, and technical support. You can follow their work, in Greek, on the public mailing list for the pilot. (An excellent practice!)
Students and teachers work on a stencil in Sminthi
Update: The US Embassy recently visited Ecole Shalom and its OLPC deployment, with a donation of creole books, and blogged about it in English and French.
Nick Doiron recently travelled to Petit-Goave, Haiti, continuing to map the country there via OpenStreetMap.
He has also been hacking on activities for the OLPC schools there, most recently the Bridge activity originally from Daniel Drake and Nirav Patel — adding a plugin which lets you incorporate a solar sensor, which lets sunlight grow giant flowers that push up your bridge!
If you think this sounds like a daydream morphed into activity form, you’re absolutely right. (see screenshots below).
Nick: if you’re looking at games to add solar sensing to, then Rollcats is an obvious choice. The Sun is your cheerleader!
