The Kigali press have been attentive to our new learning center there, and the New Times has run a number of reports after the opening ceremony with quotes from Kagame and his staff, a series on education by David, a spotlight on children and their XOs, and a Sunday feature.
There have been local radio interviews with the staff of the center as well ( ICT in education ). More images after the jump.
Continue reading
This summer, OLPC is starting two projects in Africa. One is OLPCorps, which we have covered over the past few months and which you will be hearing a great about from the participants themselves. The other is the founding of a learning center that has just been founded at the Kigali Institute for Science, Technology and Management [KIST]. As part of this process, the OLPC learning team, including David Cavallo and Juliano Bittencourt, have been in Kigali for some time, laying the groundwork for this week’s public launch. President Kagame himself came to open the center — here is the official press announcement:
LAUNCHED IN RWANDA BY HIS EXCELLENCY PAUL KAGAME, THE PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC OF RWANDA
OLPCorps Teams to Assist in Providing New Educational Opportunities in 17 Countries in Sub-Saharan Africa
Kigali, Rwanda, June 9, 2009 — One Laptop per Child (OLPC), a nonprofit organization whose mission is to help provide every child in the world with access to a modern education, in collaboration with the Government of Rwanda, is launching in Kigali, Rwanda, a Global Center for Excellence in Laptops and Learning. The purpose of the Center is to create the highest quality examples of learning with connected laptops in schools and communities, support ongoing laptop implementation plans in Rwanda, and create an African regional laptop network.
Leading the world in exemplifying laptops for learning, Rwanda is the natural base for this new center. The government of Rwanda has committed to providing all 2.2 million of its primary school children with laptops by 2012 and to serving as a model for other countries to copy, improve and further innovate. The Center also will develop senior fellows, community learning specialists and technology specialists who will return to their countries to lead efforts nationally, regionally and locally to extend laptop learning programs.
“OLPC has experienced great success when support for our mission comes from both the government (top down) as well as from grassroots (bottom up),†said Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman of One Laptop per Child. “The partnership with Rwanda represents a substantial commitment by both OLPC and Rwanda to bring learning to the grassroots and country level, which is exactly where it should be.â€
Children in remote communities in Western Australia and the Northern Territory are being introduced to the digital world with their own XOs as part of an international program aimed at boosting attendance. They have been localized to include the local language of Yolgnu Matha. From an announcement last month as the project was being rolled out:
Mr Lacey was hopeful the laptops would increase the current attendance rate of about 360 students regularly attending out of 500.
“We want to use it as an incentive, come to school….” At Rawa Community School, near the Great Sandy Desert 600km southeast of Port Hedland in Western Australia, the laptops will mean learning can be better adapted to each student.
It will be interesting to see how this fits into the plans of Geoff Anson and the crew at OLPC Australia.  Meanwhile, Pia Waugh of OLPC Friends has joined the Government 2.0 movement in the Australian government and can offer a perspective from both sides of that fence.
Here are blogs from our first 29 OLPCorps teams. (The 30th team, working in Kibwezi, received only hardware support).
University of Miami       Mauritania
Cornell : Mauritania
Tulane/U at Buffalo : Sierra Leone
UMaryland/Princeton : Sierra Leone
UPenn : Cameroon
Kwame Nkrumah U of Sci & Tech : Ghana
CUNY Baruch : Ghana
University of Education, Winneba : Ghana
University of Ibadan : Nigeria
ULagos/Royal Holloway/USalford : Nigeria
Texas A&M University : Nigeria
Dalarna U/Royal IT : Ethiopia
Laval University : Gabon
University of Illinois : Sao Tome e Principe
Colorado College : Uganda
MIT/Wellesly : Uganda
UC Berkeley Uganda
Utah State University : Rwanda
UWash/New School : Kenya
UT Antonio/Baylor : Kenya
University of Kinshasa : Congo
Tumaini University : Tanzania
GW University/UMaryland : Madagascar
Macalester U/Midlands State U/U of Zimbabwe : Zimbabwe
Harvard/MIT : Namibia
Teachers College/Caprivi College of Ed : Namibia
Indiana University : South Africa
UMASS-Boston : South Africa
Gettysburg College/Rhodes U : South Africa
Yesterday Sébastien Adgnot sent me a lovely message about Dailymotion’s drive to make Theora encodings available for all of their videos. Blizzard sums up the implications nicely:
Today Dailymotion, one of the world’s largest video sites, announced support for open video. They’ve put out a press release, a blog post on the new openvideo site as well as a demo site where you can see some of the things that you can do with open video and Firefox 3.5. They are automatically transcoding all of the content that their Motion Makers and Official Users create and expect to have around 300,000 videos transcoded into the open Ogg Theora and Vorbis formats. You can view the site they have up at openvideo.dailymotion.com.
This is fantastic news; it is a continuation of work DM started with a theora portal for a certain mean green machine, and means another 300,000 videos that will play natively on XOs out of the box.
PSNR comparisons of x264 v theora
More importantly, this is only the start of a wave of free codec adoption. Theora has been making great technical strides at lower bitrates, with steady support from RedHat, Mozilla, and Wikimedia. Expect similar updates to come over the summer, perhaps as early as June’s Open Video Conference in New York.
Congratulations to everyone at Dailymotion who helped make this milestone happen!
OLPC.tv is a collection 362 videos about OLPC from around the world. It has been updating since January 2007 by fan and volunteer Nicolas Charbonnier, of Denmark. Now its efforts are being expanded to include other Sugar and 1:1 Computing videos.
If you have a video to suggest to add to the ones already posted, please send them to olpctv <at> laptop.org. If you are at an OLPC event, school, or meetup, help take videos of the people there (with the consent of teachers and parents, of course). You can also hack Record to let you capture videos of higher quality with your XO.