The XO Files Part III: Re-imagining the OLPC Distribution
Posted on September 29, 2008 by Jon Camfield in Use Cases: Community, Use Cases: Education, Implementation, Implementation: Plan, Use Cases: User Groups
This entry is the third in the four-part series, "The XO Files: I Want to Believe" Read Part I here, and Part II, The New 4PC Market, and its Failings.
The XO Files: I Want To Believe
Part III: Re-imagining the OLPC Distribution
Concern over the original distribution plan was what got me writing for OLPCNews.com. The belligerent anti-pilot-project attitude, the requirement to buy the laptops in lots of 1million units, and the hushed discussions about the costs beyond the "$100" laptop. Rapid, bulk deployment is not a good model to introduce technology, particularly in a resource-constrained environment.
If you look at case studies of technology diffusion or successful ICT4D deployments (the Grameen Bank Village Pay Phone Project for example), you see the very social process of technology adoption, as people judge their usage of a new technology based not only on features and promises, but about lived experiences of their friends and networks. Duncan Watts's Six Degrees takes the network theory approach to this, and Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovation drives it home with extensive case studies, and the classic "Diffusion of Innovation" graph:
Among individuals, there is a normal curve distribution of the groups in any diffusion process, which are innovators, the creators of new technologies; early adopters, those who are most likely to begin using a new technology first; the early majority who will adopt next, and then the late majority and laggards. The most important actors in innovation diffusion are the change agents, who are generally external entities bringing new technology to a community and the opinion leaders within each community, who have immense influence over the adoption of a new technology by their peers.
Not to belabor the point, what can you do with a million laptops?. It's an overwhelming number to absorb into an educational system without any prior experience with the OLPC XO, not to mention 1:1 laptop usage or computing in general. Add the fact that both the hardware and software were (then, slightly less so now) new and untested, and you're externalizing a lot of risk onto governments, which are most likely already in debt for other projects that haven't paid off as promised.
Even accepting that risk and going forward, pilot projects serve more purposes. Pilots do not just to make sure the technology "works" and that there's some return on the investment (in the form of improved test scores, attendance and participation, etc.). A pilot project can and should also develop local best practices, curricula, and on-the-ground educators with experience using the XO in a classroom. To be fair to OLPC, their plans in 2006 were to open up the distribution to a wider audience (this hasn't quite happened as yet) after the initial launch:
The key to the OLPC vision will be scale, which is why the group will initially make the computers available only to governments that place bulk orders of more than 1m units. The seven launch countries are expected to order up to 10m units in 2007. With time, this will change. “After the 2007 launch, as little as eight to 10 months later, we will open this to all non-governmental organisations, countries, states within countries, right down to school districts,” said Mr Negroponte. (Limbach 2006)
Unsurprisingly, this initial approach fell through, and they've moved towards the follow-on plan. After a set of handshakes, the orders didn't materialize, and after telling people who wanted to run pilot projects "...screw you, go to the back of the line", Nicholas Negroponte and OLPC have been recently implementing much more reasonably sized pilot projects, instead of waiting for an implementation miracle.
Ideally, OLPC would have started out pitching hundreds of small pilot projects, and engaging not only governments but also NGOs, individual schools/school districts, and even communities. The project was exciting enough and the per-unit cost low enough that many of these organizations would have engaged and become (hopefully) champions, local experts, and global examples, leading to more and larger deployments in a more organic and long-term sustainable fashion.
The current situation with modestly sized pilots in a manageable number of countries is a much more sane approach. This is revealing some of the weaknesses and gaps of the technology (as there always are), and is generating the highly important localized content. Still, there's much that could be improved with very little effort.
Before G1G1, you had to be a hotshot software developer committed to helping out with Sugar projects to get an XO to work with. This helps with the technological side of the equation, but why not send some units to top-notch educators around the world to start exploring use cases, creating curricula modules, and sending feedback on classroom-level usability? The dream of the XO as a "Trojan Horse" entering the classroom as a textbook replacement but empowering children to use it at home for learning and exploration is a wonderful vision. At the end of the day, however, the teacher is the gateway to the classroom, and if he or she suspects the children are using the XO to chat during class, cheat, or so on, they will rapidly get banned. As such there has to be some teacher training on how to leverage the XO and be involved. G1G1 enables some educators access to the laptops, but some free (or at least at-cost) XOs to more educators globally could only spur more interest, open, shared curricula plans, and community efforts.
The restriction of G1G1 2007 to North American donors was unfortunate, but hopefully G1G1 2008 will be more open. Creating a global community of "early adopters" is key, beyond merely adding to the cadre of software developers (of course, whether that matters now with the move towards Windows XP is another question). A global community will find innovative ways to use the XO, contribute to debugging, and content translation and creation. At the very least, the experience will reveal remaining gaps in the software and UI through common tech support problems.
Fixing Distribution
Again, OLPC has made some great strides in addressing their distribution problems -- running smaller pilot projects; the initial G1G1, though hasslesome, increased the user community; and G1G1 2008 looks to be even better. There's even rumors of an OLPC partner in India looking at selling OLPCs with cellmodems.
OLPC needs to go further, to match innovation in distribution with their innovation in design. The goals are to improve education worldwide at a fundamental, constructivist way. The needs are high production runs to keep the costs low (ish).
An ongoing G1G1 with the ability for anyone in the world to order an XO would be a good start. OLPC might have to be careful managing the non-profit side of that, but worst case is they spin off a small, focused for-profit company that manages selling and limited support -- which can provide even further feedback as to which features users find interesting and what are common requests (though, at the end of the day, I feel strongly that the XO should retain its design focus on low-cost and education-in-developing-world needs).
Another option is to refactor the OLPC as a "base of the pyramid" style technology, selling it through financing and providing training to small businesses and entrepreneurs interested in bringing a portable cybercafe to their village, or in creating citizen media reports.
In short, OLPC needs to look at new ways to get the XO into more hands - more users, more educators, more children, more entrepreneurs, more developers. This creates a better infrastructure of content/guides/curricula for current and future deployments, helps in bug-testing, translation/localization, and creates a larger community like we already see in the global grassroots organizations and learning clubs, and on the OLPCNews forums. These might not all march to the tune of the 1CC drums, but might just be the crowd the XO needs to thrive.
Aymara Translation Sprint
Posted on September 18, 2008 by Yama Ploskonka in Use Cases: Community, Content: Localization
The "Trasnoche de Traducción Aymará" started at 6 pm, Bolivia time (+/- EST), of Friday, September 12. Much fun was had as the evening went on by about a dozen volunteers, mostly from the Linux community who were quite interested in the Sugar interface and the XOs but, alas, mostly were not Aymara savvy. However, our 3 "Aymaristas" got agreement on 58 strings, so we have just about 2.500 to go. The first string translated was "Name:", as when a kid names the XO. That will be "Suti:" for us...
Working throughout the night
The "Impeesa" Scout Group acted as the support team, feeding and watering the volunteers.
No live internet connectivity was available for the event, par for the course as internet infrastructure goes here - 1 Mbs ADSL costs $365 per month. I had to walk half an hour to find an open internet cafe to send this.
Poedit is giving us issues, and the wished-for LAN Pootle server that had worked just fine during test time the day before didn't operate either when needed, so we're on manual mode. Let's call it a start for the time being, a bit away from a resounding success yet.
On somewhat unrelated news, the city of La Paz, where we are, is actually quite calm while the rest of the country is facing much unrest. The current political situation in Bolivia brings vividly to mind the need to support quality education, so future generations will be able to find ways to get their act together better than ours seems to.
Sunday update:
An enthusiastic team kept working well past the 6 pm official end time on Saturday 13th to do as much as possible for the translation of Sugar to Aymara, in La Paz, Bolivia, proving that if we had started slow on Friday, that was no reason to do less than all that was possible.
The Aymará translation team
Some of the basic Sugar PO files were localized to 100%, though none have yet been uploaded to the official Pootle server as of Monday the 15th. Connectivity is a major issue, and such infrastructure limitations will likely be a challenge to future deployments in this South American country.
The usual fun of finding suitable terms was had by all for this ancient language learning new tricks. The "Memorize" Activity will be understood now as the "Safekeep In My Head" Activity among Aymara kids, as rousing matches of wits happened between the etymologists and the semanticists to figure out the best term that would convey the right meaning, and we are glad we have been so far spared the major religious wars existing between Aymara pentavocalists and trivocalists and others such issues. I make a mention of this, because the next steps such as fine tuning quality and reaching acceptance are not in the bag yet, as no consensus exists among specialist in this language for spelling, grammar, and obviously neologisms.
Yet the news this week for Bolivia was not this advance in computer-based education. As other events unfolded, concern for the future of our country was high among those working in the Scouting District Center of La Paz. While our personal safety was not in jeopardy, we were aware that the best we could do under the circumstances was to keep working, and so we did. We all hope that helping the Aymara find their voice and role through OLPC tools will help do a little towards our country achieving mutual respect among those of different races and cultures, within our borders, and with those working to build a whole world community, where quality education for all is a reality.
Custom XO paint-job. Next stop 44" chrome-rims?
Posted on August 04, 2008 by Christoph Derndorfer in Use Cases: Community
Last night I found this great post in our forums where a user called Gerbal describes how he painted his XO. Unlike my motivation for undertaking such a project - impressing the ladies and the geeks at the next user-group meeting or presentation that is - Gerbal did it in anticipation of a trip to South America:
Xzibit would be proud!
I recently purchased an XO off of Ebay. I am quite taken with the little machine. It is a brilliant machine and is perfect for field work in isolated parts of Central America where I intend to work. But I had one problem with it. The colour. Travelling though areas where XOs have been deployed it is probable that carrying an XO may be mistaken as having taken it from a child. Very uncool.
True that! You definitely don't want to be mistaken for one of the guys who stole 66 XOs in Peru back in June.
He describes the process of how he went about painting his XO and gives some advice on which paint to use in case you want to do it yourself. With regard to his comments about the paint potentially coming off over the course of the next few months I remember that back in the good ol' case-modding days people used to apply a layer or two of clear coat once the actual paint was cured.
Thinking about I should still have some cans of paint somewhere in the basement. Maybe I'll spend my next weekend making my own red XO?
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Could Many Organizations "Give Many" XO Laptops?
Posted on July 22, 2008 by Jon Camfield in Use Cases: Community, Sales Talk: G1G1
Give Many XO minimums
If the order doesn't get up to the Give Many standard - an order of 1,000+ XO laptops shipped anywhere from 3-6 months after payment - it falls on seemingly deaf ears. All good reasons to negotiate a term sheet when navigating the GiveMany waters.
I wrote about this general problem first in a long and academic paper when OLPC was still selling in only lots of a million laptops and only to governments. I railed on OLPC for missing the importance of the small but well supported projects in favor of unmanageably huge (but big-number) projects, and proposed a solution -- peer networks of small schools, governments, and any other interested parties banding together to be able to meet the minimum order.
Continue reading "Could Many Organizations "Give Many" XO Laptops?"
OLPC GrassCon Live-Stream
Posted on July 19, 2008 by Christoph Derndorfer in Use Cases: Community
Personally I'm most looking forward to Timothy Falconer's "Waveplace Foundation" (10:30 a.m. EST) and Tomi Davies' "The Galadima Experience" (10:45 a.m. EST) presentations since it's always great to hear reports from what's actually happening in deployments. I also hope that I don't fall asleep (it's 7 a.m. around here) because I'm supposed to go live to talk about "Moving from talk to action." at noon.
And if you're in the Bay area then make sure to join us at the San Francisco user-group meeting that starts at 10 a.m. local time. You'll find me near the coffee mugs!
Continue reading "OLPC GrassCon Live-Stream"
Reminder: GrassCon to take place this Saturday
Posted on July 16, 2008 by Christoph Derndorfer in Use Cases: Community
| 10:00 - 10:12 | Introduction (technical difficulties... etc.) |
| 10:15 - 10:27 | Alex Keybl - OLPC@Duke's College Model |
| 10:30 - 10:42 | Timothy Falconer - Waveplace Foundation |
| 10:45 - 10:57 | Tomi Davies - The Galadima Experience |
| 11:00 - 11:12 | Rabi Karmacharya - OLPC Implementation in Nepal |
| 11:15 - 11:27 | Tom Boonsiri - OLPC Golden State (Prerecorded) |
| 11:30 - 11:42 | Mel Chua - State of OLPC Grassroots Efforts |
| 11:45 - 11:57 | Nikki Lee - Olin University Chapter |
| 12:00 - 12:12 | Christoph Derndorfer - Moving from talk to action. |
| 12:15 | Concluding Remarks |
Continue reading "Reminder: GrassCon to take place this Saturday"
The Lost Tribe of OLPC, Continued...
Posted on July 11, 2008 by Christoph Derndorfer in Use Cases: Community
Windows XP computer-lab
So here we have a local, grassroots community. Active, organized, enthusiastic. Confused. Lost. Like a lot of us.
First confusion: OLPC Boston (and close associates, like Brightstar) appear to have all the power. All that power is in one single nerve pressure point which is very easy to control: the availability of XOs. If XOs were available in the market on reasonable terms, the Community might take off and be successful, which apparently doesn't seem to be OK for the Foundation. Currently too many are trying for 1CCs' preferment, pending on a nod for yea of fearing a shake for nay. Grumbling is optional, but rather discouraged, as that would make you look like a bad "team player". No XOs for you!
Groveling doesn't seem to help either...
Second confusion: OLPC Boston (a.k.a. 1CC, OLPC Foundation, OLPC corporate) is not, repeat, not, the same thing as the international OLPC Community. It took me months to understand it (I am a bit slow). While Boston might rebuff, tar, dunk you in the Charles river, the OLPC Community (a lot of them in Boston, a lot of them working for OLPC also) might still love you, though some might be wary of being seen in public in your company.
Continue reading "The Lost Tribe of OLPC, Continued..."
The Lost Tribe of OLPC
Posted on July 10, 2008 by Yama Ploskonka in Use Cases: Community
Everyone wants XO laptops
One good day, a year or so ago, the "Grupo" cashed in the goodwill they had built, and invited for a big, formal meeting with all the stakeholders. National government powers-that-be were present. The stand-in OLPC representative actually came from Brightstar, the company that has been hired by OLPC to distribute the computers worldwide. Turns out the government people were not that impressed (maybe when they got the hint that they were the ones expected to pay...), and the Brightstar person laid the party line in non-negotiable terms: OLPC makes peer-to-peer treaties with governments directly, and with governments *only*. Thank you, you may now go back to, whatever. Your help is appreciated to the extend you are effective in getting the government to give us money. Or so it feels.
Continue reading "The Lost Tribe of OLPC"
OLPC Sur: Grassroots in Action
Posted on May 26, 2008 by Yama Ploskonka in Use Cases: Community
Everyone has the potential for being both a learner and a teacher ... exchange of ideas amongst peers can both make the learning process more engaging and stimulate critical thinking skills ... Where possible, all activities should ... place strong focus on facilitating such collaborative processes.We are trying to build such a collaborative community of Spanish-speakers around the "Sur" mailing list. The intention is not just to achieve emailing with and among our folk, but actual communication and sharing. The tool is a Mailman server that lives in laptop.org.
from OLPC "Principles"
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The Future of One Laptop Per Child
Posted on May 15, 2008 by Edward Cherlin in Use Cases: Community, Software: Sugar
Education plus communication is the key to ending poverty, by giving students the means and the opportunity to get real jobs, and more importantly, to create new jobs connected to the global economy. Good education offers much more than that, including the ability to think for oneself, and good education was the professed goal of the project.
Nicholas Negroponte deserves a lot of credit for taking these ideas as far as he has, but he also has many failings, particularly in not communicating with the project volunteers or the public. He has driven out some of the project's best people, who are starting a complementary organization, Sugarlabs.org, to try to do many of the things that OLPC does not do, or does wrong:
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It's Been a Wild Ride in Nepal, And We're Just Getting Started
Posted on March 27, 2008 by Bryan Berry in Use Cases: Community, Countries: Nepal
Our goal in Nepal
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.
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.
Continue reading "It's Been a Wild Ride in Nepal, And We're Just Getting Started"
Searching for a Star-Tide March Mesh in Miami, Florida
Posted on February 27, 2008 by Guest Writer in Use Cases: Community
Linton + XO in low-stress mode
Think the stressed environments of post-tsunami, earthquake, or hurricane.
I only have my own OLPC, but would love to test out the mesh networking and ad hoc coordination potential with other XO users. It would be great if we could show mesh connectivity among several OLPCs, and perhaps experiment with disaster relief scenarios.
I'll be in Miami from March 10-13 and I would be interested in hearing from anyone who has an OLPC in the Miami area, particularly those who could bring it to the National Defense Industrial Association logistics conference at the Hyatt Regency Miami (400 SE Second Street) between about 8 and 4 on those dates.
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One Laptop Per Incarcerated Prisoner
Posted on February 03, 2008 by Wayan Vota in Use Cases: Community
You stealing that XO?
But it's not only children that need an education. There is a whole other constituency that needs access to education and the skills that XO exposure can bring: prisoners. Erwin James, a former life sentence prisoner in the UK, and a Guardian columnist, says:
With ever increasing numbers of people in prison living with literacy and general educational deficiencies and overcrowding placing unprecedented demand on the ever limited resources of the prison system, never has there been a better time to provide prisoners with computers, in their cells, and to ensure fairness and equality, why not meet the cost?I completely agree with Erwin. Incarceration without retraining is just inviting released convicts to re-offend - they often have no other marketable skill or knowledge than the crime they were jailed for to begin with.
It might not be popular with "the public" to begin with, but we could do worse than start a new prison initiative - the OLPP - One Laptop Per Prisoner. It would be much more constructive use of taxpayers money and prisoners' time than in-cell television and could change the direction of future penal philosophy.
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OLPC: An Effective Literacy Program for Adults Too
Posted on February 01, 2008 by Edward Cherlin in Use Cases: Community, Content: eBooks
Let's read eBooks together
From the invention of printing to the beginning of the electronic age, the best way to increase literacy was to print and distribute more books. Under favorable circumstances, such as the US in the 19th century, many children who could not attend school attained literacy by reading at home. In the 20th century, children's books like The Wizard of Oz flourished.
Putting an infant in your lap and reading out loud leads inevitably to the child, over time, insensibly starting to read along. Experience shows that this is far more effective than classroom learning. But what can illiterate parents do? Can they learn to read so as to teach their children? The ones who are still illiterate are the ones who think not.
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One Flat Stanley Project Per Child
Posted on January 29, 2008 by Guest Writer in Use Cases: Community
Flat John and I in Russia
The recipient treats the Flat Stanley as a guest, takes it places, does things with it, then returns it and the completed journal.
Pictures and souvenirs are often included. The recipients can be selected from the List of Participants that includes tends of thousands of students from 47 countries.
Children also send Flat Stanleys to celebrities, scientists, politicians, musicians and people of interest. The Picture Gallery has pictures of Flat Stanleys with Clint Eastwood, Arnold Schwarzenegger, prime ministers, presidents... and the list goes on and on.
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OLPC and Libraries Should Support Open Systems
Posted on January 08, 2008 by Guest Writer in Use Cases: Community, Content: Reference, Content: eBooks
Open your mind to XO
I am Mita Williams from The Leddy Library at The University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada.
I had heard of the One Laptop Per Child program months ago but it wasn't until I heard fellow librarian Rochelle Mazar speak about how she used the project to engage students with the "issues of information access and activism" that I made the connection between the work of the OLPC and the professional work that many librarians are engaged in.
The connection that came to mind was not between libraries and formal development efforts (although there are organizations like eIFL.net and Librarians Without Borders that do this) but the work that libraries are currently contributing to on the "open" front: open source, open standards, and open access.
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XO Laptop Support for Children and Parents
Posted on January 02, 2008 by Guest Writer in Use Cases: Community, Implementation: Maintenance, Use Cases: User Groups
Parents are a part of XO learning
- First of all, I work for a school district that struggles to get technology into the hands of kids, and this frustrates me to no end as a parent. So if the school district won't do it, my wife and I will.
- Secondly, there's the philanthropic aspect (coupled with the spirit of giving at this time of year) of donating a machine to a child.
- Finally, I'm a geek, and I'll get to play with it as well).
However, I think that there are a lot of parents out there who are going to start surfacing more and more who are in the same boat as Drew: a little bewildered with the XO laptop.
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