Nicholas talked about Schools without schools and children as agents of change at TEDx Brussels in 2010.  Children can grow up with a wealth of learning and skills that we cannot imagine today.
Schools without schools
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Category Archives: Education and Content
Happy new year
Happy new year to the OLPC community around the world! Â 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. Â 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).
Put your Favorite School Ever on the Map!
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!
DebXO 0.6 released!
(adapted from this recent mailing list thread. Â this is a sweet build; try it out.)
After waaaaaaaaaaaaaay to long of a delay, I just tagged and built DebXO 0.6 (installation guide).  In some ways, it’s very polished (I’ve actually tested all of the desktops myself), in other ways it has a number of regressions (due to Debian updates breaking things, switching to an almost-stock Linus kernel, etc).  Either way, I wanted to get it out because people keep asking about it, and dropping JFFS2 leads to such a massive improvement.
DebXO is a version of Debian (testing) that is customized for the XO-1 hardware.  The 0.6 release adds initial support for the XO-1.5 hardware; however, XO-1.5 is not officially supported [yet].  I’ll update the official wiki page with instructions for XO-1.5, for the early adopters.
MAJOR CHANGES:
- Update distribution to Debian Squeeze.  All packages and desktops have been upgraded.  This is pretty major; for example, Sugar is now at 0.88, and Gnome at 2.30(ish).
- Kernel update.  Switch from the olpc-2.6 tree to Linus’s linux-2.6 tree (based upon 2.6.37-rc4+).  A few pending patches from -next and -mm have been included, but other than that… it’s stock.  The config closely matches the Debian stock kernel config; at a future date, we’ll just switch to a standard Debian 686 kernel.
- Switch the nand images from using JFFS2 to UBIFS.  This makes an amazing difference in terms of usability.  Over time, JFFS2 filesystems get slower as they fragment, while UBIFS doesn’t appear to.
- Initial XO-1.5 support. It’s still rough around the edges, but it’s functional (currently xorg.conf and /boot/olpc.fth must be edited).  …
Peru’s XO cadre: 813,000 strong and growing
Peru’s latest deployment to urban schools is underway, expanding the total reach of their federal program to over 8,350 institutions and 813,000 children and their teachers, across the country. Â The program focuses on a few classes in each of a large number of schools, to ensure that the schools are all part of the program. Â Many of these schools will not have saturation (yet), but this will make ULUN much more a part of everyday school life in the capital.
The latest banners up around Lima announcing the project are bold. Â I can’t remember the last time I saw a major public ad for a national education program in the US.
Ecuador gets laptops for 3800+ elementary students
Two progressive towns in Ecuador is launching an olpc scheme: 4000 students and teachers in elementary schools in the cities of Cuenca and La Libertad will get laptops this year. The program includes its own plan for repairs and support, comprehensive training for teachers, and work integrating digital content. Schools involved will get one of XOs, Classmates, or HP netbooks, and the results will be compared. In all, the program will cost $2.5M, and will serve as a pilot for the district. If successful, it will be expanded to further elementary schools.
From a summary of the program:
El Ministerio de Educación de Ecuador firmó un convenio en septiembre del 2010 para Mi Compu, un programa piloto Uno a Uno en las escuelas. El plan se propone distribuir computadoras portátiles a 3.200 estudiantes y 172 docentes en la ciudad de Cuenca, y a 622 / 26 en la ciudad de Santa Elena.
Las computadoras portátiles XO, Classmate y HP se distribuirán y se compararán en cuanto a sus ventajas técnicas y pedagógicas. El piloto ofrecerá también un soporte técnico robusto, mantenimiento de las computadoras, conectividad y software para docentes y estudiantes; va complementado por 120 horas de capacitación docente que consta de tres módulos: familiarización con el hardware y el software, uso pedagógico de las TIC en el aula, y una introducción a las herramientas de medios digitales tales como software especializado para maestros, investigación en Internet y contenido digital educativo.
El objetivo es estudiar el impacto de las computadoras laptop sobre los estudiantes y los docentes, tomando en consideración la distribución de computadoras, su capacidad y el soporte técnico. Para más información, sÃrvase leer: “Se Entregarán Laptops en Cuenca y La Libertadâ€, BoletÃn informativo Pizarra, Ministerio de Educación, Noviembre 2010, No. 3