John Valent with the E4N Foundation has been working with children and families in Cheminy, and is expanding to two more schools in Pokot as the new school term begins. They use a collection of materials for both school and farming, and encourage children to learn with their families, and help their families learn, outside of school.
Kudos to their team for sharing their work, and tracking their open tasks and reports online.
Community-organized Haitian EduTech Dinner, Tuesday night 5PM SHARP: at OLPC HQ.
Please join! Best of all, Boston’s Haitian Coalition will
join our OLPC_Boston monthly community meeting to discuss certain very intriguing next-gen EduTech plans (OLPC, Sugar,http://open1to1.org etc) emerging in Somerville Massachusetts, as well as the 400 OLPC laptops shipping to Haiti shortly,
with Waveplace’s own Beth Santos flying in to Boston en route to Haiti.
And Marina’s blog (saigonolpc.wordpress.com) is just 1 of many now summarizing other incredible volunteering-is-NOT-a-spectator-sport work on Planet OLPC.
We dearly hope to see you Tuesday — with 9+ tangentially related trips in February alone, among some very connected AND deeply dedicated Friends education/tech thinkers and doers in Boston here, it’s clear there will be tons to discuss! Dinner is being prepared; optionally feel free to bring desserts/drinks if you can and RSVP.
Then join us taking the next step in this critical educational design challenge — 1 humble country at a time 😉
OLPC XO-1 users who are running software builds 650-656 (from 2007 and early 2008) are encountering keyboard/touchpad freezing this month. Â Some XOs became frozen thanks to a bug in an early version of the firmware. If you encountered this, your XO should start as usual, but with the keyboard and mouse not working.
Here is a quick fix to update your firmware: you’ll need another computer with Internet access, a USB thumb drive (memory stick), a charger and wall outlet, and 10 minutes. (Alternately, you can send your XO to a community repair center – see the comments.)
It is also strongly recommended that you
as the recent releases have many new activities and other improvements.
On Tuesday, Nick Doiron, Mark Battley, Adam Holt, Benaja (visiting from Haiti) worked on building our grassroot map. Nick, now a Carnegie Mellon Senior, is the genius energy who created the new interactive OLPC Map.
Thank you Mark for your organizational skills and creativity. And thank you Nick for patiently listening to our ideas and feedback. I am impressed that you are so freely able to integrate the many ideas of others into your growing project.
Q: What does this Map Represent?
Q: Who should use this map?
Q: How can I use this map if I am new to OLPC, if I interested in starting a project, interested in donating,if I have a project or am a child in a project, and if I am an OLPC volunteer?
Tuesday evening we watched a wonderful film Premier “On the Line” and had a lively discussion with the filmmaker, Audubon Dougherty. The portrait of computer and Internet throughout rural Peru was heart-rendering and very thought provoking. The needs and obstacles are so great. So where are the XOs that have been sent to Peru.
Adam presented gifts to the winners of the fun and instructive OLPC Map/Sugar Trivia Contest…
Read more about the event on Nancie Severs’ blog.
Grovo.com, a new online training site, is running a campaign to help generation XO around the world. They are donating $1 for every person who signs up (the service is free) between now until December 31st. They are also thinking about how to help new XO users learn to use the Internet in different ways. On January 2, Grovo will announce the results on their blog.
Visit www.grovo.com/olpc to get started, and if you like what they’re doing, help spread the word! There are a number of cool mentor/tutor projects in the works, and I expect to see a flowering of results and active mentor networks in the coming year.
Here’s some background on Grovo from one of their early case studies. I can’t wait to see is a series of tutorials like this on how to use, say, the most popular sites in a very different online stting, like Nigeria or Korea (where I have a hard time figuring out the social and procedural norms).
The greatest project you’ve ever built. The most explosively dynamic volunteer you’ve ever met. The greatest school system you’ve ever heard of. Even your own mom’s Haiti school dream?
How should each appear on our community’s global map of 21st century EduTech innovators? How can you help them visually catalyze OLPC’s informal but global deployment community, from Kigali to Kathmandu?
Put YOUR Learning on the Map!
If you cannot attend Boston’s olpcMAPmaking Sprint Dec 27-31 in person, and Audubon Dougherty’s premier Peru film presentation (preview), we invite you instead to inject your inspiration today — and watch your ideas grow — as our volunteer community sets itself to work, night and day showcasing OLPC/Sugar’s deployment doers’ greatest accomplishments worldwide.
So who’s on the front line of our planet’s DIY Foreign Aid Revolution today? Hint: http://olpcMAP.net was built entirely by volunteers, in the last 2 months, its community stories sparked but barely begun. Now they need your help bringing silent heroes’ creative outpourings to light — in and around rising 21st century schools everywhere, no matter how rich or poor — that you personally know are fighting to make a difference!
Whether you join these educational volunteers worldwide, seeding learning community networks one country at time, co-designing our Open Geospatial Infrastructure — or only have time to follow our grassroots pioneers’ mailing list, or just adding your your local insights into our suggestion box — we thank you profusely for your holiday generosity to our still-new-century’s kids emerging!