One Laptop Per Child News

Resumen en español al final del artículo

Yesterday the Mobiles for Education Alliance - which includes many big players such as USAID, U.S. Department of State, Peace Corps, World Bank, IADB, UNICEF, UNESCO, and others - announced an upcoming event with Sugar Labs' Walter Bender.

The topic for the February session of the mAlliance's Seminar Series is "The OLPC Project, Learning and the XO 3 Tablet" and according to the invitation it will focus on:

• The move to a tablet device for OLPC
• The relationship between device design and learning
• The OLPC model and the Sugar operating system

The invitation also mentions that:

An interactive and informative discussion will follow Walter's presentation, and attendees will be invited to explore hands-on the XO 3 tablet and the soon-to-be-released XO 1.75 and XO 1.75 touch.

The event will take place on Friday, February 10th between 9:30 - 11:00 a.m. (EST). For those of you who are based in D.C. the physical address is Ronald Reagan Building, North Tower, 1300 Pennsylvania, Suite 700 but there's also an option to follow the presentation virtually. In either case mAlliance asks that you RSVP to [email protected].

I'll do my best to attend the virtual presentation as this is certainly promising to be an interesting session.

Resumen en español: El 10 de febrero Walter Bender estara dando una presentación enfocado en OLPC, el aprendizaje y el XO 3.0 en un evento en Washington, D.C. Felizmente tambien hay una forma virtual de seguir el evento de la distancia y voy a intentar de verlo así. Hay más información sobre el evento en la invitación (en Inglés) y para regitrarse hay que mandar un correo a [email protected].

Resumen en español al final del artículo

Even though it was widely reported when Nicholas Negroponte first mentioned that he was planning a new deployment model based on dropping laptops or tablets out of helicopters, few media outlets have bothered to follow up on the idea since then. The one notable exception is New Scientist which conducted an interview with Negroponte in early December where he revealed a few details and the fact that pre-pilots were scheduled to start in January.

Now, it shouldn't come as a surprise that we have tried to keep a close eye on the relevant developments. As such I was more than happy to speak with Clark Boyd, the host of PRI's The World Technology Podcast, when he got in touch just before Christmas to discuss Negroponte's idea and the overall status quo of OLPC.

You can find the resulting 9 minute piece in episode 351 of the podcast (direct MP3 download), it starts about 15min 45sec into the show.

On a related note: I hope to learn more details about how the aforementioned pre-pilot project is going during my upcoming visit in Boston in the last week of February.

Resumen en español: Antes de navidad hice una entrevista con The World Technology Podcast donde hablaba sobre el estado de OLPC y la idea de Nicholas Negroponte en cuanto a la distribución de laptops y tablets con helicópteros. La entrevista se encuentra en episodio 351 del programa (descarga directa del archivo) y la parte sobre OLPC empieza en 15min 45sec.

Resumen en español al final del artículo

I saw the following interview thanks to a volunteer who shared it on the olpc-uruguay mailing list. In it Isaac Asimov - most widely known for his science fiction writings - spends several minutes talking about the use of computers and what is essentially a description of the Internet in education.

While that in itself would already be noteworthy the fact that the interview took place in 1988 makes it all the more interesting. It's not hard to find similarities between what Asimov described 24 years ago and ongoing projects such as Khan Academy, Wikipedia, and indeed OLPC. Interestingly enough some of the questions the interviewer asks are also very similar to the ones often heard around aforementioned projects.

In any case I think the first few minutes of this video are well worth watching:

Resumen en español: Este video muestra Isaac Asimov - más conocido por sus obras de ciencia ficción - hablando sobre el uso de computadoras en la educación en una entrevista en el año 1988. Lo interesante es que muchos proyectos actuales como Khan Academy, Wikipedia o OLPC estan parecidos a ideas que el describió hace 24 años.

La calesita surge de un proyecto escolar iniciado en el 2010 por niños de 3er año de escuela en conjunto con una maestra, la directora y un voluntario de RAP Ceibal. Durante dos años estuvieron trabajando para concretar su proyecto. El mismo permitió nuevos abordajes de temáticas referentes a ciencia, energías renovables, medioambiente, entre otros.

Giving them OLPC laptops, not just any computer, transforms their world beyond what a teacher and a regular computer could achieve together. My experience is that wherever we have OLPC deployed, virtually anyone visiting those schools has almost had an "spiritual" experience of what learning learning can be.

How children can be engaged in learning by themselves, as a class and engage the teachers as well... It transforms the school from a place where children are forced to go into a place they don't want to go away from.

OLPC and SFSU will use their best efforts to establish a long-term cooperation and collaboration in the field of 1:1 computing in certain primary schools in California and around the world. OLPC is interested in pursuing opportunities in the areas of Education, Technology and Outreach.

The Parties agree to work together to support the San Francisco Bay Area volunteer community through its monthly meetings, lending library and annual summit. Further, the parties agree to support faculty research, community service, student projects and internships in the OLPC context. These may include, but are not limited to pedagogical approaches, content generation, software development, hardware testing, network analysis, community outreach and other related topics that go towards ensuring the sustainability of OLPC in different parts of the world.