One Laptop Per Child News

Timothy Falconer, from the Waveplace Foundation, wrote to inform about the current status of events in Haiti, as many riots took over Port-au-Prince, where he is running a OLPC pilot project:

"The children and staff are safe, though they have only enough food and medicine for about a week. The markets have been closed in Port-Au-Prince, so this could become a concern. Emile said earlier today that he feels things will get better soon because of the peacekeepers.

Everyone's taking it day by day. I just got off the phone with Emile, our chief mentor in Haiti, who is staying in the countryside until things come down. Our pilot is effectively on hold due to safety concerns. I'll update you when I hear more about the children, who are close to the area of the protests."

This raises two important issues on the Haiti Pilot. The first is one that was brought before by Wayan: OLPC is an education project, but there are maybe some places that are beyond the reach of the One Laptop goal. It seems that the riots are calming down now, but what if they did not?

If violence in Port au Prince escalated to a point where most family would be forced to flee to surrounding areas, what would happen to the pilot project? Would the families disperse and the valuable laptops quickly vanish from the kid's hand as they where forced to sell/give it away? Or would Waveplace Foundation grab all the laptops from international donors and move out of the country, or risk having the school looted to bare bones?

Maybe we have to wait until political stability has reigned in some places, before a long term education project can be invested. Maybe it's too much risk for those precious resources that could be more safely invested in quiet rural areas in Peru. Maybe the "Mudhut argument" is true and laptops serve no good for kids below a certain threshold of poverty, that lack more basic things such a peaceful environment in which to grow.

Or maybe not, and that's the second important issue on this. Watch this footage sent us from Haiti:

Although it has CNN stamped on it it's clear that much of those videos are made from amateur cameras. We are talking about impoverished Haiti, all right, but we are talking about a 21st Century impoverished Haiti and they are also part of the digital imaging generation, and those in the middle to upper class in Port au Prince can afford some way to film video and post it online.

None of them are actually coming from kids with XO laptops, but - hey they could be. We are all shocked hearing those reports of violence from Haiti, but maybe if there were no computers anywhere we might never hear them in the first place. Thanks to this connecting technology we can see the San Francisco Olympic torch protests live on the web, we can see the violence in Zimbabwe in Google maps.

And thanks to a mesh system this communication network might still work if everything else goes down. So giving the impoverished kids of Haiti a way to allow their voices be heard, their stories be told and allowing them hearing news from the world outside even during a crisis is a way to be a part of this new generation.

And maybe this is worth all the risks.

Tags: Education Project | Food Riots | OLPC | OLPC Haiti | Port au Prince | Timothy Falconer | Waveplace Foundation |

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Wayan Vota is a nice guy, and clearly means well, and supports the XO in general. But I don't think he entirely Gets It with his post on OLPC Haiti: The Good, Bad, and Ugly of XO's in Abject Poverty.

Wayan has three specific objections:

• Children won't be able to take XOs home without being robbed or even killed.
• What is the follow-up, if children are successful in elementary school with the XO, but cannot continue in school?
• Haiti can't afford this program. Who will pay for it?

I am Edward Cherlin of Earth Treasury and I have a some answers.

OLPC Safety

OK, safety first. Robbery is a possibility, with XOs going for more than $400 on eBay. The usual advice from big US cities applies about not getting killed: Don't fight an armed robber. We can replace your XO, but we can't replace you. But there are places in Haiti not under gang rule. Why not start there?

How about the area where Paul Farmer's Partners in Health/Zanmi Lasanté is providing free health care? Or, wait, here's a thought. Why not talk to the gangs, and offer their chidren some XOs, and a path out of gang life? On the condition, of course, that they protect every child carrying an XO in their territory.

Leveraging OLPC Education

I'm not clear on the objection to giving little children just the first part of an education. Is it not good for anything? In Haiti, I hear that a conventional sixth grade education puts you ahead of the pack when looking for work. In the case of the XO, a sixth grade education includes computer repair, three or four years of programming, Web design, and other entirely marketable skills. But there is far more.

The children get to make contact with the outside world. Earth Treasury is creating plans for getting students into international businesses together. We are definitely going to be able to hire elementary school graduates for some of our enterprises, because we will design them around the available skills, and not the skills of ridiculously expensive university-educated First World workers such as myself.

My current day job is contract Tech Writing at $60-$65/hr., but I have also been a market analyst, a software developer, and a serial non-profit founder. I'm currently available. Or you are welcome to donate to Earth Treasury.

And are you going to tell me that you never heard of distance learning, online schools, and cooperative home schooling? Do you think that someone with access to the Internet and six years experience in collaboration will be incapable of learning the necessary from it?

If the lack of secondary schools in Haiti is the problem, then the solution isn't idiotic withdrawal, it's the creation of a complete online secondary education system where the students teach each other with help from anybody else who knows anything and is willing to pitch in. Yes, that's work, yes, that's hard (Life is hard, as hard as possible, but no harder), yes, we don't quite know how to do it (which makes it research), but tell me: Is it better to teach children to make candles, or to curse the darkness?

OLPC Costs

Haiti certainly cannot afford this program out of current income. But that isn't the correct question. Can such a program result in sufficient economic growth to result in increased tax revenue sufficient to cover the costs of, say, a 20-year bond, or an international loan? I have a spreadsheet that says Yes, and I would buy some of those bonds. What do you have?

Tags: Earth Treasury | Least Developed Country | OLPC Education | OLPC Haiti | Partners in Health | Paul Farmer |

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Recently, the One Laptop Per Child and the Inter-American Development Bank announced a pilot project in Haiti to test whether one-to-one computing can improve teaching and learning in Haitian schools.

As Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, with abject poverty and no real government services to speak of, I can tell you right now that OLPC's pilot will be a success merely by doing something, anything, to help deliver education to the country's children.

But if we take a more practical, and long-term view of the OLPC Haiti pilot, I say we'll see the good, bad, and ugly of such an endeavor.

The Good

In a direct contraction to Nicholas Negroponte guidance at the November, 2005 IADB meeting, where he told Ministers of Education that "To do a pilot project is ridiculous!," the IADB is not only piloting OLPC, they're also going to have objective testing on the efficacy of a one to one education model:

For a qualitative evaluation, classroom practices will be continuously observed to gage whether one-to-one computing affects attitudes and behaviors regarding school management, how families value education, the use of laptops at home and the perceived educational progress of students.

UNESCO’s Regional Office on Education in Latin America and the Caribbean will conduct standardized mathematics and language tests before and after the pilot project to evaluate its performance from a quantitative standpoint.

In addition, there will be teacher and student training on the laptops, Negroponte's dreaded "ICT skills" and there will even be a home-grown XO maintenance plan with students in vocational training schools and local information technology advisors.

In effect, OLPC is finally realizing that pilot projects are not only required, they are necessary, and they will be subject to objective measurement to determine effectiveness. No one is going to buy laptops by believing in "OLPC magic".

The Bad

One Laptop Per Child faces a real challenge in translating educational content into Creole. Not only is Creole a relatively rare language outside of Haiti, there is a serious dearth of content in Creole presently. Expect a call for Pootle volunteers any day now.

Next, I am disappointed that OLPC and IADB did not build on the efforts of grassroots programs like Waveplace Foundation, which already has connections to Haitian schools, and can provide needed follow-up a stretched-thin OLPC cannot. In addition, OLPC's efforts may reduce Waceplace's ability to get G1G1 participants involved in their worthy efforts.

The Ugly

Haiti is not Peru or Uruguay. It's a failed state that cannot offer even basic services to its citizenry, and outside Port a Prince, the country is run by local mafia and strongmen who brutalize their subjects. It is so bad, Waveplace Foundation staff go everywhere in armored vehicles with armed guards.

To expect Haitian children in this environment to be safe walking around with bring green $200 laptops is the height of denial, Bitfrost be damned. The laptop will have to be locked up at school with prayers that robbers will not break down brick walls to get at the computers. Or as a friend of mine soberly predicted: "There will we see the first child killed for his XO."

On a less morbid thought, but no less challenging one: how will the XO create a long-term change? So what if a poor, rural child "learns learning" in Haiti? What middle or high school could they attend? What college will be realistically in their reach? With such grinding poverty, might Haiti be too poor for the XO?

The Haitian government is definitely too poor to afford an XO pilot. If you look closely, it's the IADB and OLPC itself that are sponsoring this experiment:

The IDB will make a US$3 million grant for the pilot project, which will distribute XO laptops to some 13,200 students and 500 teachers in 60 Haitian primary schools. OLPC will contribute US$2 million to the project.

If you do the numbers, 13,700 laptops at $5 million dollars means that Haitian XO's are $365 dollars per laptop. One laptop per child implementation costs are at least double the XO laptop costs - and that's even with SES donating satellite bandwidth for limited Internet connectivity.

Tags: Bitfrost | IADB | ICT Skills | IDB | OLPC Haiti | SES | UNESCO | Waveplace Foundation | XO Laptop Cost | XO Pilot |

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We're told the first twenty laptops off the OLPC production line went to 4th graders in the US Virgin Islands. These lucky kids are taking part in a ten week pilot program conducted by Waveplace Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to bringing digital media skills to Caribbean children.

One month into our first pilot, we're starting another pilot in Haiti next week. I am Timothy Falconer of Waveplace Foundation and we need your help.

Waveplace is all about mentoring. While OLPC's notion of "pick up and learn" has appeal, we find that mentors make all the difference. You wouldn't expect a child to learn music or baseball on their own. A kid might noodle around a bit, but the real magic, what we call "spark", can only come from an experienced guide, someone whose love for learning shows through as they teach.

Waveplace works with local Caribbean groups to find motivated mentors, then trains them to teach Squeak Etoys on the XO. From our pilots, we'll develop a textbook and DVD set, which we'll make freely available to the world this summer. You can get a taste on our website where five hours of video tutorial can be found.

Tags: Alan Kay | Caribbean OLPC | OLPC Haiti | Timothy Falconer | Virgin Islands | Waveplace Foundation | XO Laptops |

Waveplace Foundation Brings XO Spark To Caribbean Children | Comment (12) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It