The OLPC Bhagmalpur project, which Sameer started in 2008 with support from the Digital Bridge Foundation, is finishing a renovation that will provide regular power from a generator at the local school, and close to giving the students there their own XOs. They visited with the students recently, one of whom is featured in our second Mission video, to show them how many people are following the school’s progress.
Abhishek Singh from OLE Nepal published his long and excellent XS wishlist, generating a long discussion on the server-devel mailing list (1, 2) and other discussion online. He discusses some specific use cases for current and requested-future features, including:
On the list, Martin comments on the package requests, Mokurai weighs in, and Sridhar points out what OLPC-AU has been doing with their XS builds.
Khürgülek Ondar, with help from OLPC-SF, is heading back to Tuva with XOs in hand and some Sugary ideas to share. Sameer is helping maintain an OLPC Tuva project blog, and they are looking for help in localizing Sugar into Tuvan.
The excellent Kleider clan have been giving him some help… now I hope he finds someone from OLPC MN to meet with him there.
The Michigan State unexploded-landmine-avoidance game was recently released for PC as well as XO. Children testers in Cambodia and developers were interviewed about it earlier this month.
OLPC Australia has released an update to their USB ‘toolkit’ for XOs, a collection of software on a USB thumb drive designed to assist in recovery, repair, and support scenarios. The new version is ready for testing, and Sridhar expects only documentation changes between now and its final release.
The XO-AU USB is OLPC Australia’s official means of delivering updates and troubleshooting tools to schools.
Two weeks back, the Financial Times posted an essay by Gillian Tett about OLPC, titled “Billions of children could be transformed by cheap computers” (and later, “Why logging on should be child’s play”). The article eventually concludes that children’s lives could be transformed, and that being able to ‘log on’ to the Internet should probably be child’s play for all children — but was much more ambivalent than the titles suggest.
They ran a long reader response to the article the following week, which is worth sharing:
As a fellow anthropologist in the financial sector, I am surprised by Gillian Tett asking “Could the idea fly? Should it?” regarding the distribution of $200 connected green laptops to children in the developing world. I similarly question her implication that this is a local Latin American initiative by One Laptop Per Child, as part of a grand “intellectual vision” recently developed by neuroscientists.
In the 21st century, we cannot separate computer literacy from the traditional “3Rs”. The luxury of computer literacy is the competitive edge of the developed world’s affluent children…
One Laptop Per Child’s mission statement has no neuroscientific technobabble: to supply cheap, green, durable, connected laptops for “collaborative, joyful, and self-empowered learning … [and] a brighter future”. Currently, 2.1m XO computers have been deployed to children and teachers worldwide in Latin America, Africa and Asia.
For Ms Tett to ask “if” or “should” this happen is like asking if the horse Goldikova should race. The little green laptop has legs – and it’s a winner.
Late last year, Roger (Arnan) published a brief summary of his two-year analysis of seven schools in Thailand, reported in The Nation, which was spun negatively in the Bangkok Post. While I haven’t seen the data on which he bases his analysis, his research and recent paper (from ICLS 2010) do not look negative; though they note that urban schools whose students already have access to computers (and, presumably, to libraries) do not see short-term improvements in traditional test scores, despite seeing improvements in basic literacy.
This is not surprising — OLPC does not target wealthier urban schools except as part of national saturation deployments, such as in Uruguay, Peru, and Rwanda where the entire system is undergoing a change in how it approaches learning in and out of school. Read the rest of this entry »
Happy new year to the OLPC community around the world! Thank you for your part in everything we have accomplished in 2010 – from our new initiatives in Gaza, Argentina, and Nicaragua to expansion of work in Peru, Uruguay, Rwanda, Mexico, Afghanistan, and Haiti.
Special thanks to everyone who has worked on the newest iterations of Sugar, and those who put on the grassroots events over the past year in the Virgin Islands, San Francisco, and Uruguay — all of which has helped connect some of our smaller projects and realize some of their educational dreams in new activities. We’ve launched our new website for the year, highlighting the stories from these and other deployments; this blog may merge into that site as well (and you can see blog posts appearing in its News section).
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!
Last weekend ran on into Monday for many attendees, due to late flights and the enormous hospitality of the Kleiders – June, Alex, Tanya, Isabella and Mike Gehl. Tremendous thanks are due to them and to everyone who made this such a joyous event!
Thanks also to the tireless design work and organization of Mike Lee and Elizabeth Barndollar, program coordination of Sameer Verma, Adam Holt and Hilary Naylor, social media and web support/registration fronts by Elizabeth Krumbach and Grant Bowman, and the local networking and support of Carol Ruth Silver and the SFSU student volunteer team of Alexander Mock, Abhi Pendyal, Brittany Dea, Charles Fang, Christian Pascual, Dan Sanchez, Gerard Enriquez, Hue La, Jay Cai, Lana Seto, Navi Thach , Neeraj Chand, Nina Makalinaw, Paul Mak, Russell Lee, and Simon Pan.
Live documentation of the event was possible thanks to tireless video work, moderation and transcription of Ben Sheldon, Nina Stawski, and others; and gifts and travel were supported by dozens of individuals, attendees (through their registration fees — thank you!) and by OLPC.
And finally, behind the scenes thank you to Yuliana Diestel and Richard Ho at the SFSU Downtown Center for managing logistics and Dean Nancy Hayes of the College of Business at SFSU for hosting us, and to Peter Brantley at the Internet Archive for allowing ten of us to join the excellent Books in Browsers event.
OLPC Mongolia banner, from laptop.gov.mn
They have charming walkthroughs for every core activity (here’s WikipediaEN and Speak. And they love to share data… sometimes in 3D.
Australia, Oceania, Nepal and Canada are leading the way in terms of detailed maps of the schools involved in pilots; it would be great to see what artistic style Mongolia adds to that meme.
OLPC’s global community of contributors and volunteers is gathering for its largest ever meeting to date, on the weekend of October 22-24, in San Francisco! Thanks to the OLPC San Francisco Community led by Professor Sameer Verma, and our gracious host San Francisco State University. If you want to take a stand for global education rights For All in this 21st century, now is your time — OLPC’s Global Community is a friendly and supportive network inviting you too to Stand & Deliver:
The OLPC SF Community Summit 2010 will be a community-run event bringing together educators, technologists, anthropologists, enthusiasts, champions and volunteers. We share stories, exchange ideas, solve problems, foster community and build collaboration around the One Laptop per Child project and its mission worldwide.
Now we’re taking the next step, bringing together the voices of OLPC experience, Sugar Labs, the Realness Alliance — and yourself. Check out our growing list of social entrepreneurs who’ve already signed up from Uruguay, Peru, Paraguay, Argentina, Nicaragua, Africa, Afghanistan, India, Philippines, France, UK, Italy, Belgium, Austria, Canada, Birmingham and beyond. Then please consider joining us, adding your own contribution/testimonial and photo!
OLPC Australia is in the middle of providing 300 children and teachers with XOs in Doomadgee, Queensland. This continues their work in Aboriginal regions across the continent (see their amazing school-by-school map). I always look forward to the updates of that particular map – which colors every school deployment by whether it is completed or not.
With roughly 4,000 laptops deployed, we’re still in the beginning stages of the initiative. It’s a good stage to be in, especially for building our technical support in advance. So what’s the best way of doing that?
One idea that has been proposed: setting up partnerships with students at Afghan universities. We’d recruit teams of student volunteers to provide ongoing support to teachers and pilot projects. Throughout the whole process, OLPC would provide ongoing support, feedback, access to spare parts and technical advice. Of course there are still a lot of details to iron out. Right now we’re planning to call it the Afghanistan Children’s Connectivity Project, involving individual Connectivity Centers in community hubs in each region.
This year, the United States Government requested $105.9 billion for military operations in Afghanistan. The numbers break down into $68.1 billion requested by the Department of Defense for 2010 and a $33 billion supplement requested by the Administration to support the 30,000 person troop surge in the area. It’s funny to think that providing every child in the country with an XO would cost about $800 million — or 3 days of that military spending.
Samantha Harris is a rising star in the Australian modeling world, recently on the cover of Vogue Australia, and proud of her Aboriginal heritage. She supports OLPC Australia’s work, which is primarily focused on Aboriginal communities on the mainland and on surrounding islands. Here is a recent interview she gave to Napoleon Perdis.
