Videographer and OLPC supporter Chiara Frisone began working on a short documentary about OLPC in South Africa almost a year ago. After a ten month wait, the excellent result is up on YouTube: Watch “My School, My Community, My Laptop” and tell us what you think!!
One of our longtime volunteers seeing Nicholas’s recent ‘Learning by Yourselves‘ talk at Solve for X, had this to say:
My great hope is that the Learning by Yourselves experiment will break the final barriers to the high objective of universal literacy — in this generation!
Please also know that although this experiment is at the cutting edge of technology, the conception and imagining of this effort was projected, and tried, in 2004 in Afghanistan. [See 2006 UNICEF report on work done with the Afghanistan government.] Using illiterates to harness the innate desire for learning among children – can be done with paper and pencil; the tablets, however, will make it much more dramatic.
From rural Zambia:
Greta Van Susteren of Fox News has worked in the past to support with the Reverend Franklin Graham and Samaritans Purse. Yesterday she wrote about their recent efforts to build a school and orphanage for roughly 100 children, and their purchase of 100 XOs to send to them thanks to a generous donor.
From her post on gretawire:
Just recently, a contribution was made to Samaritans Purse so that Samaritans Purse could purchase 100 computers for the orphan children. This will open doors for those kids – giving them a chance that they would not otherwise have. I don’t need to tell you how important learning is or what opportunities can be realized with a computer.
What kind of computers? The XO. It is a very, very special computer – and very durable since kids are not known to be that careful with things. Here are some pics of my assistant with the XO computer…
Thanks to everyone involved, and I hope you connect with the other great thinsg that OLPC Haiti are doing!
You can find the full essay on the olpc wiki.
Summary: The formidable expansion of the digital environment in our planet is one of the most urgent challenges of this century. This new environment supports most human activities around the world today. Among the multiple socialchanges empowered by the digital environment we must emphasize the transformation of the education of the new generations, the so-called “digital natives.†The access to this digital environment is now becoming a hope for millions of students and teachers, a way to overcome ignorance and poverty. It is a human right, and a value in itself.
At the same time the digital environment is becoming the common ground for the mind, brain and education sciences. We think that the future of
education will depend on the increasing integration of these sciences. And education is the hope of humanity. The teacher is facing new pedagogical challenges in a globalized world. We should however acknowledge the fact that while we have significant information about the learning brain we lack a similar knowledge of the teaching brain. Our expectation is to bridge this neuro-cognitive gap in the next years.
Pencils Not Guns