One Laptop Per Child News

Ottawa Show Tunes Party for OLPC on July 4th

2009-07-03T14:34:19Z

Calling all Canadians! Here is your chance to celebrate July 4th in your own independent way. Instead of watching the foolishness of the lower 48, you can enjoy a medley of songs from a variety of musicals, performed by students from Sing House Studios in a fundraiser for One Laptop Per Child.

Their rendition of I Hate Musicals!, which includes songs from Phantom of the Opera, Rent and Hello Dolly! will also feature the amazing singing duo Alex Lacasse and Kira Isabella. If you can make it, here's the details:

I Hate Musicals! OLPC Fundrasier
Sing House Studios, under the direction of Chantal Hackett
Saturday, July 4, at 7:30 p.m, Shenkman Arts Centre
245 Centrum Boulevard, Ottawa, ON K1E 0A1

If you're not near Canada tomorrow, you can still follow along with your own mini-OLPC musical with Pydance on the XO - an open-source clone of Dance Dance Revolution, courtesy of Joviko:

And if that's not enough to make you July 4th happy, then what about converting all that motion into energy with a dance-powered XO charger.

Empower Kids with Code = Get a Free Laptop!

2009-07-02T14:19:53Z

Having just recently started volunteering with non-profit One Laptop per Child, I've been amazed to find out about their Contributors Program. OLPC offers free XO laptops if you help their worldwide children's project. I can hardly imagine a truer opportunity: get involved in OLPC hands-on, find out how easy it is to touch lives in far corners of our planet, and weave your very own inspiration into one of the most humanitarian endeavors out there. (I find it shocking how few people know about the opportunity!)

They could be using your software!

How It Works: The OLPC Contributor's Program seeds grassroots initiative allowing teachers, engineers, librarians, and community advocates (actually anyone!) to create projects around the OLPC movement. The Contributors Program then provides XO laptops to any dedicated person who can help OLPC and its Sugar software provide learning content, technologies or teaching tools to countless needy kids worldwide. In fact, There's an App for That:-)

A very quick App(lication) in fact, with free shipping worldwide in about a week! Which is why the Contributors Program has already seen a stream of successes. I'm hoping to share the best of these with you in future writings. Already, Contributors are creating a vast array of Activities for the XO - from text-to-speech technology, new math programs, and even a disaster relief system. Best of all, the Contributors Program works hard to pair every proposal with a dedicated Mentor to assist you in any questions or challenges arising during your project!

I really urge you to apply, if you share OLPC's community vision to make things happen. Literally people of all ages can submit ideas - if you or the people you know can dedicate yourselves to creating software, hardware, illustrations, teaching guides, puzzles, quality-testing or support - you name it.

Can you advance Activities focused on the environment, languages, health, science, math or humanities? Or perhaps you're striving to be a social entrepreneur? Then set up a local laptop-lending library, or a community repair center, whatever!

Now that summer is here, now is a perfect opportunity for teachers, after-school providers, college students and aspiring youth leaders to get involved, enhancing a myriad of XO learning tools. Do you know students of any age you can engage? Tell them advance prototypes of the new XO 1.5 hardware will be available in August to projects requiring superfast technology, spurring the impact of their work further than they will ever know...

Honestly, how often in your life do you get the chance to dedicate your energy to a cause that stands to impact the minds of millions of hungry kids worldwide? If you just have a few hours a week, you can participate in this powerful worldwide movement, simply by reading the FAQs and submitting a proposal. Then go thank yourself for making a difference by meeting the kids in 2019.

Margaret Hartley is a recent Boston University graduate dedicated to improving female education and access to learning technologies in East Africa. She will even be your mentor if you ask nicely.

Real First Hand Observations in Starting OLPC Ethiopia

2009-07-01T14:11:30Z

I have worked in Ethiopia since 2006 and I initiated the One Laptop Per Child project here as an unintended side project within a larger capacity development program in the summer of 2006 with discussions with Nicholas Negroponte and the OLPC organisation. The following represents my personal opinion as a private person.

Girl documenting an event

In mid 2007 we received 10 B2 machines and immediately went into a school to test the reaction of voluntary children. As there was no internet connection available, the children concentrated on etoys. In December 2007 we got 80 B4 machines and introduced them in two classes in a primary school in Addis Ababa.

In early 2008 the Ethiopian government took over the complete ownership of the project and implemented 5,000 XOs later that year in what they call a "parallel phased" integration. This means that the children use the XO in both their school and private time. The whole approach is based on three principles:

capacity development for teachers
content (all Ethiopian textbooks) and
the OLPC hardware & open source software.

Being an observer since handing the project over, I would like to share my thoughts on this. First of all I find it very surprising that so many people pretend to have first hand knowledge of the current situation in Ethiopia. I personally find it questionable that people that have never been in Ethiopia, or if they have for only 3 weeks, can give statements about the current status of the OLPC project here.

It's always easy to judge from the comfort zone of your own living room with a Wi-Fi 100 Mbit connection. Regarding the previous remarks, the information used for the recent article "XO Laptops are Banned in OLPC Ethiopia Classrooms" about the OLPC project in Ethiopia is from November 2008 (barely 2 months after the deployment of 5,000 XOs).

Teacher introducing the laptop

Having said that let's come to the facts. The only serious independent academic research of the OLPC Ethiopia project is being conducted by the University of Groningen as a 2 year on-site monitoring and evaluation project. The first out of four reports was recently presented in "Does technology drive social change?" Some of the results after 4 months are:

children regard the OLPC as a learning device
the OLPC increases the children's total learning time (mainly at home)
the children's logical reasoning and spatial insight increase dramatically
the laptop increases the motivation to go to school especially in the countryside
after 4 months the academic performance increases by:
- 3% in average in all schools that use the laptop as a learning device
- 13% in schools that extensively use the laptop as a learning device

Whoever is really interested in the project please read the report from the University of Groningen and get in contact with the project manager via OLPC Ethiopia wiki page.

Written by Thomas Rolf in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

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My Visit to OLPC Trial School in Mekelle, Ethiopia

2009-06-30T14:13:13Z

Reading the "XO Laptops are Banned in OLPC Ethiopia Classrooms" posting made me think back to my OLPC Trial School Visit in November 2008 to Maiwayni School in Mekelle, northern Ethiopia, who were starting a trial of OLPC laptops.

I am Alex Little and I visited the school shortly after approximately 100 year 6 and 7 students had been handed their XO's and the staff had attended training. A single day of staff training consisted of half a day on how to use the XO laptop and interface, then half a day on how to use them in their teaching.

XO's better than using books?

The headmaster had lent me his XO so I could join a year 7 English class and when I walked into the classroom all 50+ students had their XOs open and running. Students had been given some training in how to use and look after their laptop, which obviously had an effect as I was told off by a 12 year old girl when I tried to close the laptop without powering down first!

All the year 6 and 7 textbooks had been scanned in and loaded up onto the XOs, so as I sat through the lesson, with the teacher writing up on the blackboard, I watched as the students all followed their place in the scanned copy of their textbook.

I came away from the lesson feeling slightly disappointed, the laptops were being used purely as a substitute for a paper copy of the textbook. In fact, maybe worse than a paper copy, as many of the exercises involved activities such as filling in the missing word, which could be completed in a paper textbook, but not in the electronic version, although at least everyone had their own copy (which may not have been true for paper textbooks).

Admittedly, I only had a very short visit, only sitting in on one lesson and didn't get chance to have informal chats with the teachers and children. Perhaps other lessons made more use of the XO, or the children were using them outside the classroom in ways I'd not seen - but it didn't appear to me to be fulfilling the laptop's potential.

There are side-effect advantages to letting students loose with a laptop. Whilst working in the computer science department in Mekelle University, I saw many students who started a computer science degree having never used a computer before. When running lab sessions, much of the time was spent teaching students basic IT skills (how to enter a username and password, locate the '#' key etc) rather than developing real programming skills. Allowing students to experiment and play with a laptop, so gaining basic keyboard skills and some level of IT literacy, would make them better prepared for college or university.

The "XO Laptops are Banned in OLPC Ethiopia Classrooms" posting identifies two of what I also believe are the main barriers to computers being successfully used as a tool for teaching and learning, rote learning and lack of training for teachers.

How can a teacher, whose entire learning, training and teaching experience, from primary school to high school to teaching college to then working in a school, has been of rote memorisation, suddenly be expected to adopt new teaching methods after a half day workshop. I find it no surprise that teachers are shying away from using the XO and no longer using them in the classroom. It's not a problem with the XO (or any other similar laptop scheme), but the way in which computers, as a tool for teaching and learning, have been introduced into a system and teaching style unprepared and untrained for such a change.

It will be interesting to visit Maiwayni School again next time I'm in Mekelle to see whether the XOs are still on the children's desks.

Do you have your own XO experience to share? Then submit a Guest Post today!

33 Children Review Sugar on a Stick, Squealing in Delight!

2009-06-29T14:05:34Z

Saturday was the end-of-year festival at my kids' school and I hosted a Sugar booth. I had asked if I could set up my XOs and netbooks on a table for kids to interact with Sugar. It was also a way for me to celebrate the Sugar on a Stick, Strawberry Release from Sugar Labs.

A Sugarized Batman Junior

Kids at this school are fairly well-to-do; all the parents I know have at least one computer in the house, many have two, some kids have their own computers already. However, the computer lab at the school has suffered from old equipment and disappearance/breakage of new equipment.

Last year I had to write to my daughter's technology teacher (computers + electronics) when he sent her home with a Word file and instructions for editing Word. She brought him a USB stick with OOo and an offer on my part to assist in setting up the lab with free software; I didn't hear back, but I didn't hear about Word any more, either.

Thirty-three (33!) kids paid a ticket to try Sugar on 7 XOs, and using Sugar on a Stick, a Classmate, and three netbooks including the new Dell education netbook.

Many children were with their parents, many with a friend or brother or sister. A handful of older kids turned down paying a ticket (most of the older ones didn't ask permission to try them, either, they just pulled up and started exploring). The XOs were all together in mesh (including the two old build 65x machines), the netbooks in standalone (I had brought an access point but had my hands full with 10 kids at a time).

All of the kids needed help exiting Activities, except for the GCompris Activities; I guess because of the persistent exit icon in GCompris screens. (We'll need to look at that.) Several kids wondered how to get back to the Home View. On XOs, they understood the dedicated keys right away; those who forgot just punched the four dedicated navkeys until Home View came up.

Enjoying a Sugarized festival booth

On the netbooks, especially the Dell Mini 10 which has no dedicated function keys (they are blue Fn alternates), kids needed help for each return to Home View. I later managed to set the default on those keys to Function instead of multimedia controls in the BIOS. The absence of a bound Frame key on the netbooks is unfortunate.

The smallest kids, without exception, got Maze going and progressed to higher levels. One kid saw others playing it and brandished his ticket specifically to play Maze. Oddly, kids seemed to understand the game faster on the Sugarized Classmate PC despite its small screen size (it's an Olidata JumPc Gen-1 7" screen). I attribute this to the color coding of the arrow keys on the Classmate's keyboard (the Classmate's keyboard is generous to begin with).

The small (grades K-2) and middle (grades 3-5) section principals each came by with some teachers and expressed great interest and took photos. They preferred the XOs to the netbooks with the exception of the Dell Latitude 2100 education netbook, they really liked the tattletale LED bar, the spine for putting a student's name in, the anti-spill "legs", the large screen.

They seemed reassured they could be in Windows by just rebooting without SoaS on the SD Card, although I mentioned to them that Dell had made a mistake and delivered the wrong OS (Ubuntu is standard on that netbook). The principals were interested in jabber collaboration which they had never heard of.

One mom expressed frustration that dropdown menu choices found by mouse rollover could not be validated with the Enter key. Do we have a ticket for that? Several parents and a teacher asked about translation tools.

Some parents who had already heard of OLPC asked where the crank was. That such an attribute could still be top-of-mind years after the crank prototype was superseded indicates to me that OLPC may be missing a major marketing opportunity by not bundling the Freeplay crank with G1G1.

One parent asked about audio books, could the computer play back a recording of a native speaker of another language. A teacher expressed interest in the possibility of kids studying another language with Sugar on a Stick, bringing the stick home to continue lessons.

Chat on the XO laptop

Smaller kids enjoyed the webcam. 8-10 year olds loved the Chat Activity although they were sitting round the same big table; amusingly, as all my sticks and XOs are named variants of my name e.g. "SeanSoaSDellLatitude2100", they started calling each other by those handles and squealing with delight when they figured out who was who.

One kid wanted to change his XO color so we did that but in so doing he couldn't collaborate any more, fixed with a reboot. One parent asked about DVD playback on the netbooks. Here's something interesting: I told each parent and teacher who spoke to me that Sugar is free software ("logiciel libre"). Not one of them asked me what logiciel libre meant.

Finally, some lads started in with water guns after their turn at the screens and managed to spray a couple of the XOs which showed the monochrome hires screen right away. I dried the screens and keyboards while powering down, dried them out 24 hours and both booted up fine.

Some parents and teachers were wondering if I was there selling laptops and when I explained that Sugar Labs is a nonprofit composed of volunteers like myself, that Sugar is free software and can be downloaded, that Sugar on a Stick can boot most PCs and run under virtualization, etc., they were friendlier and asked more questions.

Of course, a festival booth like this is completely unrelated to classroom study, especially over a semester. However, every parent and teacher who came by did leave the stand aware that netbooks are candidates for kids' learning in schools and/or at home...

Originally submitted to Sugar Labs Marketing by Sean Daly and republished here with his permission

OLPCsb: Deploying XO Laptops in USA Classrooms (Pt 3)

2009-06-26T14:09:57Z

Welcome back! In our 3rd post of our series on the efforts of OLPC, Santa Barbara, we will discuss the ways that the XO's have been used as learning tools our local 3rd grade classroom. Lets jump right into it...

The key to our success: a teacher

Providing The Learning Tool

As I mentioned in our last post, fortunately for us, our teacher is great proponent of using technology as an educational tool in the classroom. Because of this, we have not imposed any learning strategies or tools upon him. We came to this decision because we were are aware of the effects trying to push something that is unwanted or not tailored to specific circumstances- it just won't work!

We decided that since our teacher knew the machine, it's programs and capabilities, and knows the California 3rd grade curriculum the best, he should decide how was wants to use them, and we must observe, offering opinions and suggestions only when appropriate.

He has been essentially on his own directive, with us standing by observing and offering support as needed. The students typically have around two to three hours a week with the XO, and have done some really neat things with it. The Turtle Art program has been incorporated into their Geometry lessons with great success. Our teacher has asked them to adjust the numbers of the angles to draw first 90 degree angles, then overlap other angles over it, to create intricate shapes and patterns. With the ability of the students to simply change a number and visually see a new angle drawn out in front of them, it has helped them grasp their simple geometry lessons with ease.

They have used the Browse and Write applications to collaborate on and submit research projects, and the Moon application to study the cycles of the moon (part of the California 3rd grade curriculum). They have also had ample time for self exploration, playing and using the rest of the XO activities

Unfortunately, as all our initial efforts focused on establishing the pilot classroom and the international program, OLPCsb has not yet developed an application to be used in the classroom. However, we now have commenced work on activities, with our first project being a vocabulary-based reading comprehension activity.

This will essentially aid reading by helping the child attain a larger inventory of relevant vocabulary. In plain English, it's easier to focus on what the story text means when you don't have to spend all your focus on figuring out what a word means. This was inspired by a tutoring/research program done in the UCSB education department, a program which we found when one of our members became involved as a tutor.

This "reading buddy" activity is being further developed conceptually as our members from Computer Science and Engineering departments commence work on the programming aspect of the work, and it is our hope that this can be done in a variety of languages in the future.

That's all for now, but join us next week as we get into our International Partnership Program, and some of the situations that have arisen in solidifying an international partner school!

OLPC Afghanistan XO Laptop Impact Research Plans

2009-06-25T14:06:57Z

In Afghanistan now that we did our first pilot school we are now launching a major effort to quantitatively and qualitatively assess the impact of the use of OLPC in schools in three areas - Education, Health, and Economic.

Empowering girls' education

Educational Impact Assessment Plan
We will be testing all pupils on comprehension, problem solving, reading, writing and mathematics before receiving the laptop and at regular intervals afterwards. Teachers will be taking part in a focus group. We will be comparing this to two control schools that do not have OLPC.

We hope to generate statistically significant pedagogical evidence on the impact of the OLPC Laptop in education. Our hypothesis is that the XO laptop will not only improve standard measurements of educational achievement but also encourage creativity and resourcefulness which is also of the utmost importance.

Health Impact Assessment Plan
We have prepared in co-operation with the Ministry of Public Health various awareness / information pre-loaded on the laptop (promotion of hygiene, common diseases, family nutrition etc) and will use focus groups to explore the impact of this in the home. Female medical students will be able to work more closely with mothers in the house than others.

It is our hypothesis that the XO laptop can be an effective tool to distribute messages to
positively change behaviour towards health / hygiene. This can be a difficult subject to
monitor as it concerns people's private homes including the woman's part of the home

Economic Impact Assessment Plan (Coming Soon)
We have prepared information on interview skills, business directories, a basic guide on how to start a small business and will develop further material focusing on agriculture and cottage industries. Again focus groups will be the main tool to try to assess the impact.

The plans are basic but we hope to share with the world a better understanding of the impact of OLPC and strengthen the case for more widespread deployment. We very much welcome and would be pleased to facilitate anyone interested in more in depth research either by correspondence or we can arrange research trips in Afghanistan (yes, it's safe). Contact details are in the research plans.

Making Uruguays' 300,000 XO Laptops Count

2009-06-24T15:18:33Z

As I described in an earlier article, the first two years of the OLPC deployment in Uruguay "have been characterized by implementation and incubation. The laptops have been deployed to schools, manuals have been created, tech savvy volunteer groups have been formed, wireless internet connections have been established, teachers have slowly learned how to implement the laptops into their curricula and classrooms, and, as Rezwan has covered previously, a community of open source programmers has developed educational applications for the laptops."

Last week I visited Uruguay myself to witness how teachers and students were incorporating laptops and wi-fi connections (now in over 1,000 schools) into the classroom environment. My first gray blistery morning in Montevideo I joined a van full of professors and students from the Universidad de la República who were headed to Santa Lucía, a small town in the department of Canelones just an hour's drive from the capital.

Uruguayan XO gang sign

After a few accidental detours and several thermoses of mate tea, we pulled up to Santa Lucía's one and only primary school. Dozens of primary school students in white frocks were sitting on steps and tree trunks with their XO laptops, pecking away as if they were in a wi-fi café in Tokyo or New York City.

Santa Lucía's "Escuela 104″ (every school in Uruguay is given a number) teaches all of the town's young students in morning and afternoon shifts. That is, half of Santa Lucía's students come early in the morning and stay until lunch, and the other half arrive in the afternoon and stay until the early evening. When Pablo Flores, a professor of engineering at the Universidad de la República and a coordinator of Flor de Ceibo, asked the school's teachers if they had any problems or complaints regarding the XO laptops, one immediately responded, "the kids hang around here all day long. We can't get them to go home. Is there anything you can do to helps us?"

Pablo later told me that such reactions are typical during his frequent visits to schools around the country. However, while I found the comment to be entertaining, Pablo smiled softly with discouragement. On the way to Santa Lucías several of the volunteer students from the Universidad de la República shared their stories of teachers who felt threatened by the presence of the laptops in their classrooms. The younger teachers, they all agreed, tended to embrace the change and try to incorporate the laptops as much as possible into the classroom environment.

But some of the older teachers felt that their position of authority in the classroom was threatened by the presence of the laptops and the power they gave the young students. As many university professors have discovered in recent years, laptops and internet connections in the classroom often lead to students chatting behind the professor's back. Or, as George Landow put it in Hypertext 3.0, "Technology always empowers someone. It empowers those who possess it, those who make use of it, and those who have access to it."

I do not want to overstate the point. After all, this particular morning we were in the school's humble computer lab surrounded by eight or so teachers who all took time out of their busy schedules to learn more about the XO laptops and how they can make better use of them in the classroom. They were eager to learn and quick to make entertaining jokes about their frustrations with the new technologies. I imagined myself as a primacy school instructor - with over 20 years of teaching experience - having to learn new teaching techniques from volunteer university students who have never experienced the enormous challenge of keeping a classroom in order.

We were in Santa Lucía to give workshops explaining how to use the EduBlog blogging platform developed by a team of Uruguayan and American programmers. The XO laptops have been great at bringing information from the wider world to Uruguayan students, thanks to projects like Wikipedia and Conozco Uruguay, both of which come pre-installed on the machines. But, as Pablo explained to the gathered teachers, the laptops also permit Uruguayans to contribute content, stories, and knowledge to the vast repository of civilization that is the internet:

Each of the teachers created her own individual blog, and they then created a group blog for the entire school titled, appropriately enough, Escuela 104 de Santa Lucía.

One teacher, who registered under the username "sancac", wrote:

Let me tell you that I am a first grade teacher at "Leticia Volpe School 104″ located in Santa Lucia, Uruguay. It is found between the streets R. Argentina, Tajes, and Brasil. It is a school with two shifts and a total of approximately 700 students. These students are my children ...

Another teacher, "ladelsanta" published a post with photos of nearby landmarks:

School 104 is found in the city of Santa Lucia, on the bank of the river with the same name. At its beginning it was a school only for boys, but with the passing of time that changed and it became the mixed school it currently is today. My mother once competed against this school, which she called "the big school" because it occupied a large space (which is now shared with the lyceum). To be highlighted in our city is the first hotel for tourists in this country, the Biltmore Hotel.

You can use Google's machine translation to read the rest of the teachers' entries.

The morning blogging workshop was facilitated by Pablo Flores and Mariel Cisneros Lopez, both professors from the Universidad de la República. But in the afternoon session, attended by over a dozen teachers, the university students took the lead, facilitating an outstanding workshop that got the teachers enthusiastic about the possibilities of blogging in the classroom. Flor de Ceibo will continue to organize expeditions to primary schools across the country in order to show teachers and students how they can share their stories, articles, and homework assignments online by using the EduBlog platform. Later in the year, with the financial support from their Rising Voices microgrant, they will organize a competition which awards prizes to students who publish the best entries about particular topics chosen by a committee of judges.

This article, by David Sasaki, was originally published on Risisng Voices and is republished here with David's permission.

Corruption or Charade? OLPC Ghana XO Laptop Purchase

2009-06-23T14:05:20Z

Ghana is an amazing beacon of democracy in Africa. In their recent elections, John Atta-Mills defeated the then-ruling party candidate to succeed President John Kufuor in a peaceful transition of power - one of the few in Africa. The transition has not been so peaceful for OLPC Ghana, however.

Fighting over XO laptops

The One Laptop Per Child program has be subject to a political review by the new administration, and like in Nigeria and Thailand, the results have not been pretty:

From these five news reports, you can see that the new government is questioning the costs of 1,000 XO laptops donated to Ghana by OLPC during President Kufuor's regime.

While I think the hubbub is the usual post-election positioning, the effect could be stifling to a larger OLPC Ghana deployment. Just check out this declaration by Abdul Hakim Ahmed of the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning:

"MOFEP wishes to put on record that although Letters of Credit for the payment of the 10,000 laptops were established, nothing has so far been paid. MOFEP will be working together with the Ministry of Education to pay the OLPC the cost of the 1,000 laptops which have already been cleared and are in the custody of the Ministry of Education. The Ministry will withhold payment for the remaining 9,000 pending a proposed review of the transaction."

Lets hope the review does not have Brazilian results, but it just a post-election hiccup.

Quake on the XO Laptop: for Education and Memorization

2009-06-22T10:03:35Z

Check out the skills of atphalix who has taken on the technical challenge of overcoming the physical & hardware limitations of the XO Laptop hardware (no OpenGL hardware 3D acceleration) to get Quake on the XO laptop:

Now atphalix is seeking a higher goal than a better Doom on the XO experience, he's using Quake to make a true 3D educational game with software rendering only. ABC Cube consists of shooting cubes with letters/numbers on them, with the letter or the number pronounced at each kill, to facilitate memorization.

Before you condemn the violent nature of atphalix's chosen application, listen to why he picked Quake and his overall goal:

The Quake 1 game engine was chosen for it's ease of modification and for its network capabilities that would make the project usable as a base for making other kind of innovative 3D games and activities for the laptop. As a matter of fact, success in bringing the 3D to the XO through software rendering would be a great proof of concept as well as a base to start other 3D appliances upon the technical foundations of abcube.

Now I find that quite innovative - using a first-person shooter for a positive, educational experience. If you too like his efforts, here's the OLPC wiki page and OLPC News Forum post.

One Laptop Per Magic School Bus Child

2009-06-21T00:11:29Z

How is this for a fun bus ride to school: a magic school bus with XO laptops! Vanderbilt University medical scientist Billy Hudson started a program called Aspirnauts for the rural kids in his hometown of Grapevine. On their hour-long bus ride to school, they get to play with XO laptops in a whole new version of "one laptop per child":

I only wish my school time bus rides were such fun. I was stuck back in the olden days when we just had books and spitballs.

OLPCsb: Deploying XO Laptops in USA Classrooms (Pt 2)

2009-06-19T13:31:39Z

In our last post, Deploying XO Laptops in USA Classrooms, we discussed the founding of OLPCsb last December, and provided a quick overview of our mission and objectives. In this post, we would like to share with the OLPC News Community how things have progressed over the past several months in regards to integrating the XOs into our local classroom!

Bringing the XOs to Classrooms:

In just one short month, with the incredible dedication of our faculty members and a local elementary school, we launched our first pilot program on December 14th, 2008. We were truly fortunate to have Nicholas Negroponte show up for a quick visit to the classroom and give an "inaugural speech" to the school. You can check out the video here:

Our classroom is a small 3rd grade classroom at Kellogg Elementary School, in Goleta, CA. We had 14 XOs graciously donated to the classroom by various individuals, enough to gain some traction and get an idea of how they could/would be used, yet not enough to fully fill the classroom (so students couldn't take them home yet). We were happy with that, because our aim was to slowly integrate the XOs into the classroom and see what could be done, to prepare for a full and comprehensive pilot program in the upcoming school year.

Fortunately for us, the teacher we have been working with is an exceptionally experienced educator, and a firm believer in bringing technology to classrooms. He was familiar with OLPC and the XO before we brought them into the classroom, and already had several ideas of how to use the XO and its activities to engage his students and apply it to the curriculum (will discuss further in next section). While the classroom already had a few Mac computers that students were using, as everyone reading this probably knows XOs provide a very different learning experience, and we were interested in understanding the difference in usages between the Macs and the XOs

Having the full support and enthusiasm of an experienced teacher, as well as the schools Principle and Board, has been very valuable. You cannot force this technology upon anyone- it must be a ground up, collaborative effort involving input from all parties. We have worked very closely with everyone involved, and have constantly shifted focus and priorities to accommodate the needs of the classroom, the school, and our resources.

Aside from minor technical difficulties (wireless router initially not working properly, occasional sticky mouse pads,) things have moved along smoothly in our single classroom. We have been taking everything very slowly to ensure no slip ups, and so far this strategy has proved very useful. For this reason, we have not yet pursued any other schools or classrooms, although we have perked interest. We want to continue working with this specific classroom and this specific teacher for the next year, to develop a solid and functional pilot program that we can then use as a comprehensive model for future expansions.

Thanks for reading, and check back soon! Next post- Integrating the XO's into the classroom!

One Possible OLPC Legacy: Abandoned XO Laptops

2009-06-18T16:10:02Z

Today there is great buzz as 30 teams of OLPCorps volunteers are fanning out across Africa to showcase hundreds of XO laptops to teachers and administrators in multiple rural schools. For the rest of the summer, there will be palatable excitement as educators have their own voyage of technology-assisted discovery. Next school year, children will jumping in joy when they are handed little green laptops to learn and explore with.

But what does the future look like? Five years from now, what will be the One Laptop Per Child legacy? Could Jesse's experience with laptops and appropriate technology be the norm?

A future teacher find?

I start the day as normal. This means waking up to no power and no water. That fine, I am prepared for this now and quickly wash down the bread I had baked the night before with the water I had presciently set aside. I journey to school where, in the half hour before classes start, I quickly outline my lectures for the day. [...]

Although the school is woefully ill equipped for labs, a smattering of grants and donations over the years has left the school with some surprising equipment. [...]

I was in the back of the room, trying to hold my breath because I had just accidentally kicked a box full of unlabeled white powder, when I saw a box of with a green cord protruding. Through a crack in the box I saw a green bevel and I was filled with disbelief. Yes!; it was a box with 15 pristine OLPC green laptops. The first thing I did, after doing a kick ass acid-base demo with color changing indicators, was spend the day playing with the laptops.[...]

I conspicuity took two laptops to the teacher room and started running loud attention grabbing programs. Within minutes every teacher was huddled behind my desk, taking excitedly about the laptops. Most teachers had never seen the laptops before and expressed disbelief that I had found them in the supply room.

Often they stay empty

I am not surprised that XO laptops were relegated to the storeroom, as Jesse's experience is not unique. Personally, I've seen too many school computer labs that are sealed off from use until the donor comes, when they're opened and filled with smiling, photographic children. But before you bemoan OLPC, understand why this happens.

In the usual donation context, communities are given an asset with great fanfare, and come to believe that if they safeguard the asset and show its still working when the donor returns, they'll get more assets. In this mindset, using the asset is dangerous - if its broken, the donor will be angry, might not fix it, and will surely not trust the community with any more assets.

One easy way to surmount this reasoning is to break the asset, and then show the community how to fix it. A harder, but more lasting way is to make a long-term commitment to the community around the asset. For OLPC that would mean a continuous volunteer presence at OLPCorps locations, a promise to return with more XO's and volunteers the next summer, and unlike their relationship with grassroots deployments, actually giving a damn about XO use in small pilots.

OLPCorps Africa Weeks 1-2: A Training Roller Coast

2009-06-17T19:39:00Z

What happens when you throw 30 teams of jet-lagged college students into a two week training course on OLPC deployment with the President of Rwanda, Nicholas Negroponte, and the promise of $10,000 + 100 XO laptops? An OLPCoprs Africa experience that puts MTV's "Real World" to shame in its roller coaster of highs and lows.

Happy with XO laptop fun

First, let's have Hassan tell us about the training location:

Kigali is such a beautiful place. The entire landmass is dotted with plenty greens, trees and a myriad of wonderful people. One remarkable thing about the city was its 'cleanliness'. The environment was clean in every sense of the word.

Oh yeah, Rwanda is damn impressive. Nothing like a dollar denominated donor economy to keep business booming in Kigali no matter the Great Recession. But not everyone was chipper about the early morning training starts, as Katie notes:

"Jet lag" and "5am" should never be in the same thoughts.

But the thoughts of the OLPCorps volunteers are very interesting as they learn more about One Laptop Per Child's XO deployment methodologies. Here is Stephanie explaining the challenges of using constructionist methodologies in traditional educational systems:

The word "curriculum" has become a derogatory, don't-use form of swearing here at orientation. OLPC has created a computer that emphasizes constructionist education and their manner of inculcating the computers into global classrooms is, of course, constructionist. The teachers know the local curriculum better than any volunteer or OLPCorps member ever will in two months. Therefore, the goal is to enable teachers to introduce the XO into their own curriculum through making them comfortable with the computer and its activities.

In theory, this is a great approach. However, it requires teachers to be flexible and willing to change the way they think about organizing class time. It becomes mandatory for teachers to use a form of education that they themselves have never used nor witnessed. For teachers who have been in the classroom for decades, this task is difficult, to say the least.

Negroponte and President Kagame

The task is made more difficult when OLPCorps volunteers hear what Nicholas Negroponte has to say about the objectives of their 10-week African experience. Unlike the original OLPC mission, he has a much more commercial hope for the program, as understood by Katie:

According to Negroponte, OLPCorps was designed with the main objective of, not improving educational opportunities for kids as I originally thought (or was led to believe), but instead igniting a grassroots movement in our respective African countries that inspires community members to call on their governments to join the OLPC bandwagon.

In other words, Corps teams deploy 100 laptops to 100 children in a community with much more than 100 children. The community is exposed to the greatness of the XO laptop, those who don't have laptops want them, and so the community puts pressure on the government to reform the education system, and spend 75% (this figure was an example given by one of the government officials at the conference) of the education budget on a bulk purchase of XO laptops for the country.

Lest you think that Katie was alone in her change of opinion, we also have "Ashyia" realizing that OLPC doesn't follow a bottom-up approach, which begets a fundamental question about the whole OLPC program:

OLPC is not a response to an identified problem, that was developed with the help of the community that it will be used in. It was an idea that some professors came up with to push a new idea in educational policy, and then decided to use the laptops to solve it [...]

When we were working in the Rwandan schools on Friday and Monday, it felt like we were forcing this technology on the teachers, that we were creating a great burden and task for them, which is something that I have never felt before on a development trip. And yes, the kids love them, an of course they are a great tool for them, but is this really development?

Personally, while I have issues with its design and there are better ways to leverage the volunteers' efforts, OLPCorps is development. Even OLPC is development. And Eli makes a great point on OLPC's development impact:

Would $200 worth of books would have a greater impact? I don't think we will ever know the best method of changing educational policy or exposing young children to the vast world around them, but I feel that more investment in the future is good and if it is easier to motivate educational policy-makers about a cool technology rather than some other idea then I strongly encourage that investment.

And I heartily encourage OLPCorps volunteer teams to invest in their amazing opportunity to experience the messiness of international development first-hand. An opportunity that deep down, I am damn jealous of.

How I travel now: boda boda

Ah to be a birthday boy on the boat again, seeing Africa through the fresh eyes of OLPCorps volunteers like Rachel, with her pictorial impressions of Uganda.

If you too want to experience OLPCorps vicariously, I've created a feed reader of all the OLPCorps blogs that's also displayed in the right sidebar here on OLPC News.

Join me in following OLPCorps, and join Nadeem to:

[I]magine what will happen to literacy stats when children have ultimate access to reading resources and opportunities via ebooks and online exploration.

A dream that is made possible by all the OLPCorps Africa participants.

Stay current with OLPCorps Africa: subscribe to OLPC News via RSS Feed, Email or Twitter.

Learning Club Meeting: The Brightest Light in the Library

2009-06-17T13:53:09Z

The June meeting is back at the Gallaudet University Student Academic Center.

What: Family XO Mesh Meetup
When: Saturday, June 20th, 2009, 10 am to 1pm
Where: Gallaudet University [map, aerial photo], Student Academic Center,
**NOTE ROOM CHANGE: First Floor [floorplan], Classroom 2 SAC1210 and Classroom 3 SAC1211, Washington, D.C. 20002

Our guest speakers are members of the team from the Washington, D.C.-based Lubuto Library Project that deployed 10 OLPC XO-1 laptops in Lusaka, Zambia. The project's core mission is to build libraries with carefully selected high-quality books to serve street children. The team will talk about what they learned from using XOs in the library and how they plan to sustain and scale the effort.

The July 18th meeting will see a return to Friends Community School in Greenbelt, MD for a reprise of last year's OLPC News Great 4P Laptop Bakeoff. Bring your netbooks to compare with others and to try out the latest version of Sugar on a Stick. More details will be posted in July.

At the end of the month, we will be representing OLPC and Sugar Labs at the 2009 National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) June 28 - July 1 at the D.C. Convention Center. There will be a batch of XO laptops at the open source pavilion in the exhibit hall and we're helping Sugar Labs present at the NECC Unplugged "fringe" festival.

If you haven't heard, there are some excellent new videos on OLPC.tv of Chris Ball demonstrating the working alpha board of the upcoming XO 1.5 laptop and a Mary Lou Jepsen showing off the first commercial production samples of her company's daylight-readable LCD screen for netbooks. "Mr. Biotech" has created a very nice 5-minute video review (minus mesh collaboration) of the current version of Sugar.

And at long last, the official URL for Sugar Labs DC, http://dc.sugarlabs.org, is live! More details to come in another blog post.