The 10-person creative team @ the Costeau Collective is auctioning two days of marathon designwork for any project at all; proceeds to benefit OLPC.  A cool idea.
Update: The auction raised over $9,000 — enough to support an entire classroom! A hearty thanks to the Collective for their creative support. (So who was the lucky winning bidder?)
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!!
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!
Sandra Thaxter, who has been working with some of the grassroots programs in Kenya, recently joined with others in the OLPC Kenya volunteer community, for a meeting with the the Kenyan Institute for Education on their digital learning initiatives.
Assistant Minister of Education Calist Mwatela set up a meeting between these groups, and they are planning a series of Skype meetings over the next few weeks. Sandra wrote more about this and her dream of an OLPC Kenya Alliance, as a guest post on the Eshibinga blog.
Keep up the good work!
As noted last week, Jackie Lustig has compiled a report from our South African projects. It draws on background data from the country, and highlights work done there over the past four years.
Starting with a gift of 100 laptops from donors on Boston, and expanding through the interest of a number of OLPCorps projects in 2008, South Africa has expanded its OLPC community to almost 1500 students and teachers today.
(This is an 8MB pdf, so may take a moment to load)
Kevin was recently fired up by likes Sridhar’s recent summary of Australian OLPC projects and how they are building a national education programme. He challenges Warschauer and Ames to take a look at their work. (They are known in the olpc-verse primarily for their paper framing the idea of a computer for every child as a “technocentric” “utopian vision”.)
Given the depth of information out today about the diversity of olpc programs, there is much more research to be done – not about whether to give learning tools to children (of course you should), but about how to use them as the basis for transforming and enriching a community. To paraphrase a famous educator, the diversity in OLPC implementations around the world will help us discover the most effective approaches.
A tip of the hat to OLPC Australia, which continues its truly remarkable work.