Category Archives: OLPC

Realness summit, Waveplace call for mentors

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Tim Falconer and Waveplace are hosting the upcoming “realness summit” (about the realness of small independent pilots with XOs, which are quite different from OLPC deployments) on the Virgin Islands at the end of the month. It’s worth a look, though it aims to be offline – Internet junkies may have a hard time either attending in person (and suffering withdrawal) or following the four-day event on Twitter.

Update: Waveplace also regularly recruits mentors to help run their school projects, and have put out a call for mentors for the coming year, with a minute-long video spot.

School reports from Kagugu and Rwamagana

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Julia recently travelled to Kagugu and Rwamagana to work with the OLPC schools there.

In Rwamagana she ran a week-long workshop, working with the students on programs and storytelling. In Kagugu, she took part in a larger review of the project, and helped them update their XOs with an assist from veteran globetrotter Daniel Drake – exercising the nandblast scripts and gathering data on laptop repairs.

I wonder what Bruce would say about the project today.

Caacupé hackfest in Paraguay

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Marco Fioretti interviewed Bernie in Paraguay about his ongoing work there.  From the interview:

The main reason of my work in this country was to bring our end users as close as possible to the developers: our development model cannot work without quick feedback from the trenches. Luckily, I found a lot of talent and interest for programming among the young people of Caacupè. Last March I started to meet some of them them every week to teach them how to develop software for Sugar. We call this the “Caacupé hackfest” and it’s going pretty well.

It’s a nice followup to the XO customization posted last month.

Sugar and OLPC in rural Argentina

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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.

OLPC Greece supports 28 schools

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OLPC in Greece has distributed 550 laptops to over 30 classes in each of 28 schools, and will soon be done with the deployment phase of their program.

In each participating class every student gets their own laptop, but no school has saturation.  I am curious as to how it will turn out.  Each school seems to have done its own internal training and planning, with a high ratio of participating teachers to students — many teachers are engaged in each school.  They all share a country-wide mailing list to discuss their work.  They have made a lovely visualization of their national network, linking proudly to the individual sites of each participating group.