Yirkalla is being well-covered by Australian media. TEN Digital devoted part of a weekend episode to the deployment, including this video from the classroom during the first day of the deployment. They catch a priceless expression on this child’s face 1:10 in, as he either learns to play Maze (as the shot suggests) or discovers Rick Astley for the first time.
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Also in Arabic: ÙÙŠ اللغة العربية
After a 10-month wait for approvals, the UNRWA OLPC core team, administrators, parents and children of Rafah took part in a brilliant beginning to the UNRWA OLPC program in Gaza, with a celebration event on April 29th. I was fortunate to spend the days beforehand with this team and their community. They worked tirelessly – children, parents, teachers, developers, and administrators – and it was inspiring to work with them.
The Palestinian people have the optimism, resourcefulness, and dedication to turn a speck of dust into a garden. Not just any garden, but one that the entire community shares.
And the XO has a special feature beyond its tech specs and activities – it can energize a community to have hope for their children. One member of the core team, Jamil, remarked; “This is XO is a humble machine, we can take it and do great things with it.”
They did.
In a mere 12 weeks after their first intro to the XO, the Gaza core and community team:
– prepared infrastructure
– designed and gave workshops for 200 teachers and 12 administrators
– introduced the XO to 2000+ students
– helped these children introduce the XO to their parents
– created a digital library
– ported their own ILP learning games to run on the XO
– integrated Memorize, Chat, Browse, & Speak into classroom activities
– helped teachers begin distributing homework via the XO
– witnessed initially skeptical parents begin to advocate at shops and mosques for XOs for all the children of Gaza
I was looking through Uruguayan videos online for a recent full-length TV episode on Ceibal. I didn’t find it, but here is the tireless Miguel Brechner presenting at TEDx in Buenos Aires last month – well worth a watch. And there was a news episode on Argentine television late last year.
I also found this surprise: “Aprendiendo con Ceibal“, an unusual half-hour post-modern classroom experience…
(hat tip to Bob Hacker)
Part of our ongoing series on OLPC in Afghanistan
The ISAF Logo:
In Kabul I met with General Stanley McChrystal, current commander of the
International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). Joining us were other top brass including Rear Admiral Greg Smith, chief of telecommunications, to discuss OLPC in Afghanistan.
The OLPC concept is predicated on the idea that technology can reach this generation of children and teach them to think critically, and analytically, and can connect them to each other and the world’s body of knowledge. If these things were to come to pass for this generation of Afghani children, the world will look very different in ten years than it does now.
McChrystal and Smith and others acknowledged that this is not a normal war. It is a war where the US is engaged in building better lives for the people of the country, a war which seeks to build social capital between the government and its people, a war which seeks to build peace by building education and
ultimately prosperity.
All were hugely receptive to the idea that OLPC could: 1) Educate this generation of children right now, 2) end the isolation of the Afghani people, and 3) build social capital between the people and the government.
I asked McChrystal to be a champion of OLPC in Washington and in Kabul, and asked him to think about ways to fund every child in Afghanistan. He
asked for the dollar figure. I said it would cost $1 billion to connect every child. He didn’t blink. It can be done. In his words, “Our job is to end violence, and this is one way we can do it.“
Coming up in this series: Building partnerships and future preparations.
This is the start of an ongoing series on OLPC in Afghanistan –sj
I travelled to Kabul, Afghanistan last week with two purposes: To assess prospective partners on the ground, including the Ministry of Education (MOE), in order to get a sense of both intent and capacity; and to meet with potential supporters for OLPC in Afghanistan, and craft a strategy for the coming year.
I)Â Introduction
Afghanistan is a hugely complicated part of the world. Regional politics are impacted by the politics of India, Iran and Pakistan, and the geopolitical wrangling of America, Russia and China add an entirely different element into the mix. Combine this with decades of virtually uninterrupted war, limited natural resources, and low rural literacy, and you have a country that needs dramatic change in education.
Although relatively rapid progress has been made recently in the education sector, just over half (52%) of primary school aged children are enrolled in school.  Furthermore, due to a shortage of schools and teachers, schools are forced to operate in “shiftsâ€, the average being three “shifts†per day, meaning that each child generally receives only 2.5 hrs (5 x 30min periods) of school each day. The time constraints imposed by the shift system, combined with the fact that teacher-student ratios are often as high as 1:50-75, result in Afghan children receiving only about half the OECD recommended average time in school. In addition, many teachers in Afghanistan have an education level only a few years greater than the students they are teaching. The result is a cycle of rote education, with limited opportunities for innovation.
The conventional remedy of building more schools, training more teachers and providing more materials would require a six fold increase to the education budget (over a billion USD per year), would take 10-15 years to yield measurable results, and would be prey to some of these same problems.
The La Rioja pilot is underway, with the first of 60,000 XOs being distributed and field reports coming in from reactivated’s Daniel Drake. Local news are reporting on the need to bring laptops to places where noone comes, and the value of Sugar to young learners.
The latest article in La Nacion includes an intro video by Ariel Torres about the OLPC project, with a nice Wikipedia cameo.