One Laptop Per Child News

I would love to announce that One Laptop Per Child has restarted the Give One Get One program of years before, but sadly, you can only Give One on Amazon.com. But there are still good Black Friday Deals on XO-ish things. Amazon has netbooks on sale for those who want to shop for new computers.

Over on eBay, you can still buy XO laptops, some in their original packaging. But if you already have an XO-1, and you're holding out for an XO-1.5, you can always go Constructionist while you wait with these three books:

• The Children's Machine: Rethinking School In The Age Of The Computer
• Mindstorms: Children, Computers, And Powerful Ideas
• The Connected Family: Bridging the Digital Generation Gap (Book & CD-ROM)

Personally, I'll be re-watching my favorite TV show: 60 Minutes - One Laptop Per Child.

The Lubuto Library Project builds beautiful, indigenously-styled open-access libraries that serve street children and other vulnerable and out-of-school children in sub-Saharan African countries, starting in Zambia.

The libraries, owned and run by Zambians, offer a wide array of programs, including mentoring and use of OLPC XO laptops, that provide the children with a bridge to schools and social services that are beyond the reach of vast numbers of them.

We successfully introduced 10 XO's at the first Lubuto Library, in Lusaka, Zambia, in February, 2009 - see XO Empowered Street Children at Lubuto Library - and they have been in almost constant use ever since:

We are now completing our second library, in another part of Lusaka where there are many street children needing services, and we would like to provide as many of the XO laptops as we can get. The former street children who work with our libraries are adept in training, and we can assure you that the laptops will be heavily used and appreciated for as long as they last by some of the most vulnerable children on the planet.

Your donation of a laptop is tax-deductible and we will immediately send a receipt with our thanks. You cancontact us here.

Jane Meyers is president of the Lubuto Library Project, Inc.

OLPC is restructuring. This time quietly, which at least doesn't start up the storm we had in January, but even slow news are important news, as they add up.

It was already public knowledge that the Learning Team is gone to Rwanda, for good. Nicholas Negroponte quipped to me during the IADB Seminar, saying that I "wouldn't have to see [David] Cavalho any more". (I actually liked David the time we met personally, but that's off the point).

We also had announced already that Sales went to Miami, no longer connected with Brightstar. While I personally hate to lose the connection with Marcelo Claure, someone also born in Bolivia, I'm sure there were reasons for that change.

Now, Rodrigo Arboleda, until recently OLPC President and CEO, Ibero-America & The Caribbean, dunks the geography verbiage and now is President, One Laptop Per Child ("OLPC"), taking over not just sales but operations responsibility for the whole OLPC Association, from Miami.

Dr. Negroponte will be focusing more specifically on future development (a.k.a. XO #?).
Chuck Kane stays as President of the OLPC Foundation, operating from the 1CC Boston headquarters.

More minor changes that do make a big difference: Adam Holt has a more definite and stable role to keep the community alive, SJ Klein is still sort of with us or maybe not quite while being one of the topmost to-go guys at Wikimedia.

I wish he had been able to do what he proposes for Wikimedia while he was with us, like open meetings and soliciting public input. Sean Daly is not quite a hire apparently, but he seems to be turning into a sort of a credible public spokesman for the project within the community, something we sorely needed.

We've seen some people go, in a less stressful way than what happened in January. We will miss dogi and isforinsects. They did a good job, and I for one learned a lot from them.

Will a new Global Advocacy Group for OLPC be based in Washington DC? While it is possible there will be some commuting, as Matt Keller is located in Cambridge, there might be interesting action to follow up in DC besides the McCain endorsement. Who knows, maybe even money will flow!

Alas, the message OLPC proposes doesn't seem to be yet aligned with the one that comes from major funding sources, mostly because it still falls short of a specific and definite focus for curricular content and support of classroom work.

An interesting page to keep an eye on is Jobs at laptop.org. The only change in a few months has been the interest in Middle East education. Anyway, some of those job offers never got anyone hired, so take the page as an indicator of trends rather than an up to date or otherwise accurate source. Notice the several offers for the now defunct XO 1.5. A cached version.

(full disclosure: the above is a compilation of an observation of trends and likely events, but may not be fully accurate, since it is so hard to get actual information on the goings-on at 1CC - I again requested to talk with them to check on facts, so far no answer)

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The Sugar software for the OLPC XO (and, with Sugar on a Stick, for almost any other recent computer with an x86 processor) is based in part on Seymour Papert's educational classic, Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas. Sharp tools for young minds

One of those Powerful Ideas is to provide Sharp Tools, as opposed to the weak idea of canned lessons on individual topics that go no further. They were originally designed for the factory automation model of education.

You know, everybody in an entire state or country gets the same lesson from the same textbook on the same day. Efficiency! Except when some students don't get a particular lesson, and there is no provision for helping them to catch up.

We still have to offer lessons on the same day for everybody in the same classroom, but we aren't confined to a single textbook, or even the same information on the same topic within a lesson. For example, the lesson may be for a class to go out on the Internet, and for each student to find different information that relates to a topic, and combine the various discoveries. Ivan Krstić mentioned this strategy as one of the first that teachers discovered in Peru.

Come out this Saturday to OLPC events in New Your City, or San Francisco. Here in the Bay Area, we'll have the OLPC San Francisco Bay Area Summit 2009 - a OLPC-SF community event designed to primarily foster collaboration amongst deployment teams in the SF Bay Area. We also hope that the event will help in improving the visibility of OLPC and Sugar to a wider group around this area.

The event is a "Birds of a Feather" type event but largely run as an unconference. Open to everyone. Drop by, and join a session. Bring a friend. Bring your family too!

OLPC San Francisco Bay Area Summit 2009
Saturday, Nov 21, 2009 (whole day)
SFSU Downtown Campus at #553,
835 Market Street, San Francisco

Sessions include:

• Stacey Kertsman. (eduWeavers) "XO for teaching and learning." Education track. Room 553
• Sameer Verma. (SFSU) "Moodle and the School Server". Technology track. Room 554
• Humaira Mahi (SFSU) and Carol Ruth Silver (MTSA). "Women, health literacy and empowerment". Outreach track. Room 553
• Bruce Baikie. (Green Wifi) "Senegal - Deployment lessons and moving forward in 2010" Education Track. Room 554
• Ed Cherlin (Earth Treasury). "Teaching Python in schools". Technology track. Room 597
• Alex Kleider (Madagascar). "School Server installation and configuration". Technology track. Room 553
• Christian Nobs and Ted Kuster (Starr King). "Kid Camp: Discover by doing - Hands-on experience with XO activities for children". Outreach track. Room 554
• Ed Cherlin (Earth Treasury) and Sameer Verma (SFSU). "Sugar on the XO, Sugar on a Stick, Sugar in the Lab, Sugar Everywhere!". Technology Track. Room 597
• Joachim Pedersen. (OLPC-SF Repair Center), June Kleider (Madagascar) and Anil Daswani (Support Gang). "Repairing and supporting XOs in the field." Technology track. Room 553

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Editors Note: This article by Alec Ross and Simon Rosenberg, is one of NDN's Series of Modest Proposals to Build 21st Century Skills first published in May 2007. Its introduction is republished here to remind us of an American need for one laptop per child. Read the full article here. A single global communications network, composed of Internet, mobile, SMS, cable and satellite technology, is rapidly tying the world's people together as never before. The core premise of this paper is that the emergence of this network is one of the seminal events of the early 21st century.

Increasingly, the world's commerce, finance, communications, media and information are flowing through this network. Half of the world's 6 billion people are now connected to this network, many through powerful and inexpensive mobile phones. Each year more of the world's people become connected to the network, its bandwidth increases, and its use becomes more integrated into all that we do.

Connectivity to this network, and the ability to master it once on, has become an essential part of life in the 21st century, and a key to opportunity, success and fulfillment for the people of the world. We believe it should be a core priority of the United States to ensure that all the world's people have access to this global network and have the tools to use it for their own life success.

SugarLabs evolved from OLPC with a wider goal to provide an instructionist GIU and computer learning environment for elementary school age kids all over the world. It's engineering goals call for an OS and hardware-agnostic platform, with transparent free and readily accessible and modifiable code that can be also easily shared among users. The normal user has absolute control over the Sugar part but the core system remains secure from malicious activities.

One aspect that was explicitly stated in the OLPC project but is not even suggested by SugarLabs is environmental concern and energy (code) efficiency. The other aspect that was not addressed either by OLPC or SugarLabs is if free and accessible implies "as long as you do it a certain way".

For those in Europe, its time for a trip to Hamburg this weekend! Why? Because OLPC Deutschland e.V. will be having its annual meeting to decide how to spend all its loot donations over the next year.

But better than that, Bert Freudenberg will be showing off an XO-1.5 - the first in Germany! And with Rita, talking about their summer visit to Squeakfest Brazil. Bert & Rita will also share first-hand field reports from OLPC deployments in South America.

So here's your chance to geek out this weekend:

OLPC Deutschland Annual Meeting
Sunday, November 22
Sebastian Umlauft's home
Pepermölenbek 4, 22767
St. Pauli/Fischmarkt
Hamburg, Germany
(map)

If you're going, be sure to sign up on the Mitgliederversammlung 2009 in Hamburg wiki page.

Some friends of mine from college asked the following question about OLPC Afghanistan:

Greg Mortensen built 200 schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan for less than the cost of one cruise missile. In doing so, he has done vastly more to end Islamic fundamentalism than the entire US effort in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Is it enough, C.?

No, it isn't enough. Afghanistan needs its own army and police built up, plus a civil service and infrastructure: roads, schools, clinics, electricity, phones, Internet, microfinance. But if you do all of that, and don't build and supply schools, it all falls apart. The Taliban demonstrate this fact themselves by destroying every school they can get to, other than their own boys-only madrassas, and shooting teachers.