Jeff Shear composed a thoughtful retrospective on OLPC.
The laptop that will save the world, revisited
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Category Archives: Technology
Paving the road to connectivity
Alice Rawsthorn follows up on her earlier pieces on OLPC with an short, sweet article in yesterday’s New York Times. “A Few Stumbles on the Road to Connectivity” offers a summary of OLPC’s work and development over the past three years. She touches on many of the changing expectations about the project, by supporters and detractors, over the years, noting that initial detractors worried we would distort the commercial market, or impede other humanitarian projects. But both commercial and other humanitarian projects in education and technology have grown, even in countries where OLPC has reached every school and is a significant part of the annual education or technology budget.
The larger story, often lost in the drama of competing yet similar programs, is the global change wrought by universal connectivity projects. UCPN, Ceibal, Canaima, Connectar Igualdad, Magelhan, Aakash — all are variations on the essential theme. That will soon have transformed education in most of the world. The question is, which regions will still be left out?
OLPC Rwanda Report: Transforming society through access to modern education
As we mentioned yesterday, OLPC Rwanda now has an excellent project summary (pdf) online. It covers the first three years of the national initiative and the related development of Rwanda’s primary schools.
The report captures the spirit and challenges of country-wide change. It addresses the major phases of the project, and the background in government policy and vision, without diving into too much detail.
A recent teacher's workshop in Rulindo, Rwanda
A summary, to whet your appetite:
In 2000, under the leadership of President Paul Kagame, Rwanda established 20-year objectives to transform the country into an industrial/service-based economy. This VISION 2020 plan specifies short-, medium- and long-term goals with measurable indicators of progress.
The plan relies on six pillars, the second being human resource development & a knowledge-based economy, and three horizontal areas, the third being science & technology.
In 2001, only one of the country’s 2,300 primary schools had any computers at all.  By 2005, 1,138 schools had at least one PC, 40 schools in Kigali had Internet access, and connectivity was being rolled out to other schools.  Over 1,000 teachers had been trained in computer literacy, from 120 primary schools.
Rwanda announced in January 2007 it would work with One Laptop per Child. Â In 2008, it received 10,000 XOs [thanks primarily to our generous donors and the G1G1 program].
In early 2010, the government purchased 65,000 XO laptops so that schools in every school district could begin receiving laptops for P4-P6 students. This purchase was financed by the sale of cellular licenses to Tigo and Korea Telecom, working with the government to extend broadband connectivity nationwide. Â They have since purchased another 35,000 XOs, and plan to deploy another 400,000 over the next 5 years. Today the program has a 27-person core team, plus 5 staff from OLPC, working on the project.
The Ministry of Education started with 150 schools, and asked the headmaster and a teacher of their choice to come to Kigali for one week of intensive training. They subsequently spent four days at each school to work with the teachers and students, and one day for community awareness meetings.
Ministry representatives held meetings with local Parent Teacher Associations and local authorities, explaining how laptops would be integrated into the classroom. They also went on radio and TVÂ and write newspaper articles to discuss the project.
Parents at a PTA meeting introducing the XO
GoGoNews kids’ news activity to ship with Sugar
GoGoNews, a site providing news summaries for kids, is developing an XO activity to showcase their news.  Like the older NewsReader activity, it will offer regular updates from its online feed.  OLPC plans to ship the activity with future XOs, in English and Spanish.
The activity is scheduled to be done by February. Â GoGoNews founder Golnar Khosroshawi says of the project “Together we will equip children with relevant technology and content, regardless of location, to promote learning and understanding, not just of academics, but of people, countries and cultures.”
School computer labs passing out of favor
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. Â We should demand more, not less, for our own education — which underlies our capacity to pursue the rest.
Visualizing universal connectivity in Argentina
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. Â (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.