Category Archives: OLPC

Rwanda ranks among top IT countries on the continent

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Pupils of Kimisagara Primary School in Kigali using laptops during a lesson. Rwanda is among top 10 African countries in ICT usage. The New Times/ T. Kisambira.

Original post and photo from NewTimes

Rwanda has been ranked among the top 10 countries in Africa that are in better position to benefit from new information and communication technologies.

The 2013 Networked Readiness Index, released on Wednesday by the World Economic Forum (Wef) and European Institute of Business Administration (INSEAD), considers several aspects, including a country’s market and regulatory framework in advancing ICT for inclusive development.

INSEAD is one of the world’s largest graduate business schools, with campuses in Europe, Asia and the Middle East, as well as a research centre in Israel.

The survey that assesses the capacity of 144 developed and developing economies to leverage ICT for growth and well-being, ranks Rwanda top in East Africa, 6th in Africa and 88th globally with a score of 3.68.

Mauritius ranks first in Africa and 55th globally with a score of 4.12, followed by South Africa on 70th (3.87), Seychelles (79th with a score of 3.80), Egypt on 80th position scoring 3.78, Cape Verde (81st with a score of 3.78) and Rwanda.

The report, titled “Growth and Jobs in a Hyper-connected World”, recommends that national policies in some developing economies are failing to translate ICT investment into tangible benefits in terms of competitiveness, development and employment.

The Global Information Technology Report 2013 says Finland comes first in the world with a score of 5.98, followed by Singapore with 5.96 and Sweden with 5.91 in the third position.

The findings dwell on each country’s ICT infrastructure, cost of access and the presence of the necessary skills to ensure an optimal use, use of ICT among governments, business and individuals, business and innovation environment, the political and regulatory framework and economic and social impacts accruing from ICT.

“Despite initial concerns that ICT would hasten the deployment of resources towards developing countries, the benefits are now widely recognised as an important way for companies and economies to optimise productivity, free up resources, boost innovation and job creation,” said Beñat Bilbao-Osorio, senior economist, global competitiveness and benchmarking network, WEF, and co-editor of the report.

ICT usage

The survey states that despite progress, Latin America and the Caribbean still face connectivity challenges, while sub-Saharan Africa ICT usage remains very low, even though nations continue to build ICT infrastructure. In the Middle East and North Africa, ICT investment and use is sharply divided.

The report recognises Rwanda’s efforts to transform its agrarian economy into a knowledge-based one by 2020, using ICT.

“Rwanda’s ICT investments in education, partnerships with foreign universities and the laying of fibre-optic cables have created a conducive environment. Services such as E-Soko, a mobile service that allows farmers to check market prices for their products, have already improved the daily life of many Rwandans,” the report says.

It adds: “With the help of these new technologies, Rwanda intends to capitalise on its central location in Africa and act as a hub for banking, financial and outsourcing services.”

Speaking to The New Times, yesterday, Alex Ntale, the director of ICT chamber at Private Sector Federation, said: “it’s a testimony of what good governance and strong private sector can achieve with commitment and support of responsive public institutions.”

Rwanda has been on several occasions ranked among the most dynamic performers when it comes to ICT development globally.

Last year, the International Telecommunication Union report named Rwanda, Bahrain, Brazil, Ghana, Kenya, and Saudi Arabia as developing nations with strong dynamic ICT markets because of  catching up fast in efforts to bridge the ‘digital divide’.

To advance ICT growth, Rwanda plans to establish an ICT park that will be a base of technological investments, including training, industries, research and development. The country has also laid a robust 2,500-kilometre national fibre optic cable that seeks to enhance access to various broadband services and the National Data Centre.

“Individual countries need to identify the digital divide gap in order to fulfill long-term growth, competitiveness and innovation targets,” said Bruno Lanvin, the executive director INSEAD and co-editor of the report.

To maximise the country’s ICT infrastructure, Rwandan information technology students and fresh graduates are actively engaged in software applications, thanks to kLab innovation centre—an open technology hub for IT entrepreneurs.

 

Contact email: frank.kanyesigye[at]newtimes.co.rw

 

Learning how to learn – Rodrigo Arboleda at TEDxCMU

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Rodrigo Arboleda is Chairman and CEO of One Laptop Per Child Association (OLPCA), a not-for-profit entity seeking to provide equal opportunity of access to knowledge to small children in Developing Nations and in some communities within the USA. OLPCA’s mission focuses on socio-economic and cultural change via education, with primary interest in children of 3 years and up. Arboleda is in charge of worldwide operational issues related to the project. More than 2,700,000 laptops have been distributed so far to children in 41 countries and in 21 languages including many indigenous languages. Arboleda has been also a Visiting Scholar at the Media Lab of MIT, where he worked on the Digital Nations Consortium project and on the Education for Peace initiative, E4P. He has served also as a Board Member of the 2B1 Foundation, which made possible some of the projects developed at the Media Lab. He was born in Medellin, Colombia and completed his Bachelor Degree in Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in 1965.

In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.* (*Subject to certain rules and regulations)

3,000 more kids with XO laptops in Nicaragua

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Ciudad Sandino, Managua, Nicaragua – Thursday, April 4, 2013. The Zamora Teran Foundation delivered about 3,000 laptops to elementary students as part of the One Laptop per Child Program.

Zamora Terán Foundation delivered 3000 computers to the same number of children of 10 public schools in Ciudad Sandino as part of its “One Laptop per Child”.

According to the president of this organization, Josefina Maria Teran, with this delivery  30,000 children across the country already have their own XO computer to facilitate their learning process.

In total 101 schools across the country have benefited from this project. The program includes training for teachers on issues of educational innovation to improve the learning process. Besides, 108 teachers from schools in Ciudad Sandino also received their XO computer, a tool that promotes a change in the teaching-learning process.

Thus Ciudad Sandino became, according to Zamora Terán Foundation, the first community in the department of Managua digital. In the rest of the year they expect to deliver 10,000 more computers throughout the municipality.

Rodrigo Zamora interview at Clix CNN Spanish

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Rodrigo Zamora from the Zamora Teran Foundation was interviewed by Guillermo Arduino from Clix CNN in Spanish about the One Laptop per Child program in Nicaragua.

Here the video:

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Nicholas Negroponte: Re-thinking learning and re-learning thinking

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Published on Mar 19, 2013

Re-thinking learning and re-learning thinking

Nicholas Negroponte, Technology Visionary and Founder, One Laptop per Child

What if we have learning all wrong?

In this thoughtful, provocative keynote, Professor Negroponte explores the implications of the work of One Laptop per Child (OLPC), the non-profit association he founded in 2005. Distributing 2.5 million rugged laptops around the world and seeing how impoverished children use them has provoked Professor Negroponte into re-considering much that we take for granted about how children — and all of us –learn.

The industrialisation of schooling, he argues, has replaced our natural wonder of learning with an obsessive focus on facts. We treat knowing as a surrogate for learning, even though our experience tells us that it is quite possible to know about something while utterly failing to understand it.

And compounding this is instructionism’s fatally flawed belief that anything can be taught and that there is a perfect way to teach everything. If we have learned one thing from OLPC, it is that the human mind is too rich, complex and wonderful for that.

This lesson does not apply only to children, and it does not apply only to developing countries. Children can — and do — learn a great deal by themselves before they have their natural curiosity extinguished, too often by school. And those children grow into adults. So how would our education systems and our adult lives be better, if we focused a little less on measuring what we tell people and a little more on understanding how they discover?

http://www.learningtechnologies.co.uk

Video: