One Laptop Per Child News

Three years ago, I called for Open Source OLPC software and hardware, where One Laptop Per Child did not give exclusive production rights to on manufacturer, but opened up all the designs, software and hardware, to local producers.

In this scenario, XO laptop production in each participating country would nurture hundreds of new Silicon Valleys - Silicon Huts if you will - with the profits, the wages, the skills embedded in each country, developing businesses, jobs, minds that not only "learn learning" but earn livings.

At the time, Nicholas Negroponte dismissed the local OLPC assembly justification of employment, investment, and empowerment, saying that computer assembly jobs were not ones anyone would want (except maybe in China). Fast forward two years, and the tune is changing, but not from Negroponte.

This time its Rodrigo Arboleda Halaby, the South American lead for OLPC coming to the political reality that if OLPC wants to win in Brazil, they need to build in Brazil, as reported in OLPC busca parceiro para fabricar 'laptop de 100 dólares' no Brasil:

The idea is to locally produce the model XO 1.5, a new generation of educational notebook, which is scheduled for August this year and implement the project in Brazil program Give One, Get One (G1G1) - which includes the donation of a laptop for children developing countries in the equipment purchased by each user. In the case of Brazil, the purchase of laptops will be made by companies or private institutions and notebooks will be donated to public schools.

With the local production of the XO, OLPC also hopes to resume its participation in projects of inclusion of government. The organization ended up outside of the second auction sponsored by the Federal Government to distribute 150 thousand educational laptops to public schools, held in December last year. "At that moment we could not produce locally and therefore we could never compete" Arboleda said.

It seems that OLPC Brazil has finally learned from its auction losses that local production does matter in Brazil. If you don't promise some sort of local assembly of your technology, you will not be considered for a government tender.

Funny enough, I thought OLPC already knew this need - they promised school server production to Brazil back in 2007. Oh right, all those vaporware school servers that still don't exist.

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These days I have a spare Children's Machine from a G1G1 donor who realized that OLPC designed an amazing education tool for children in the developing world, not a $100 laptop", and passed his XO on to me.

Originally, I held a contest for G1G0 donors, and LesleyT won four months of joy for her class of special needs kids. With them, she explored its ability to be an assistive technology and handle screen licking. She also tested the XO's durability when screaming in digital.

LesleyT now has her own XO, which means I now have a spare. Rather than me having two, I'd like to send this "TravelingXO" on a little road trip to help expand One Laptop Per Child's impact.

If you have an interesting project that needs a physical XO for testing or implementation, and you need it for two months or less, please describe your opportunity, its solution, and how that will benefit OLPC in the TravelingXO Forum.

I'll ship the XO to the projects that excite me, and then assign an order for other projects. If you have an extra XO, feel free to join me in the TravelingXO idea - the more the better.

My only requirements: You'll be expected to write a Guest Post on what you do and send on the XO to the next recipient.

Submit your TravelingXO project ideas here

This Saturday, the OLPC Learning Club will revisit last year's OLPC News 4PC contest with the: Great 4P Computig Laptop Bake Off of 2009.

Through 2008, the netbook market continued to grow dramatically, seeking the optimal four Ps of power, performance, portability, and price. Industry analysts estimated this "netbook effect" drove sales of close to 12 million netbooks worldwide in 2008 and possibly 35 million in 2009. Nicholas Negroponte, who has laid claim to starting this market with the OLPC XO-1, believes that in a few years 1/2 of all laptops sold will be netbooks.

Faculty and parents from Friends Community School in College Park as well as members of the Learning Club will have a variety of netbooks and other computers on hand for review including:

• Acer Aspire One
• ASUS EeePC 701
• ASUS EeePC 901
• Belco Alpha 400 ($149!)
• Classmate 2 (2goPC)
• Classmate 3 convertible touchscreen (2goPC)
• HP Mini Note
• OLPC XO-1
• Tablet PCs
• Wega UMPC
• ... and more

Having so many laptops, netbooks and other PCs in one room will afford an excellent opportunity to test the USB flash drive version of the Sugar Learning Platform, which lets you boot into the OLPC XO ’s operating system on most any PC without affecting the internal hard drive. We'll have a bunch of USB drives preloaded with the latest "Strawberry" release of Sugar. Several of the Sugar USB drives will be raffled off later in the meeting, so be sure to get to the school early enough to get a raffle ticket.

The Great 4PC Laptop Bake Off
Saturday, July 18th, 10am-1pm
Friends Community School
5901 Westchester Park Drive
College Park, MD 20705 (map)

We'll also feature a special guest - our very own baby drool tester: Hanalei Vota.

What will OLPC Afghanistan's XO laptop mean to children receiving it in government schools? We hope it means an alternative to rote memorization. We hope it means an education based on induction and science, experimentation and imagination, an education that will help the children develop analytic skills and critical thinking. One Laptop Per Child is, as always, not a laptop project, but an education project.

But half of Afghanistan's children today are not in regular schools, have no teacher, and will grow to adulthood without them. Many of these children, approximately four million of them, disproportionately over eighty per cent of them girls, will grow up totally illiterate.
Master Teachers by Satellite for Afghanistan is an organization focused on these children without real schools or teachers.

Rosamel is what we wish every teacher involved with XO deployments were: ready to learn, ready to try, and what makes a lot of difference, ready also to share her experience. It also helps she doesn't give up easy, and together with several teachers and volunteers in Uruguay, that she does not expect to be handed the solutions to all the issues she faces. Kay, Bender, Negroponte, and many others who visit OLPCNews are probably right in saying that collaboration is among the brightest promises OLPC can offer. The fact that so far official OLPC policies and action have not encouraged collaboration has not stopped a few volunteers to try their best Among the less than 1% who actually did get connected to international community collaboration for this project, from all grownups given XOs there these two years, she has already shown both her willingness to ask questions, to answer questions asked by newer arrivals to the Castillian list, OLPC Sur, and also to do her own research and publish it, besides being active, as a volunteer and plain member, in the list governance, and several other initiatives linked to Ceibal. While full time teaching, of course.

What happens when One Laptop Per Child has an international internship program but without the deep funding from a One Here One There donation scheme? You get the forgotten South America internships of Peru and Uruguay. First, let's see what the South American intern program offers:

• Unpaid interns get a 1-week orientation
• Just a single XO laptop
• 9 weeks at a community site in either Peru or Uruguay
• And enjoy a wrap-up and celebratory session.

Now you can argue that they will get the benefit of established programs, where they can work closely with local implementation teams comprised of teachers and technical professionals experienced in OLPC deployment. And they have a defined mission to support an interactive English language learning program and help children learn by designing and constructing their own software projects.

But that is nothing compared to the other OLPCorps experience. In additon to the massive OLPCorps Africa hype, those lucky volunteers are getting the bonus plan with their benefits:

Over two years ago now, when my OLPC News fame was at its apex, I was approached by infoDev at the World Bank about starting a website focused on discussing how low-cost information and communication technology (ICT) device initiatives for educational systems in developing countries are relevant to the very groups they purport to serve - the students, teachers, and their surrounding communities. And by ICT systems, they wanted the full gamut - from 4P Computers like the XO laptop, to mobile phones, PDA's. infoDev also wanted a sustained effort in bringing educators and pedagogy into the conversation. Today, I would like to take this opportunity to introduce the Edcuational Technology Debate. ETD, as we like to call it, promotes discussion using a process loosely based on the classic debate framework.

Now that Google has announced that yes, they are working on a netbook operating system, what might Google Chrome mean for the XO laptop - the netbook category inspiration? Will Google Chrome run on the XO?

From what Google says, I expect that it should run damn fast on the XO, just listen to the specs from the announcement:

We're designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds... [W]e are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don't have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. The software architecture is simple - Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform.

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Uruguay's "El País" announced on the 7th day of the 7th month that 7 thousand 7th graders will receive XO computers in Treinta y Tres, Uruguay, running MS Office on Windows. (English translation via Google) The article stresses that Microsoft and the Uruguayan Central Education Council (CODICEN, the top authority as to school policy in Uruguay) will be monitoring closely the experience. This is interesting news considering that so far Ceibal, run by the LATU (Technological Laboratories of Uruguay, a government-financed, semi-independent body) has not shown much interest in monitoring and evaluation, even though it is indicated this pilot will be also part of Ceibal.

The CODICEN Director, Laura Motta, indicates her concern regarding possible backlash from defenders of open software, saying that "this is not a general change", moreover, that for Secondary education it has already been decided to work with open source software, so as "not to be committed to a single provider".