Toshiba is releasing a Libretto W100 series of laptops this fall, taking after the XO-2 in form factor and design. It’s great to see this make it to market.
Unfortunately, the many interface niceties they have implemented seem to be written only for Windows for now.
This week, Argentina’s president Cristina Kirchner oversaw the launch of the La Rioja deployment and the handout of XOs to roughly 2,000 students. This was the public start to the 60,000-student deployment announced this spring, named the JoaquÃn V. González program after the distinguished politician and educator. The program will provide an XO to every primary school student and teacher in the province by next year.
Sabrina DÃaz Rato reported on the event, with shout-outs to Claudia Urrea and Martin Langhoff, who are currently in Argentina helping the learning and technical teams of the project get off to a good start. But the most interesting part of the article comes at the end, where she summarizes related efforts by Walter Flores, Argentina’s Education, Science and Technology minister.
Christina Kirchner presents an XO to a vested young girl
Flores sees La Rioja’s program becoming a model for an implementation that is interesting to other regions, and mentions some specific neighboring provinces looking for advice – the Argentine provinces of Catamarca, Corrientes, and Mendoza, Chile‘s Atacama region, and the Bolivian municipality of Yacuiba.
Continue reading
Thanks to eBay for keeping us in its spotlight this month. OLPC is one of the 3 nonprofits featured in their Giving Works Spotlight on Education. A portion of all proceeds bought or sold through that page will go to OLPC.
And we will again be one of the nonprofits on display at checkout during the second week in August — an invitation for eBay users to donate when checking out with PayPal, which has so far raised roughly $20k.
We are also talking to Causecast about ways to make OLPC more visible as a force for educational change, particularly within the US. If you have a story about an OLPC fundraiser you have participated in or want to share, let us know.
Sri Lanka’s Virtusa has been working with our support gang over the past six months to provide a team of testers to help improve test depth and quality for new Sugar releases. They have been working with both XO-1 and XO-1.5 machines, and are now testing our upcoming 10.2.0 release.
Update: Fast Company just picked up this story over the weekend. Thanks again to the Virtusa team!
India’s HRD Minister Kapil Sibal spoke recently of a $35 tablet for Indian students. In response, Nicholas published this open letter to India. (Read it also in Hindi, Spanish, French, and German.) Continue reading
David Leeming of OLPC Oceania has developed detailed deployment docs for a recent pilot in Kosrae, Micronesia, over at Wikieducator.   It is an excellent summary of what has been learned in the region to date, and useful guidance for anyone trying to organize a deployment for anywhere from 10 to 10,000 students.  I hope to see more great things from this project.
UPDATEÂ (Aug 20): David has published an excellent Teacher Training Manual based on those notes.