St. Kitts is expanding its (lowercase) olpc program for high school students. The program, sponsored by their diplomatic ally Taiwan, began with 1200 students in April. This month they are adding 2400 more students. Â Ambassador Tsao, the Taiwanese ambassador to St. Kitts, said on Monday that children having their own laptops was “tantamount to hav[ing] keys to their bright future”.
Luis Galindo’s workshops with OLPC and game development continue at the Creative Center in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. Â They recently finished a Scratch game about recycling, available to play with at scratch.mit.edu.
Geeks Without Frontiers, working with Cozybit’s Javier Cardona, recently released the latest version of their open source village-scale wifi tech, o11s. This is solid work that deserves more visibility.
Also covered by ostatic.
Antonio Battro wrote recently about spontaneous reading and literacy experiments with laptops, in an essay on computers as reading prostheses (for children and others). In it he refers to Sugata Mitra’s work in India with the Hole in the Wall project:
In this sense, we should also experiment with spontaneous reading using a computer. OLPC will start now to deliver XO laptops with special software to remote communities with no schools where children and adults are lacking reading, writing or number skills. An inspiration was the famous “hole in the wall” experiment done in India with illiterate children who spontaneously started to read while sharing an unsupervised computer, what Sugata Mitra calls “minimally invasive education”.
Everything we learn in life is part of our education — most of it not conveyed explicitly by instructors. From your own experience: how has minimally invasive education been part of your life, in contrast with controlled, highly directed learning?
Mike Hutak, OLPC Oceania director, signed an agreement with the University of the South Pacific this week, committing to work together to further research and teacher training on 1-to-1 Computing in the region.  Mike commented on the handover in Fiji:
USP is the leading teacher training institution in the region with campuses in all 10 Pacific countries where there are OLPC projects. Governments and ministries of education will now have access to the best minds in the region for their country to using the XO laptop in the classroom. And at the Japan Pacific ICT Centre, they will now have access to the best facilities too.
Mike: thanks for the update!
The contest rules are out for the OLPC/Nickelodeon storytelling contest. Â OLPC and Nick will be judging the submissions together. Â All XO users in Latin America are eligible to compete by submitting a story, anination, or other multimedia clip of up to 3 minutes. Â Contest ends August 29.
OLPC Association y Nickelodeon organizan y juzgan el concurso en conjunto (anuncio, reglas completas):
Hat tip to Claudia, Christoph, and Giulia.