We’re hosting an olpcMAP discussion session at our Cambridge HQ on Wednesday night, with students (and future collaborators!) from Tufts. If you can’t be there, catch up on recent additions and developments to the project with this month’s olpcMAP update.
Meanwhile, mapping maven Nick Doiron shares the view from his seat in Montevideo, where he is a resident hacker this month with Plan Ceibal.
A stray comment today about Windows not working on ARM machines, by someone who thought all OLPC laptops had moved away from Linux, reminded me to reaffirm something:
Every one of the 2M+ XOs we’ve ever made shipped from the factory with Linux. As far as I know, under 7,000 XOs have ever run Windows natively* – some 0.3% of all laptops we have ever produced. Most of those dual-booted into both Sugar and Windows XP, as part of programs sponsored independently by Microsoft. I know of a few teachers that had those machines in at least one class, but have never seen reports from a class using them — if you know of one of these schools, I would be most interested to hear about the experience — particularly from schools that used both OSes.
The XO community around the world includes one of the largest deployments of Linux to primary students anywhere in the world. This is something we can all be proud of.
* To be fair: running Windows in emulation through wine or SugaredWine is quite popular for certain activities. Â Three cheers for the wine team’s excellent work!
Nicholas talked about Schools without schools and children as agents of change at TEDx Brussels in 2010.  Children can grow up with a wealth of learning and skills that we cannot imagine today.
On Tuesday, Nick Doiron, Mark Battley, Adam Holt, Benaja (visiting from Haiti) worked on building our grassroot map. Nick, now a Carnegie Mellon Senior, is the genius energy who created the new interactive OLPC Map.
Thank you Mark for your organizational skills and creativity. And thank you Nick for patiently listening to our ideas and feedback. I am impressed that you are so freely able to integrate the many ideas of others into your growing project.
Q: What does this Map Represent?
Q: Who should use this map?
Q: How can I use this map if I am new to OLPC, if I interested in starting a project, interested in donating,if I have a project or am a child in a project, and if I am an OLPC volunteer?
Tuesday evening we watched a wonderful film Premier “On the Line” and had a lively discussion with the filmmaker, Audubon Dougherty. The portrait of computer and Internet throughout rural Peru was heart-rendering and very thought provoking. The needs and obstacles are so great. So where are the XOs that have been sent to Peru.
Adam presented gifts to the winners of the fun and instructive OLPC Map/Sugar Trivia Contest…
Read more about the event on Nancie Severs’ blog.
OLPC Rwanda organized a capacity-building workshop for 300 teachers this week. The school-head and one lead teacher from each of 150 schools attended. The GC4LL blog has a detailed writeup. I like this quote in particular, since passing on the ideas behind our core principles takes time:
They also are going to learn about the two main points of the OLPC implementation: one laptop per each child and children take laptops home. Those two points are always controversial and it is very important that school’s principals understand the underlining logic behind them. It the school management buy the concept, the success chances of the project in the school increase significantly.
There is also a photoset from the event and a copy of their “training booklet“(PDF) online.