Category Archives: Policy

OLPC Rwanda takes off

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Update: the OLPC Rwanda 2011 report is out!

OLPC Rwanda (twitter) has grown steadily since its launch a few years ago, and is now part of early education in every school district in the country. Rwanda aims to become a technical and Web powerhouse, and has remained true to that vision. Today they are in some ways the most technically advanced country in the region (to the chagrin of neighboring Kenya, which also hopes to be the hub for software and technology development in East Africa). Rwanda is preparing to double the size of the OLPC project in the country over the coming year, now that they have a smoothly-running system in place.

Happily for us (and for future deployments), the country team has put together a beautiful report on their first three years of work, which will come out tomorrow. It is concise and written for a general audience, with a fine balance of perspectives, from political and financial to the needs of teachers and PTAs.

In related news, Joseph and Erize, the two boys who made their own business cards for their OLPC outreach efforrts in Kigali, saw that we wrote about them on the blog last week, and left comments of their own welcoming questions from all of you. 🙂

School computer labs passing out of favor

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Mike Trucano, in a typically balanced and measured World Bank blog post, notes that computer labs are coming under increasing scrutiny — and that despite decades of use in the developed world, there is little evidence for them being an effective use of resources given today’s options for discovering computing, learning to use software tools, or connecting to the internet.

Expert opinion, at least in many OECD countries, is increasingly calling into question the reliance on school computer labs as the primary model for impactful use of educational technologies.

He notes the common arguments for teaching with or building computer labs, a countervailing shift towards personal and mobile computing, and the history of the concept.  A good read, and a strong argument for the need for long-term studies to compare and contrast various options without prejudice — so that we cannot again say, decades from now, “The evidence base in support of  <this educational and technological model> is, to my knowledge, not very robust… there is still not a lot of rigorously obtained hard data that we can point to.” We shouldn’t be able to say that about any significant aspect of educational life.

That sort of ignorance in science, business, politics or economics would be utterly unacceptable.  We should demand more, not less, for our own education — which underlies our capacity to pursue the rest.

Visualizing universal connectivity in Argentina

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Argentina’s Conectar Igualdad program, which will provide 3M laptops to secondary students across the country by the end of next year, has devoted much time to their web presence.  (The secondary students receive Classmates; 60K primary students in the north have also recieved XOs.) The national education ministry has a history of excellent web sites, including educ.ar, which has gathered learning materials and information for teachers for years.

Conectar Igualdad has, among other things, a lovely real-time summary of the program’s progress, noting the current targets or the deployment and how it has progressed during the current phase in each district.

They are also open about the experimental nature of their work.  They have asked students and communities to come up with great ideas and local initiatives using the laptops and other information technology, running a variety of contests to select the best of them.  The aim of these contests is to highlight the dynamic of “one laptop per child” and universal connectivity, connect with web 2.0 services, and to collaborate with others in a creative way.

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Paraguay Vice President hands out awards to OLPC students

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Paraguay’s vice president, Federico Franco, recently presented an award to Giulianna Pozzoli, the recent winner of the Nickelodeon-OLPC Scratch animation contest, and other student leaders. This was held Caacupé, home to the country’s first large deployment of children’s laptops.

At 0:39 you can see one of the children in the audience filming his speech on her XO; another is typing as he talks. Others have hand cameras. He talks briefly about how everyone needs to work together to help improve children’s education, for a better future – and this an essential part of it.

OLPC Niue: reports of demise premature

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Following last week’s announcement that the education department is “phasing out” support for OLPC in the South Pacific island nation of Niue, OLPCA is reaching out to the community there, looking at options of how to manage the ongoing communal ownership of the laptops for the benefit of everyone on “The Rock“.  OLPC is working with its Pacific partners to conduct a needs assessment to ascertain the status of the program there, and how they could move forward. We will work with all partners in Niue to ensure the XO contributes to its ongoing educational progress.

We understand the XOs, and all essential associated network infrastructure on Niue, remain in robust working order — and firmly in the hands of the island’s children. It was there that we learned that the OLPC principle of child ownership needed tweaking in the Pacific, where traditional cultures often value the group over the individual. In Oceania children are usually  “custodians” of their laptop, with a responsibility to safeguard it on behalf of the community, and further to share it with that community. These lessons come directly from our first experiences in Niue.

The Niue Department of Education and its partners had put in place a comprehensive and technically competent deployment. Eucators have said the OLPC program “went well” for two years and the XOs produced real educational benefits among students. We are keen to ensure that we document and build on this success, both in Niue and elsewhere in the Pacific. And no matter what direction the program takes we want to ensure it aligns with OLPC Oceania’s Community Participation Guidelines, especially the need for environmentally responsible solutions.

Both OLPCA and the Pacific countries that today are introducing the XO are incorporating lessons from our first Pacific pilots.  We are comparing it to the progress we see elsewhere in remote Australia and in Micronesia in the North Pacific, where the largest donor (the United States) is now working with countries on OLPC.  The fact that a funding shortfall was key to the Niue decision has spurred a broader debate in the region on aid to Small Island States like Niue, and has allowed us to raise the issue with other stakeholders in the region.

 

Niue reviews phasing out olpc, citing Internet costs

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Niue, a small island nation in the Pacific, became the first country to provide one laptop per child, over two years ago. At the time, OLPC Oceania was just taking shape; since then, another 8000 children and teachers have implemented programs across the Pacific.

Last week Niue’s acting Director of Education, Lisimoni Togahai, said that although the first two years went well, they were phasing out the program. “The school could not afford to pay for the high cost of maintaining the V-SAT that’s connected to the satellite for the internet access.”

Niue supported child ownership, and children there take their laptops home and keep them when they graduate. About half of the 500 XOs deployed belong to students who are still in the school system. While schools may be phasing out their subsidized connectivity, the children can use their XOs elsewhere. The country has abundant free wifi – it was touted as the first “Wifi nation” in 2003 for the availability of wifi in all of its cities.

Michael Hutak, coordinator for OLPC Oceania, has been in touch with them hoping for further background. He recently posted a summary of lessons learned so far from Pacific pilots. An excerpt:


* There is country-level demand and political and community support for OLPC in the Pacific;
* Small pilots provide an insufficient evidence base for policy makers;
* Monitoring & Evaluation should be integrated at the outset of an OLPC programme;
* Broad-based regional technical assistance is needed to aid country capacity building;
* Laptops and hardware peripherals should be centrally maintained in the region to efficiently support trials;
* There is suppressed demand for internet connectivity in rural and remote schools.

See also ChristophD’s take and Michael’s followup.