One Laptop Per Child News

Ah, I can still remember the day we got the first computers in our school. Not just any school mind, but my school. And not just any of my schools, but my primary school. The school where even the lightest of impressions would burn into your naked soul until it hit the bone.

There, in that school all of a sudden we found a computer upon a table. No-one of us younglings knew exactly how it got there or what it was for... Yes computing of course; the meaning of which overlapped pretty much with game playing, although very few of us had actually played with or owned a computer.

Oh how the black magic of the thing attracted us like flies. It was a PC of sorts, but not of the Intel variety. Nor was it any of the MSX-y variety which I had come across before. But it had a tape-drive, just like the MSX. And it took forever to load anything.

But it would keep you amused by making funny screachy sounds as it did so. A bit like a demented robot. And that is about all I remember, because this wonderful educational device fell flat on it's face at the end of the eighties. I think it sort of landed there by magic, at that odd place at the end of the class.

And the teachers of my school sort of hoped it would sorcer itself away. Which it did after two months. In a puff of smoke, never to be heard of again. To great delight of said teachers who never actually tried to use it to educate us.

Burn out

Now we will fast-forward to the present day. I'm Ties Stuij, Journalist come nerd/developer working for OLE Nepal in Kathmandu. Through the greyish magic with which fate spins its web I somehow find myself working in this dynamic and stinky city. Working on educational software for these black magic boxes for OLE Nepal. Well, not really working at present. Resting would be more accurate of a description.

The whole development team is in a state of lazy rest. Not a laziness used as a coping strategy to counter the dreariness of everyday office life... Quite the opposite.

This laziness is a coping strategy to alleviate our fused out brains that have been mutilated beyond recognition by our iron willpower to make the best damn educational software this side of the horsehead nebula.

Ehh.. Did that sound just a bit pretentious? Perhaps, but we have been working awfully hard to produce a final build of a software suite called Epaati, that will assist teaching children from both grade 2 and grade 6 (8 respectively 12 years old) maths and English.

Final build in the sense that this version of Epaati will be put on these mini (super) computers, called XO's. These computers will on their turn be put in the greedy little hands of Nepali schoolchildren in about a week.

Oh the pressure, the pressure!

We've been developing Epaati for quite a while now, but up till now we unleashed it's considerable power only upon our test audience, game jams and the teachers of our deployment schools. And our digital child has grown quite a bit since it's conception. We developed 47 learning activities in all.

Tons of bugs can hide in and amongst their folds and crevices, and there's nothing like the urgency of actual use to drive the hunt in uncovering and squashing them. Animal rights organizations were held at bay with long poles, while this digital mass murder was underway. It's hard to believe that there were so many bugs to be found. But then again, this suite is the result of 6 months work by three to four developers and one graphics artist.

Another thing that's annoying is that this software is for little puppy-eyed kids who might actually be helped in their development by our efforts. You know, a regular customer is a party on equal footing.

You ship a bug, and she'll know this is an industry hazard. But those little kids... somewhere in that jaded, cynical, hedonistic, western brain of mine those kids invoke scary feelings of social responsibility, which drive you to walk the extra mile.

So the OLE Nepal offices have of late been a battlefield on which many a shard of good will has driven itself in the bloody soil, when it had to admit defeat against fatigue and sleep-deprivation while all involved tried to MAKE STUFF WORK. And not just the development team of course.

While our immediate task for the coming deployment is done. Other sections are still in full gear working with getting the XO's ready, beating school servers in shape, testing jabber servers, giving press conferences, instructing teachers, aligning us with other parties involved,.. etc. Let them work like mules, we don't care. Our brains are soup, we're of no use.

As reporter after reporter is shuffling into our office to get the news on what is to come, we are already done. Filled with a vague satisfaction that stage-builders must also feel, just before a theatre play starts that they built the decor for.

Here there be monsters

We are doing quite cool stuff here, on the brink of the unknown. I myself am in charge of optimizations, as it's called. And that task was more satisfying than expected. The XO's aren't the most powerful computers in the world and as it turned out the software we use to build our activities (Etoys, on top of Squeak, for connoisseurs), wasn't yet prepared to handle a project of our scope in such a constrained environment.

For example, when I started off, a number of activities we made would take over a minute and a half to load, and some wouldn't load at all. Also our software took up way to much memory, affecting other software as well if it was being used at the same time. This was making the user experience much less fun and much more frustrating than is acceptable.

Not to speak of the activities that didn't even work. If I wouldn't be able to find some solutions, or find people that would find solutions, my job would be unenviable to say the least. Once I oversaw the full scope of our problems (or was I just exaggerating everything in my head), I got scared indeed.

Also considering I had hardly coded in Smalltalk (the language of which Squeak is an implementation) before. Luckily Smalltalk/Squeak is a very comfortable environment to work in and me and others managed to trim our problems down to an acceptable level. In certain cases the loading-time speedup was tripled or even quadrupled. All our activities are now loading, while memory consumption is halved. Not that we're there though.

While I'd like to bring down loading time even more (Most of our activities load between 20 and thirty secs now; Still quite a bit in the light of a child's impatience.), we need to address amongst others character-encoding and sound related problems. But these seem to be solvable problems, our biggest enemy being time and manpower.

Live or die

The strange thing is that we've created a beast, but we've got no clue how it's going to behave in the wild. Maybe it'll just curl up and die, just like the computer in my boyhood school. But I must say that the enthusiastic reactions I've seen from actual teachers (two of which have stayed in my house for a few days, while they received training) have very much outstripped my expectations.

And I think that if I and my comrades could already be enchanted by that computer that was basically just sitting there at the back of the class, these action- and content-packed babies will certainly have an impact on those child-brains in rural Nepal.

Postscript

For those that want to try our beast of burden, you can download the XO bundle by surfing to http://dev.laptop.org/pub/epaati/Epaati-10.xo For XO illiterate Squeakers: the bundle is a simple zip file. Just unzip it and click the image in the epaati dir.

Tags: Educational Software | Epaati | Horsehead Nebula | OLE Nepal | OLPC | Smalltalk | Squeak | Ties Stuij | XO Bundle |

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I have been working on OLPC in Nepal for over 18 months and it has been an incredible ride. I have learned how to navigate Nepal's educational bureaucracy, worked 70-80 hours per week consistently, and gotten to know some truly talented people. Ivan Krstic's recent blog post inspired me to write about my own personal journey with OLPC.

In the last few months we have had some incredible breakthroughs:

• The Danish IT Society has donated 200 XO's for Nepal's Spring Pilots and agreed to raise funds to buy laptops for later deployments.
• The OLE Nepal development team has developed some fantastic learning activities in the E-Paati Educational Suite. I remember beaming with pride when members of Birmingham's implementation team told me that they would love to use E-Paati for their deployment.
• In early March, the Danish Embassy agreed to fund our work implementing Nepal's deployments at Bishwamitra and Bashuki, our community activities, and content development for the next 12 months.

And an Exciting Future: We have two deployments starting in April at Bashuki and Bishwamitra. I am confident that we can expand this project rapidly if these deployments go well.

I have gotten a number of e-mails from individuals seeking advice on how to start a grassroots OLPC organization. I am really flattered that they seek out my counsel but I must make it clear that I am just one member of an extremely talented team. Rabi Karmacharya, Dr. Saurav Dev Bhatta, Mahabir Pun, Sulochan and others and others have put an incredible amount of work to get us this far and deserve the lion's share of the credit. I just happen to be the team member that writes the most blog posts and consistently spams the various OLPC mailing lists.

Starting with OLPC Nepal

So how did we get here? That is a story in itself. I have been working outside the US for the last six years, mostly as a career member of the US Foreign Service, in the Middle East, China, and most recently Kathmandu. A consistent theme in my travels has been the importance of educational infrastructure and its frequent neglect vis-a-vis physical infrastructure.

OLPC captured my imagination from its first announcement. In spring of 2006, I got appointed as the IT Manager for the US Embassy in Kathmandu, Nepal. I contacted Walter Bender to find out if anyone was working on OLPC in Nepal. He put me in contact with a group of passionate young engineers working with an A-Test Board. This original group coalesced into a larger team within a few short months.

Rabi Karmacharya, Mahabir Pun, Shankar Pokharel, Ankur Sharma, myself and others formally established OLPC Nepal in November of 2006 to advocate, develop content, and implement OLPC Nepal. We worked hard to raise the public profile of OLPC and secure a government pilot. Those were exciting times. In May of 2007, our hard work paid off when the Education Minister publicly committed to a pilot of OLPC.

On to OLE Nepal

In July of 2007, OLPC Nepal split over irreconcilable differences of how to implement OLPC in Nepal. Our sudden success brought to light that amongst ourselves we had very different ideas of how to implement this project. Mahabir, Rabi, and myself left to form OLE Nepal. Anyone who has ever started a business or non-profit group knows that this is a common occurrence.

A group of friends start a project with a common goal but fuzzy ideas how to reach that goal. Over time, team members come to differing plans. Sometimes those differing plans can be reconciled, sometimes not. I have seen this phenomena in Boy Scout troops, startup companies, and sports teams. We are still on amicable terms with the OLPC Nepal team and support their efforts. We are particularly proud of their translation activities.

In August of 2007, I resigned from my career with the US Foreign Service to focus full-time on OLPC. My bank account and my parents still haven't completely forgiven me. Rabi started his transition out of managing a successful software company and Dr. Saurav Dev Bhatta joined the team as Education Director. Only one month earlier, Saurav had left his professorship in public policy at the University of Illinois with the intention of working in education reform in Nepal. The timing could not have been more fortuitous.

We formed a partnership with Open Learning Exchange, Inc. a Boston-based non-profit that support grassroots organizations that are committed to developing open content for education. OLE, Inc. is technology-agnostic and leaves it up to its grassroots partners to decide which technology to use. OLE Nepal has committed to OLPC's technology and OLE, inc. has been supportive of our decision. It is really, really hard to get a non-profit off the ground and I can't overstate how helpful OLE, Inc. has been in terms of providing assistance with logistics, management advice, and connections to donors.

Now we have a full-time staff of 15 people and a number of dedicated volunteers. We have come a long way in a very short period and the most exciting days are ahead of us.

Some of the things I have learned along the way:

Teachers are the real Implementers of this Project
Teachers will be the key to this project's success. We just visit schools while they will be there year after year. They have the respect of their communities while we are a foreign entity.

Integrity Matters
It is tempting to take shortcuts when the pressure is on, particularly of the ethical kind. This is a mistake. We have an excellent team in large part because of Rabi Karmacharya's impeccable integrity. Time and time again, team members have told me they committed to this initiative in significant part due to Rabi's leadership.

Volunteers Need Support
The XO and Sugar are packed with cutting edge technology. This makes it difficult for volunteers to contribute just a few hours a week to the project, with the notable exception of the Pootle translation system. It takes several hours just to catch up on what's happening in the project. We put a lot of time into documenting our work and training volunteers. http://blog.olenepal.org/index.php/archives/132

Volunteers Sometimes Come with their own Agendas
Unfortunately, some individuals come to this project seeking resources for their own activities or to pursue a narrow interest not connected to the core ideals of OLPC. Great ideas are plentiful; people willing and able to implement them are not

E-Library is still missing from the Open-Source stack
There are very, very few libraries in Nepal. The amount of Nepali-language resources online are pitifully few. one of the first things people say they want is an Internet accessible library stocked with Nepali literature, history, and art.

Unfortunately, most open-source Content-Management Systems can't scale to support a national digital library. The best candidate for building a scaleable content repository is the FedoraCommons (not related to Fedora Linux) package however it has a very steep learning curve and requires extensive custom development. We are working with developers from OLE, Cambridge to build a national E-Library for Nepal based on FedoraCommons that will feature a Nepali-language interface and workflow tools.

Nepali Parents care most about Math, English, and Science
This comes up again and again. People want the tools for basic education. In my opinion, teaching basic English, mathematics, and science in a constructivist manner is much harder than the higher subjects, and frankly, much more important.

There should be more than one OLPC organization in a country
OLPC is too important and large a project to be left up to one organization. I really wish there were many more than two organizations working on OLPC in Nepal. We will be successful when every organization working in education makes OLPC a cornerstone of their approach.

The Long and Winding Road

It will be a long, difficult process to reform educational systems so that they empower kids, teachers, and schools. It won't be done in several years, even 10. I and the rest of the OLE Nepal team are in this for the long run and I will make it my career to implement technology to enable this process.

Every once in a while I read pessimistic articles about the future of OLPC. You can dismiss those. I know a significant number of very dedicated people working at the grassroots level who are in this for the long run. We won't be deterred by bad press. If you aren't already part of this movement, please join us.

There is a long list of people that I want to thank for supporting me personally and OLE Nepal over the last 18 months. Here are a just a few:

• Santosh Gyawali
• Dr. Richard Rowe for teaching us how to become a professional organization
• Walter Bender, SJ Klein, John Watlington, C. Scott Ananian and many, many others at OLPC
• Shankar Pokharel and Ankur Sharma of OLPC Nepal for making me believe in this project
• Christoph Derndorfer and Aaron Kaplan of OLPC Austria
• The entire Squeak and EToys communities for supporting our activity development effors
• Bert Freudenberg
• Luke Gorrie
• Subir Pradhanang
• My Brother-in-law Christopher Sniffen, for telling me I would be stupid *not* to quit my job and work on OLPC full-time
• Tika Bhattarai, who invented the term "The Quality Divide" in education
• Satish Kharel who has helped out at the most critical junctures
• Dr. Kedar Bhakta Mathema, our lead advisor
• Mohan Das Manandhar, Dr. Pratibha Pandey and our entire Board of Directors
• Wayan Vota for consistently promoting our work
• Mahabir Pun for being a consistent source of inspiration
• And the whole OLE Nepal Team

.

Tags: Bashuki | Bishwamitra | Bryan Berry | OLE Nepal | OLPC Nepal | One Laptop Per Child | Open Learning Exchange |

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Do you dream in Bash? Can you Moodle all night with Dev "Where’s the Party Yaar?" Mohanty. And do any of these technology terms excite you: BIND, DHCPD, or Squid? Then you'll be interested in this opportunity of a lifetime: OLE Nepal Super SysAdmin.

OLE Nepal is looking for a Super Systems Administrator to work with their Kathmandu-based team and with OLPC to implement a school server solution in the OLE Nepal school pilot program.

Much work remains with the School Server as it is currently under active development and will likely be so throughout 2008. And while OLPC recently made a great decision in hiring Martin Langhoff as School Server Architect, OLE Nepal needs help with the technical aspects of deployment like updating the XO’s, back up of student data, maintaining mesh network, and web caching.

There's only one small catch to this dream job - it's a volunteer position. That means you'll not be paid in cash for your efforts. You'll get a greater reward, one that money cannot buy.

No, not a Superman bodysuit, but the life-affirming warm and fuzzies of happy children as they learn and explore with the XO laptop.

So if you are ready for the adventure of bringing educator driven development to Nepalese children, then apply today!

Tags: BIND | DHCPD | Dev Mohanty | Educator Driven Development | OLE Nepal | OLPC Volunteer | School Server |

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While it may surprise some, there are Give One Get One participants who feel that the XO laptop from One Laptop Per Child isn't right for them.

They could be parents who bought the XO for kids who wanted something else. Or adults who thought the XO would be a good business laptop replacement. And last but not least, people who believe in the OLPC mission but found the XO not suitable for their computer use case.

Recently I had the privilege of interviewing Boomer, a G1G1 donor who is sending me his XO laptop to re-gift it to a deserving OLPC developer group. I have the great honor of sending Boomer's laptop to OLE Nepal, one of the most innovative and organized local OLPC group.

While Boomer's XO is on its way to them, let's hear why he would voluntarily give up clock-stopping hot technology for free:

Tags: Bryan Berry | Command Line | Fortran | G1G1 | KISS | OLE Nepal | Personal RAM | Re-Gifting | TSA | XO Laptop |

Re-Gifting Your XO Laptop to Benefit OLPC Developers | Comment (6) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

Are you wondering what's happening with OLPC Nepal? How a spirited band of volunteers led by Shankar Pokharel and Ankur Sharma, both fourth year students at Nepal Engineering College, is convincing a nation that One Laptop Per Child can change education. Wonder not, for according to INAS they are using Negroponte magic!

A magic more enchanting than any of the Harry Potter tales will sweep through Nepal soon, thanks to a pair of students who are working to take $100 laptops to children in the country's remotest and most underdeveloped villages, where there is no electricity or even books. The 'magic pencil' that will write such plots is the XO-Laptop designed and developed by Nicholas Negroponte, co-founder and director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology media laboratory.

Until the 'Mero sanu sathi' - my little friend - finds a child who can write the next literary blockbuster on his Nepali and English character XO keyboard, OLPC Nepal is looking for funding with the education and sports ministry and major donors.

Tags: Access to Learning Award | Gates Foundation | Intel | Microsoft | Nicholas Negroponte | OLPC Nepal |

OLPC Nepal Using XO Magic to Change Education | Comment (26) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

Hi, my name is Bryan Berry. I live in Nepal and I volunteer most of my free time to OLPC Nepal. I am not an educator by profession yet I was not surprised by the examples cited in the recent article in the New York Times "Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops." I was interested to read Amir Kaeger's response to the article.

As the article title proclaims, many American schools have adopted and since dropped laptops in the classroom after failing to find any improvement in test scores. I believe that the laptops did not produce measurable results primarily for the following reason: The best way to raise test scores is teach to the test. There are also three additional lesser reasons:

1. Most educational software today is sub-par
2. American schools already so many resources that laptops only offer marginally more access to information
3. Teachers need familiar material when they first begin to incorporate laptops into the classroom

Teach to the Test! The best way for the schools to raise test scores is to gear all classwork to the tests and for parents to pressure their kids to study hard. That's how it works throughout Asia. I believe that testing has an important place in education but it is only part of education.

Tags: Bryan Berry | Constructivist Activities | Hong Kong | OLPC Nepal | OLPC USA | TamTam | Test Scores |

Improve Test Scores? Forget OLPC, Just Teach to the Test! | Comment (15) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

While we're focused on the educational models, learning software, and teacher training, the codesmiths at One Laptop Per Child have put out a LiveCD of the Sugar user interface. The talented J5 reports:I have stopped producing the LiveCD development builds to save space and time it takes to get out the daily builds. They are set to be replaced by the SDK LiveCD builds which will be built less frequently, usually during major sugar API changes and along with the stable builds. The first one is now available at http://olpc.download.redhat.com/olpc/streams/sdk/build1/livecd/ and is experimental. AKA, not guaranteed to work. I want to get some testing and add features such as a USB memory home directories and at some point, point and click installation to a hard drive.As you download the software and start hacking its core, do let us know what you find.

Tags: Abiword | Implementation Plan | OLPC Columbia | OLPC Nepal | SDK LiveCD | Sugar UI | Sugarize |

Sugarize Your Day With a Sugar UI LiveCD! | Comment (7) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

At DLD (Digital, Life, Design), Europe's "conference for the 21st century" at HVB Forum in Munich, Germany, Negroponte spoke in the panel "How to Be Good" on his views on the world's children.

How might the mighty MIT professor, the self-proclaimed "global citizen", fix the problem of uneducated children? How would he deal with providing the rural poor a solid educational basis for development? At 12:40 in the presentation he tells us:

It's not by training teachers. It's not about building schools. With all due respect [to HP's efforts], it's not about curriculum or content. It's about leveraging the children themselves.

So in other words, Nicholas Negroponte doesn't believe in the tried, tested, and confirmed power of teachers, working in structured classroom environments, to exceed his "magic", his OLPC implementation miracle.

Tags: DLD | How to Be Good | Mero Sano Saathi | Nicholas Negroponte | OLPC Nepal | Pedagogical Models |

OLPC Nepal Creates Content While Negroponte Dismisses It | Comment (9) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

Yesterday I was at a meeting with officials from Nepal's Ministry of Education about OLPC Nepal when the following words, paraphrased from the original Nepali, turned my blood to ice:

"Wow, this could really work . . . This is exactly what Nepal needs . . . So, where's your Implementation Plan?"

Implementation Plan?!!! Implementation Plan!!! [shock and fear] You mean that big document that explains how we will put an XO laptop in every Nepali child's hands, train their teachers, maintain and support this whole new structure over the long term?

Um nope, Chhaina, Don't got one. We're a bunch of people trying to transform Nepal's education system in our spare time between day jobs and families. We've been so busy meeting with government officials and international donors, localizing the software, and building Nepali-specific learning activities (we love our B1-Test) that we've neglected this very important document.

Tags: Implementation Plan | Networking the Himalayas | OLPC Nepal | OLPC Nepal Wiki | Shankar Pokharel |

Got Implementation Plan? | Comment (7) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

I am Shankar Pokharel, President, One Laptop Per Child Nepal. I present to you why I am working towards one laptop per child:

The Goal

Nepal has committed to achieve universal primary education by 2015. At the current rate we're moving, we're not going to make it. The key challenges are to get educators and educational materials out to remote areas. We can't truck in books because there are no roads. We can't convince enough teachers to go live in these harsh places.

It would be much easier and cheaper to send a hundred laptops than a thousand books. A hundred laptops don't replace math teachers but they are better than no math education at all.

Tags: OLPC | One Laptop Per Child | One Laptop Per Child Nepal | Shankar Pokharel |

A Holiday Wish: One Laptop Per Nepali Child | Comment (11) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It