Ian Quillen writes in Education Week about the varying motivations and sponsors of major global edutech projects. He notes the work of Plan Ceibal in Uruguay (with OLPC) and Kennisnet in the Netherlands (with OpenWijs and related programs), in addition to projects driven in part by for-profit corporations.
I will add a link to a free version of the story when I find one.
The school board of Eastern Townships, Canada, under Ron Canuel, has been pursuing a one laptop per child school program for over eight years, today reaching roughly 2,700 students and teachers. A research paper recently released by Karsenti and Collin suggests their decision to give children their own laptops was a primary cause of the student’s success to date, which has included a 40% reduction in their dropout rate over 4 years.
While they aren’t using XOs in their classroom, I’ve met some of their team more than once and shown them around our offices; they were certainly right at home. It’s great to see this sort of long-baseline research coming out. The only thing better would be similar research from many different facets of the same country or environment, as I hope we will see from Uruguay in another year.
Happy new year to the OLPC community around the world! Thank you for your part in everything we have accomplished in 2010 – from our new initiatives in Gaza, Argentina, and Nicaragua to expansion of work in Peru, Uruguay, Rwanda, Mexico, Afghanistan, and Haiti.
Special thanks to everyone who has worked on the newest iterations of Sugar, and those who put on the grassroots events over the past year in the Virgin Islands, San Francisco, and Uruguay — all of which has helped connect some of our smaller projects and realize some of their educational dreams in new activities. We’ve launched our new website for the year, highlighting the stories from these and other deployments; this blog may merge into that site as well (and you can see blog posts appearing in its News section).
Paraguay’s national deployment, run by Paraguay Educa, has been developing its own build of a Sugar operating system for its students, with help from Sugarlabs. They are calling it Dextrose. The newly-formed Activity Central group, a Sugar-development consultancy, is helping with this work, and supporting some local developers in Paraguay.
Dextrose is a spin of the core Sugar build that will focus on teacher tools and content in Spanish.
While initially developed with feedback from classrooms in Paraguay, this will hopefully become a platform that other deployments in Latin America can use. While Peru has been shy about frequent software upgrades, preferring to have something stable for years at a time, Uruguay and other smaller deployments are good candidates to start using Dextrose as well.
Part 2 of a review of the XO-1.5
Over 90,000 Uruguayan high school students will receive a new XO-1.5 HS (High School edition) laptop. So how is it different from the XO-1 that their younger classmates have?
From the outside, the XO-1.5 HS has the same feel — it’s the same size, and the same antenna ears… though they feel different somehow in dark blue. The color variation on the backplate is more limited — there may be just one set of colors to match the dark blue casing.
To make it easier to use for high school students, the keyboard features larger keys for larger fingers — and it’s now a standard responsive, ‘clicky’ keyboard rather than a waterresistant membrane. Its light/dark blue color scheme represents Uruguay’s national colors, more subtler than the bright green of the other XOs.
Since we redesigned the keyboard, we took the opportunity to make a few other handy changes. The new keyboard screws in and pops out without dismantling the bottom of the XO — taking 2 minutes rather than 15 to swap one out.
I tried it myself during my first XO teardown – the keyboard was probably the easiest thing for me to get out. We did a half tear down and photographed it, so we can also add guidelines for upgrading your disk on the 1.5′s motherboard. And now people seem to be making hybrids of XO-1.5s with the new keyboard (see our Flickr stream for more). I’ll post again when the new repair guide section is ready.
Christoph Derndorfer, widely known for his ministry to young XO pilots, fashion sense, and active speaking / writing /editing about OLPC, has recently kicked off a Latin American Tour. (Todd Kelsey, where are your tour-badge-printing skills when we need them?) He plans to visit all of our country partners in the region with significant deployments this summer, documenting his experience.
Christoph’s travel reports are enchanting. Take for instance the recent photoessay from Montevideo’s eXpO photo exhibit in Uruguay – composed entirely of photos taken with XOs by students in 4 primary schools. And with his iconic beard, long hair, and thousand-meter stare (seen below by the pool at the Fame Factory), Christoph is becoming as known for his xoly presence as for his love of good design and Sugarized icons.
ChristophD preaching the End Times (or at least the Shutdown Screen Icons)
To stalk with him across the southern slopes, deployment by deployment, you can follow his online writings, photos, and twext. He is looking for personal contacts along the way, especially people who have played a role in OLPC deployments, so please get in touch with him if you know someone he should meet.
As weeping and cheering for today’s World Cup results spread across the globe, at OLPC we are hoping to recover enough to try sOccket’s power-generating soccer ball at our next weekly scrimmage. Since Ghana and Uruguay are XO countries we are exhausted from rooting for both sides.
Yesterday, Jessica Lin from sOccket visited us at OLPC and promised to trade a sOccket ball for an XO, in hopes that someday a XO can be powered by the energy of play. Learning in play was strong thread of discussion this week at OLPC. We talked to Jessica about 60+ soccer programs around the world (like the Kabul Girls Soccer Club) that help children learn about teamwork, strategy, physics, and statistics as they participate in their favorite sport. Right to Play was another kindred program we met at the UNRWA education conference, which sparked a brainstorming session about how computer games could be incorporated into RTP programs.
So, start up your XOs! Track stats of the World Cup games, Measure the amplitude of cheering when a goal is scored, or Record a set of videos of your friend’s elaborate soccer footwork!
We all have the right to learn & play…
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.
We have been working on a new XO laptop for high school students — one with a larger and more responsive keyboard better suited to the hands of older students. And Uruguay’s Plan Ceibal, expanding into high schools across the country, will be the first recipient — they’ve ordered 90,000 of the first production run.
These XO-1.5 HS machines are largely the same as a regular XO-1.5: they are VIA machines with Sugar and Gnome desktops, running both Sugar activities and Gnome apps. Only the bottom half is different: they have ‘clicky’ rather than membrane keyboards by default, and the base has been redesigned so that keyboards are much easier to swap out or clean — there are two screws you can access from the battery compartment that release the keyboard, then you can pop it out. No more 10-minute teardowns!
The new machines will be shades of dark and light blue; the factory is still working on getting the plastics and dye selection just right. I saw an early stab at this design, and it was very sexy — but I haven’t seen the final keyboard model they are using yet. As a keyboard fanatic (I can get 70wpm on my XO-1), I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled for the first one back in the office and will post a review for you.
Now that we have a half-dozen designs or models, we’ll need to come up with a better naming scheme… I’m taking suggestions for names and themes.
Thanks to Flavio Danesse, one of the CeibalJAM developers, children can now stream TV and radio to their XOs using the new Sugar activity called JAMedia. This Sugar activity is a music and video player that can stream online TV or radio broadcasts, or play local media from the Journal. The result offers quite a fine video-watching experience, and for now offers access to over 25 television and 70 radio streams.
CeibalJAM recently made headlines by receiving an honorable mention from the Prix Ars Electronica annual awards for “Digital Communities”.
Uruguay’s Plan Ceibal is now offering individual sales of XOs to students, parents and schools. This is handy for students who have lost their XO (under some conditions schools replace XOs for free when they are lost or broken, but only within limits), for parents whose students are in private schools that don’t have XOs yet, or for schools that want to have an extra supply of machines to set up additional computer centers, hardware labs, or the like.
Yama commented that schools can get lots of up to 60 XOs at low cost to keep at the school — which are then owned by the school, unlike the XOs given to children, but they must commit to connectivity:
Schools wishing to purchase XO lots are required to get at least a 3 Mb fixed IP connection. Those [that do and have] already purchased XOs at a higher price will be comped with extra XOs.
I like the sound of that. That’s about what Chester Community Charter School required for every 1000 students they brought online…
For those who haven’t noticed Scratch taking over the world, OLPC France published a lovely essay about the contest and the value of Scratch and Etoys for young students.
La promesse selon laquelle le projet CEIBAL donnerait aux élèves du pays des perspectives de réduction du fossé numérique et d’inclusion numérique n’est pas vaine, puisqu’ils sont désormais en mesure d’échanger d’égal à égal avec les jeunes créateurs Scratch appartenant à une communauté internationale à laquelle on doit déjà près d’un million de projets (projets Scratch) de par le monde.
The promise that CEIBAL would address the digital divide and digital inclusion for the nationls’ students is not in vain, since they are now on an equal footing with the young Scratch artists in an international community which has produced nearly a million Scratch projects.
In Uruguay, Efecto Cine and Plan CEIBAL are running an “ANIMATE” contest through June 15 for the best Scratch submissions by students across Uruguay. Ten winners will be announced, with the top four receiving mini-DV cameras for their schools. (Rules)
Meanwhile, an updated Scratch activity is being developed with full Journal and camera integration, and a new activity release is expected within the week. Kudos to everyone working on the project.
Alicia Casas de Barran, the Director of Uruguay’s National Archives, speaks today about “what happens when all students and teachers have their own laptops” at the World Bank in DC. She has set a good standard for countries interested in digitizing national learning and government material, and it is great to see the national libraries and archives joining the public discussion.
Uruguay continues to build on its success, which last month reported a tripling of access to the Internet in the country’s interior, and that 85% of all children were online. Plan Ceibal continues to expand its vision for the program to include older children.
Access to the Internet has tripled in the interior of Uruguay, and 85% of all children use the Internet, according to a recent study by Radar and Antel. 40% of them visit one of the official national educational or informational sites at least once a day. That’s pretty fly.
Ready for vampires
Batovi Games Studio, a game development company headquartered in Montevideo and Buenos Aires, recently released a long mini-game, Super Vampire Ninja Zero, for the XO. This is the most recent game being developed in parallel for the XO and the desktop PC. Batovi has been around since 2005 and has recently begun expanding to new platforms. It is great to see their handiwork running within Sugar.
Bernie reports that SVNZ is currently a hit in Uruguay and Paraguay, as well as among ninjas. It may be the most polished XO game release since Sim City for the XO came out. Now if only their forces were combined… perhaps in Vampires Take Micropolis, Online Edition?
Update: parents and teachers are often unhappy that their children play games. No less Doom and SVNZ. I sympathize with this. I also remember how a love for games taught me how much you could do with a computer (and how that was my first impetus to program something — how awesome to be able to make something it’s fun to watch others play!). This is part of the genius of Scratch – it combines the sharable joy of games and animations with an easy learning curve for discovering algorithms and techniques.
Yesterday in Costa Rica, Secretary Clinton gave a moving speech about the necessity of bridging socio-economic gaps across the Americas at the Pathways to Prosperity Ministerial.
She started off by commending Chile’s immediate response to the Haitian earthquake which indicated the increasing strength and cooperation of the region. She goes on to praise region efforts at economic growth including our very own OLPC initiative in Uruguay:
And like you, I have followed the progress that Uruguay and Panama have made towards spreading the benefits of the digital age through initiatives that distribute laptops to children. I was just in Uruguay, meeting with the out-going president and now-president Mujica, and their “one laptop per child” program has given a great boost to learning and access to the wider world.
She says that programs like this “can be a model for the rest of us.” Thanks for the support, Hillary!
US Secretary of State Clinton at the Third Ministerial Meeting in Costa Rica
In her speech, she also highlights six goals of Pathways to Prosperity that the US will focus on helping:
1. The creation of “small business development centers where people can go to get information and advice about starting a business.”
2. Support for “women entrepreneurs across the hemisphere.”
3. Modernization of customs procedures.
4. Better communication through the spread of English in Latin America and Spanish in the US.
5. Green the operations of small to medium-sized businesses.
6. Modernize lending laws and regulations.
Fernando da Rosa just published a lovely blog post about the 160,000 children in CEIBAL using Sugar on Linux, and what this means for their community. A must-read; with a 3-minute video pastiche that says it all without needing any words: 1 year of CEIBAL + OLPC
From his post:
Al momento actual, noviembre de 2008, ya se llevan entregadas a los niños 160.000 XO, todas con LINUX y SUGAR. Creo que más allá de los números, ver las caras y la alegría de los niños da fuerzas para continuar cambiando las cosas, trabajando por una mayor equidad, una mejor educación y profundizar en el uso de las nuevas tecnologías en el aula.
“As of November 2008, 160,000 XOs have been given to children, all with LINUX and SUGAR. I think that more than the numbers, seeing the faces and joy of the children gives one stregth to continue changing things, working towards a greater equality, a better education and more thoughtfulness in the use of new technology in the classroom.”
