The Global Center for Laptops and Learning in Kigali has been updating their blog recently. This past week, Brazil and Rwanda students met via Skype for the first time.
Juliano Bittencourt, who spent a year in Rwanda with his wife, recently posted a lovely email about Rwanda developments to the OLPC Brasil mailing list.
He points to Silvia Kist’s personal blog (in Portuguese) as a source for more information about the work there, along with the ‘laptop learning’ photostream.
“The photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know.” -Diane Arbus
I am starting to appreciate how difficult it is to find compelling photographs that capture the spirit of learning. How do you represent collaboration and learning by doing? Basic interactions among children are often similar across different environments — with features and dress and surroundings the greatest change from town to town. But collaboration can happen between students sitting next to each other, across the room, or kilometers away… Great photography captures and makes you wonder about what is not seen in the image.
Some of the more exciting images are of children discovering something new on an XO; or share with their neighbors something they have discovered. I love to see their looks of delirium:
There is a beautifully lit image of a student posing with her laptop, the water stained ceiling of the classroom telling of the need for a new roof:
Or the picture of children on the steps of a red clay mud dwelling exploring together, with a yak grazing in the foreground.
We have a new Flickr gallery of photographs of children learning in deployments, where you can see more as they are submitted. If you have a great set of photos from your own deployment, please post a link to it.
An update on Uruguay’s deployment of olpc in high schools: Plan Ceibal has posted some details and images of the laptops that will be used in this project. Some schools will use the new blue XO-HS laptops, and others will use Magellans — the only implementation of the Classmate design that has been used in large scale deployments (in Portugal and Venezuela).
You can see their take on a feature comparison of the machines. While there’s no check box for “sunlight-readable screen”, robustness, or power management, it’s a good look at how schools perceive their options. I would be glad to see classrooms worldwide adopting any platform like this — both can share the same software and materials.
I just landed, and Mike Dawson picked me up at airport. Immediate flat tire on airport road. Much help from Afghani soldiers. So begins my second trip in a month.
Flat tire at the airport
Bernie Innocenti and the team in Paraguay have released build 180py of their Fedora 11 + Sugar desktop. It is fast, offers both Sugar and Gnome desktops, and includes many recent features from the past year into a build that isn’t too large.
Some call it ‘the best XO OS ever’ – and it is indeed fantastic. Everyone who has an XO-1 should download this build and try it out. (but don’t forget to back up your files and any customized activities first!)
At the same time, Sugar 0.88 is being designed to work on both the XO-1 and the XO-1.5, and is currently available for testing and development. Bernie needs help with finding “a more pronounceable name than F11-0.88” – describing the combination of Sugar 0.88 and stock Fedora 11 – so once more, please share any good naming conventions. If your name is chosen, I will personally ship you one of the near-mythical Red XOs.
Teachers and assistants at the Universidad Evangélica de El Salvador
El Salvador, which began a 400 XO pilot last year, has been in the news again this week.  Their vice-minister of education Erlinda Handal gave an interview about their program “Cerrando la Brecha del Conocimiento” (Closing the Knowledge Gap), and mentioned hoping to expand their olpc project to cover all primary students in the country over the next four years.
“Children being able to take the ‘laptop’ home is something new, expected to amplify the process of learning, and this opens greater opportunities, better prospects for success.”
I hope to see more news from El Salvador, or at least more videos like these, in the future.