Nancie Severs and her trip to Vung Vieng Village

Posted on February 18, 2010 by giulia

Imagine you are sitting on your comfy couch watching TV. You decide to tune in to 60 Minutes. They are talking about a nonprofit organization that is bringing a low-cost laptop to children in developing countries. You think that is a great idea and decide to learn more.

Fast forward two years, and you are in the middle of a floating fishing village in Ha Long Bay in Northeast Vietnam. You have started a project to bring a number of these laptops to the only school in the village. While there you are tackling a variety of speed bumps that arise. These range from easy to extremely challenging. As the days pass, you can see the joy in the children and adults of the village. You realize that you have made a difference and changed their lives. You have changed their world for the better.

This is the story Nancie Severs of New Hampshire relayed when she presented at OLPC’s Cambridge headquarters.Â Hearing Nancie speak is inspiring. She has heart and energy. Last year she visited the Vung Vieng Floating Fishing Village with her husband Mark. She thought of OLPC and realizedÂ she could bring the XO to this village with a plan. She says if the XO laptops work out here “in the middle of the sea” where learning resources are limited, books are destroyed by the salty air, and newspapers blow away or get wet, then she will be convinced that it can work almost anywhere.

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OLPC in Vietnam: Vung Vieng village and olpc.vn

Posted on February 11, 2010 by giulia

A student in Vietnam

I recently attended a presentation given by Nancie Severs, one of our dedicated volunteers. She had just returned from Vietnam where she donated her time to a school in small floating fishing village.Â She published a partial account of her experiences organizing a small team to bring one laptop per child to Vung Vieng village.Â Read how she overcame environmental, cultural and energy challenges to pilot the first deployment ever to this area of the world on the Vung Vieng wiki page.

Meanwhile, long-time OLPC volunteer and crack developer Mario Behling has started exploring larger-scale projects in Vietnam, and set up a lovely website (olpc.vn) about the projects there and blogs about them, including Marina’s work in Saigon.

A classroom in SÃ£o TomÃ© e PrÃncipe

Posted on February 7, 2010 by giulia

It’s 8am on Saturday morning, and 100 students and five teachers sweat in a single classroom. Most likely, there is no energy today, but with luck, students come to class with their computers fully charged from another neighborhood. In a concrete room with one door, the students spend hours working on their bright green XOs. The sounds: typing and talking.Â And laughter.

Students working on XOs outside in Sao Tome

This is the scene in SÃ£o TomÃ© e PrÃncipe, a two-island nation of about 160,000 off the west coast of Africa, near Gabon and Nigeria, at the SÃ£o JoÃ£o Secondary School. The school received 100 XOs in the summer of 2009 through an OLPCorps team of students and professors from the University of Illinois.Â It now runs XO classes for its sixth grade students with help from Beth Santos and a local organization called STeP UP (SÃ£o TomÃ© e PrÃncipe Union for Promotion).Â The XOs at the school areÂ quite popular – the program has been covered by local and national news networks.Â You can see pictures of the project and find other SÃ£o TomÃ©-related links at the Sao Tome Blog.

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14th Assembly of the African Union Heads of State

Posted on February 1, 2010 by giulia

Nicholas addressed the 14th Ordinary Session of the Assembly of the African Heads of State yesterday (the 31st) in Addis Ababa.Â The theme of the Assembly was â€œInformation and Communication Technologies in Africa: Challenges and Prospects for Development“.

After his speech, Nicholas met with President Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete of the United Republic of Tanzania, President Paul Kagame of Rwanda, President Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal, Vice President John Dramani Mahama of Ghana,Â and Foreign Affairs Minister Seyoum Mesfin of Ethiopia.

In addition, OLPC was invited to participate at the Information Technologies in Africa Exhibition, jointly organized by the African Union and the Economic Commission for Africa, that took place in parralel with the Heads of States Summit.Â The whole event ran from Jan 27 – Feb 3, and the formal sessions met during the last 4 days of the event.Â OLPC was asked to participate in recognition of OLPCâ€™sÂ contribtion to Africaâ€™s devleopment.

Our reception was very warm, following on the interest at the EALA Summit during the fall.Â Every national leader who touched on education spoke of the importance of connectivity and (lowercase) one laptop per child for vitalizing education.

Images from Ghana

Posted on January 27, 2010 by giulia

In Ghana, where the Baah-Wiredu Laptop per Child Foundation is working towards a 10,000 laptop deployment, the Millennium Village cluster in Bonsaaso includes some of the first adopters of one laptop per child.

The Millennium Villages are part of an effort to help sub-saharan African countries realize the Millennium Development Goals through global social, financial, and innovation support.Â Professor Jeffrey Sachs and former Secretary General Kofi Annan have worked closely together in designing and championing the MDGs, and proposing Millennium Villages and related programs.
This past week, Sachs and Annan visited Bonsaaso and visited the primary students there.

Primary students show off to visitors in Bonsaaso

As the village is unusual in a number of ways, not least in that it reportedly has reliable free internet access, it will be interesting to see how the students and teachers progress over the coming year. What do you think?

Newsletter, take 2: update for January 25

Posted on January 25, 2010 by giulia

The latest issue of the new OLPC newsletter is out. I’m trying out different layouts for an archive, including having select past stories show up each week at the end.

As always, feedback on design and story selection are welcome. Current requests include a way to browse the newsletter online without leaving some sort of story navigation (with some sort of floating TOC?)

For the early-Feb edition we will try to gather & discuss stories and images in advance in the OLPC newsroom.Â Please submit your muck-raking, globe-trotting, xo-loving ideas and links there.

January 25, 2010