One Laptop Per Child News

After working with science students in the US, a few of us got together and decided that the XO laptops could be used for a lot more good than the various national governments currently allow, so we decided to try our hand at an unofficial OLPC deployment! Our focus was to try and use the XO as a learning tool for the subject of science, for 6th, 7th, and 8th graders at a small grammar school in India.

We started our academic year two weeks ago here in Meerut, India. The 6th, 7th, and 8th graders have been using the XO laptops about half of the class days, alternating with hands-on experiments and required, standardized textbooks.

As there is no state certified content for the laptops, we feel that this "bridging the gap" effort has added merit as compared with a strict XO laptop regiment. Currently, the students are studying various levels of electricity and magnetism.

We're trying to gather as many data points as possible for the OLPC community. We aim to present the findings and unique perspectives generated by this opportunity with larger bodies of educators. By sharing results (and content) with first through third-world organizations, we can fill the gap left between the official OLPC deployments, and those first world individuals with a laptop.

In this way, the XOs can be leveraged by a much larger number of students worldwide: home-schooled students worldwide, G1G1 children, and other schools with a computer to student ratio of less than 1:1. Specifically, we are already understanding and overcoming challenges faced by unofficial deployments of the OLPC learning platform where there is limited support, both in terms of OLPC training for teachers and for the laptops themselves.

Currently we have 5 XO laptops from US donors of the G1G1 program. As there are between 8 and 12 students in the classes that use these laptops, we could use a few more. We have already noted a definite, quantifiable difference in the effectiveness of the laptop when a student has his or her "own" XO laptop vs. sharing with 1 or 2 students, even within class period time limits.

We're definitely interested in acquiring a few more laptops. Because our XO-compliant curriculum is already underway, any XO donated can make a huge difference in our program! Each XO means that two students get to use their own laptop as a learning tool or science experiment setup! If you do have a G1G1 laptop, please consider letting a student learn on it!

Holden Bonwit reminds you that you can still develop code without the XO laptop itself, by emulating the XO.

Tags: G1G1 | Holden Bonwit | India | Learning Tools | Meerut | OLPC | OLPC India | Unofficial Pilot | Xo Laptop |

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I am Roxana Bassi, an ICT Specialist at the Global e-Schools and Communities Initiative. GeSCI provides strategic advice to Ministries of Education in developing countries on the effective use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) for education and community development.

Recently we have started receiving several requests for assistance in advising regarding 1-to-1 computing solutions similar to OLPC’s. We are working on a series of tools that can be used by any government planning the piloting or deployment of any such project, like the low-cost computing devices toolkit published last year.

One of the documents we are working on is an analysis of the educational/pedagogical considerations for these particular types of projects, which are quite many. We are having trouble, however, in finding relevant information about the pilots that have been executed around the world.

The only thing we can find are nice pictures and videos, blogs and content created by students, but we have not been able to find specific pilot planning documentation about any of the projects being executed, or any educational experiences-based analysis of 1-to-1 solutions and its challenges and opportunities in real-world use in our countries.

We would like to ask all of you in the OLPC News community for this information, if you have it available for public distribution, to share the links with the rest as I believe this is invaluable data we have to have to help in designing sustainable solutions for education.

Thanks in advance

Tags: Educational Results | GeSCI | Global e-Schools and Communities Initiative | Pedagogical Considerations | Roxana Bassi |

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Let's begin with a warm-up test on what the OLPC should be about. Choose the right answer out of each pair:

1. Developing Countries parents want their kids to take pictures and write down their thoughts
2. D.C. parents want their kids to learn English


3. I'd say music creativity is essential for every kid to to be educated in
4. I'd say grammar and spelling is essential for every kid to be educated in


5. the biggest challenge to development is widespread corruption
6. the biggest challenge to development is that children don't get to explore, experiment and express themselves

Look for the official answers on "Content" on the wiki seems almost like an afterthought. The 'educators' list is pretty much inactive.

The main problem that our Matter of Education has to deal with is to actually give chances to kids to achieve their giftings beyond what their current educational system can offer. OLPC, and/or other such initiatives are to be the "bridge" that have-nots can take to get what the "haves", well, have.

To solve learning inequity is our community's duty.

Humor me for a minute and let me take the easy ones out of the way. Writing and language arts are life skills. Those who struggle with these will find their inability to communicate according to convention makes them less effective trainers, leaders, teachers.

OLPC, as currently exists, incorporates Language Arts training? No. Should it? Yes. English is the de facto lingua franca that connects ideas and ideals in our world in our day. The role that Latin has in the previous sentence is the role that terms and expressions in the English language have in every other language now, especially in matters relating to science, technology, manufacture, business.

If you don't depend on it outright, your speech and notes are peppered with it. Besides parent, teachers and administrators want to have better English training for the kids and even themselves. Is it part of the current OLPC? No. Should it be? Yes.

Corruption Management

This is clearly my favorite trainable skill. Just as in the more popular field of risk management, it is unlikely that corruption will ever be totally eradicated. Even in such paragons of development and civilization as Scandinavia and the Netherlands it will rear its ugly head from time to time. The real issue with corruption worldwide is that it is arguably the number one factor that establishes, serves and protects injustice, abuse, exploitation, and ultimately poverty and all its children.

Aid for development that is not fighting corruption is often its very life, what makes corruption thrive. The canonical water well project with ineffective accounts, where most pumps end up sold away and the last one turns out to be "owned" by the village chief, not only denies water to the village but also reinforces patterns of successful dishonesty, without even gaining any goodwill for the donor country.

I believe that we can agree that corruption has to be fought, by all means available, especially education. Yet, if the general trend I have perceived is anything, I suspect there isn't much support for doing it with the XO. One argument that will be parroted is that this is the One Laptop per Child, and corruption is a grownup thing.

Refuting this notion is easy. First, corruption is everybody's problem. Next, corruption breeds in untruth, sheepish compromise, and bullying/abuse scenarios, and none of these is age-dependent. We clearly can and should develop suitable training resources on the XO to learn to recognize truth and also to prevent bullying, a real problem in many places.

To learn to stand up with what is truth is harder. I haven't yet found anything that beats experiential education done right, which sadly is quite high maintenance.

The XO is for grownups too

Early corruption avoidance should be addressed among kids. Yet the most important point is to recognize, accept and implement grownup-directed training and content in the XO - of course besides better and more for kids themselves.

This, among others, for the very obvious reason that the home XO might be the only twenty-first century educational tool that will enter many a hut, cabin or hovel, and quite a few community leader's homes. And hopefully, the XO will be the one that is not held hostage by the corrupt shackling a people.

Finally, this is simply something that needs doing. As such, it is really deeply irrelevant if the OLPC has right now corruption management as an educational goal, because it doesn't matter how many of those green thingies a country buys or is given, doesn't matter how much international aid it gets, neither whether missionaries, teachers or volunteers move in.

What matters is that we turn this training into a priority, fast track OLPC project. As long as corruption is not addressed an its endemic rule broken, there is no chance a people will develop and become what it can become, respect the environment and hold its own to protect itself, treat its sick, raise its young unto righteousness, and generally make true that having faith in better times ahead is real, rather than empty, meaningless fiction.

Yamandú was teacher in several countries for over 15 years and wrote a book on Uruguayan Education.

Tags: Anti-Corruption Tool | Corruption Management | Developing Countries | Educational Goals | OLPC Project |

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There are very few breaks a "gifted kid" will get south of the Rio Grande. The dearth of lending libraries is only matched by the almost total absence of programs for a square-shaped kid that will not fit in the round hole in the one-size-fits-all-(or-else) educational systems available.

Carla Gomez Monroy reported about a child in Arahuay that "[was] categorized by the teachers as [a child] with bad behavior...". The teacher would set this child "apart from the group, at a desk for himself, closer to the teacher".

But then, "the first day A... came to school with his XO laptop, instead of playing during recess, he kept on exploring the XO. He quickly became one of the most acquainted with it and empowered to help his classmates by telling them how to do this or that."

Tags: Carla Gomez Monroy | Entertaining Gizmo | OLPC Peru | Special Needs | XO Laptop | Yama Ploskonka |

The Nicest Thing for a "Special" Kid in Peru | Comment (10) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

I am Yama Ploskonka and I love Constructivism. I was in Teachers' College in Uruguay during the mid '80s, at the time when this was the latest buzzword in town. Nobody really knew what Constructivism meant, but it sounded good, empowering.

Twenty years later I was hard pressed to try to explain the concept to a teacher of English in Istanbul. Turns out that Ankara had ordered all of them to start using a constructivist point of view in everything, as of the next semester, and he had little idea on what it meant and how he was going to manage to stay out of trouble.

I really enjoy it mostly because its discourse embodies so many of the high double-speak that was part of my French Literature training. It's useless, but there's a je ne sais quoi that makes it sound quite enticing. Well handled, constructivism can seem to be All That Is Good, and those who oppose it made to look like the forces of darkness. The main problem with constructivism is that a child cannot just re-create civilization on his own.

Tags: Co-Learning | Constructivism | Constructivistic Ideology | Exploring | OLPC | Teachers Matter | Yama Ploskonka |

When Constructivism Hits the Road | Comment (29) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

My brother Joe Felsentein, who is famous in the world of population genetics, tells how for decades those working in his corner of biology (phylogenetic inference – the science of constructing inheritance trees) were scorned by the reigning molecular biologists as "stamp collectors".

While the molecular biologists pursued the secret of life itself, the stamp collectors puttered around with statistics and large data sets, working out how to make sense out of data patterns.

Then came the crowning triumph of molecular biology – reading the human genome. Note that I do not say "decoding the human genome", as it suddenly became clear that no one knew how to make sense of gigabytes of gene sequence data. Who, the moleculars wondered, could make some order of all this data?

Then everyone looked at each other and exclaimed in unison, "the stamp collectors!" Joe and his colleagues were showered with money and attention. Their grant requests were now favored for approval, and at Joe's university a brand-new Department of Genome Sciences was created which welcomed his august presence.

The parallel is this – the OLPC project is about as far as it can go without empowering its own "stamp collectors", by which I mean those who have long labored in the field of experimental education. Yes, there are others besides Seymour Papert, and the official OLPC line on the topic, that the educational research had already been done and that the engineering was all that was left, was always blatantly untrue.

Tags: Constructivism | Danielle Martell | Experiential Education | Experimental Education | Killer Apps | Seymour Papert |

One Laptop Per Child "Stamp Collectors" Needed | Comment (11) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

In the New Year, I got fed up with the "I Don't Have My XO" whine in the OLPC News G1G1 Shipping Problems Forum and decided to do something about it. I donated my XO to a needy G1G1. LesleyT was the lucky recipient, and now that the month is coming to a close, we have an update on XO laptop usage from an excited user group: special education students in North Carolina. First off, let's hear Leslie's description of her special needs user group:

The children I use the XO with are in a special education class, and I'm only with them a few times a day, usually during their computer lab time. Most of them can read, write, and speak, although not always at grade level. They are vociferous consumers of media, especially flash games, but I'm unsure if they understand what they are doing. They click and pound. They ask to be put on a specific site if they can't find it in the drop-down menu, then click on pictures of cartoons they like until they come to a game. If a game is too hard, or freezes, they simply open another browser, or move to another computer. While waiting for internet explorer to start, they might click enough times to open 10 browsers.

While waiting for the XO laptop to boot, Leslie's students put the screen through their own version of ruggedness - the lick test. Thankfully, Leslie reports that Mary Lou can add "saliva resistant" to the XO check list. Leslie also reports that her students take to the XO in other ways too.

Tags: Angelman Syndrome | Assistive Technology | Gibberish | Saliva Resistant | Special Needs | XO Laptop |

One Assistive Technology Laptop Per Child | Comment (17) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

Hello, this is Alan Bell again. You may remember me from the "Help I haven't got an XO for BETT" post a few weeks ago. Well I can now report that this story has a happy ending.
,br> The day after the article appeared on OLPC News we got a call from Tomi Davis, of OLPC Nigeria. Roughly speaking the conversation went "Would you like to borrow some laptops?" to which we replied "Hell yeah!"
,br> We (Tomi, The Open Sourcerer and myself) arranged to meet up the night before the BETT show, the laptops were pre-production Beta 4 models with rather old software so we worked with Tomi to upgrade them using a hastily purchased USB stick from a dodgy looking local shop (cash only - no change - lets just call it twenty quid - no, you can't have a receipt).

Tags: Alan Bell | Asus | BETT | Braille Reader | Francois Brutsch | Frank Margrave | OOXML | Open Source | Tomi Davies |

You Can BETT on a Guest Post Happy Ending! | Comment (13) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

Being the geek that I am, I got a copy of Mark Warschauer's latest book, Laptops and Literacy, having been a huge fan of his insightful commentary on the "digital divide" in Technology and Social Inclusion.

You might remember Mark from his New York Times article which he clarified here at OLPCNews, as well as his recent posting of a case study-like look at the Intel Classmate at the Newport Heights Elementary in Newport Beach, California.

Laptops and Literacy Overview

Laptops and Literacy is a different kind of book. Where Technology and Social Inclusion was more of a framework or theoretical book, L&L focuses on case studies of one-to-one laptop studies in the United States, focusing on some school-based programs in California and the statewide initiative in Maine which has often been help up by the OLPC Foundation as a perfect example of the power of the one laptop per child model.

Tags: 1:1 | Intel Classmate | Laptops and Literacy | Maine | Mark Warschauer | OLPC America | One to One Computing |

A Review of One-to-One Laptop Programs in America | Comment (9) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

original text:

Hello, I am Alan Bell, one of the founders of The Open Learning Centre, a UK based company helping business and education take advantage of Free and Open Source Software.

BETT is the worlds largest educational technology show, it is running next week, from the 9th to the 12th of January at London Olympia. There will be about 30,000 visitors to the show including teachers, head teachers, ICT coordinators etc. from schools around the UK, Europe and the world.

Schools visit BETT to see innovations and technology trends to help guide their IT strategy. I will be helping out on The Open Forum Europe stand SW105, where we will be distributing Edubuntu CDs and spreading the word about Free software and Open Standards.

Tags: Alan Bell | BETT | Edubuntu | FOSS | G1G1 Laptop | Linux | London Olympia | OLPC UK | eBay Seller |

OLPC Mesh Networking at BETT in London Olympia | Comment (2) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

Greg Smith raised several important points in his "Optimal XO Application Development Model Process" post.

We need to engage with the schools of the OLPC target countries (eventually all countries are targets, but we have to start somewhere) about the collaborative discovery model of education, which we call Constructivism.

Colonial Education Systems

This means opening a discussion with teachers, students, administrators, families, prospective employers--well, everybody, actually. The problem that we face is that almost every education system in the world was created by a colonial power, not to encourage innovation and problem-solving, but to keep the population in order while their country was pillaged.

Tags: Colonial Education Systems | Constructionist | Constructivism | Constructivist | Trojan Horse | US Education |

OLPC as Constructivist Education Reform | Comment (16) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

An anonymous writer asked on the OLPC Wiki:

"Kids in developing nations are starving...maybe meeting their basic needs (food and shelter) should be your focus."

I wrote an answer on the page, and then thought you all might be interested, and might have something worthwhile to say.

I agree about the problem of starvation and malnutrition. And about the problems of war, disease, oppression, land mines, slavery, and all the others that deny our children livelihoods, health and even life. They are not in question. The question is not even what you and I individually should do.

It is what we all should be doing. And that means everything, not just a bit here and a bit there. It also doesn't mean that we should work on only one part of the solution. Someone needs to focus on immediate survival issues of food, health, water, war, and other troubles of the poor. If that's you, thank you. We need more of you.

OLPC is About Education

And somebody needs to focus on education in order to break the cycle of poverty. That's us. We need more of us, too. It isn't either/or, it's both/and. It would cost billions of dollars to feed every undernourished child as soon as possible, and the money is not forthcoming from governments or private donors. I wish it were.

Tags: Basic Needs | Earth Treasury | Education | Ending Poverty | Food | OLPC Education | Shelter | Water | XO ROI |

Education is a Basic Need in the Developing World | Comment (36) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

I am Nicola Ferralis and the conventional way of teaching science has been through lecturing. The motivation behind this method was often the convenience that comes with it. In a lecture an instructor follows his notes or a book while the audience listens. Although questions are often expected, this rarely happens. This method usually is not very compatible with experimental sessions, where students are asked to prove something through an experiment, because they are not trained to question their learning, but only to follow directions. This detachment between lecturing and the experimental training is, in my opinion, a reason why often there is very little excitement from the students over the sciences.

A consequence of this one-way of transmitting knowledge (from the teacher to the students) induces a high level of dry memorization by the students. The reason behind it consists in the lack of development of quantitative and analytical skills that comes with the traditional lecturing. As side effects, sciences (and in particular the physical sciences) are perceived as cryptic, difficult and requires a student to be "very smart".

To overcome such limitations, the physical science education community over the years has suggested that the "inquiry-based" learning provides a much more effective way of teaching the sciences because more it follows more closely the scientific method. This is indeed the true way of teaching problem-solving skills.

Tags: Constructivism | Constructivistic Approach | Etoys | Inquiry-Based Learning | Lillian McDermott | OLPC XO |

The Role of Constructivism in Teaching Science | Comment (22) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

Intel is now piloting its in several U.S. schools. Three of us from the University of California, Irvine visited Newport Heights Elementary in Newport Beach, California. The school was provided with 70 Classmate PCs to use in two classrooms - a sixth grade class and a fifth grade class - for a pilot study to take place from November 2007 to March 2008. Following the pilot study in this and other schools in the U.S. and other countries, the Classmate PC will supposedly go on the market.

Intel provided 70 Classmate PCs, 2 power cords each computer (so one could be kept at school and one at the students' homes), slim blue rubber wrap-around cases for each Classmate, and an Intel knapsack for each Classmate. I was told that the Classmates came with a 40GB hard drive (and that a flash drive version of the Classmate had been abandoned after an earlier trial); 504k of RAM, and licenses for Microsoft Office (which was installed on the computers).

It is powered by an Intel Celeron microprocessor. The computer has no CD or DVD drive; a small, low-resolution screen; and a small keyboard. Otherwise, it appears to be a fully functioning low-end Wintel notebook computer. Intel reports the battery life as four hours, and the teachers told me that they had as of yet had no problems with the batteries.

During our two-hour visit to the school, we visited the two classrooms using the Classmates, spoke with the teachers and students, tried out a Classmate, and spoke with administrators and technology coordinators at the school and district. Students at the school had been using the Classmates for about a week and had taken them home a couple of times.

Tags: Classmate PC | Intel | Mark Warschauer | Microsoft Office | Newport Heights Elementary | Power Cord |

Intel Classmate PC in USA Schools: A First-Hand Report | Comment (22) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

Two months ago UNDP started a project with One Laptop Per Child in Macedonia. Two classrooms were set up with 25 laptops each in early September when the school year begun. The news about the project was made available to the public last week when a major newspaper printed a story about the project.

I am Novica Nakov of Free Software Macedonia and I visited OU "Vojdan Chernodrinski" that is one of the primary schools that have a OLPC classroom to see what's going on.

The kids that are using the XO laptops are in the second grade. They seemed very enthusiastic when I entered the classroom. They were chatting on the laptops and telling each other what they wrote to their friends. They had no obvious problems using the laptops although the interface is in English.

Some of them even explained to me what kind of things they do and how to use some of the software. As I understood, classes in mathematics and Macedonian language are held using the laptops. The children are allowed to take them home and do homework. As a part of the UNDP project and with cooperation from OLPC the teachers had gone through some training so they can apply adequate teaching methods using the laptop.

Tags: Free Software Macedonia | NComputing | Novica Nakov | OLPC Macedonia | UNDP | Vojdan Chernodrinski |

OLPC Macedonia Update at OU Vojdan Chernodrinski | Comment (12) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

I am Edward Cherlin and I think the OLPC program is astonishing in its goals, even if some doubt its ability to perform. It proposes to educate up to a billion children with the latest in technology and information, and to some degree their families as well.

OLPC aims to add several percent to annual economic growth in the developing countries, with spillovers to the developed countries that will have the opportunity to supply technology and we don't even know what else. (This is not officially stated, but I infer it from the goal of ending poverty. If anybody wants, I can run the numbers in a future article.)

The XO will provide more access to health information than we could dream of a few years ago. Of course, we don't yet know who will make that information available in local languages, nor who will access what parts of it and put it to use. The XO will let the children and their communities talk together all over the world, if they want to, and who knows what that might lead to?

XO Collaboration

But today, I am voting for a different aspect of the program as potentially the most astonishing. The XO laptop software is set up for collaboration. Several children can sign on to the same instance of a Sugar activity, including paint, music, write, browse, and program. In some cases, many children--entire classrooms or entire schools. And there are games, of course.

Tags: Adam Smith | Edward Cherlin | Harry Potter | OLPC Collaboration | Sugar Activity | Track Changes |

OLPC is About Collaboration, Not Cheating | Comment (2) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

Yesterday's Boston Globe had an telling juxtaposition of Iqbal Quadir of the wildly successful GrameenPhone and Nicholas Negroponte of the wildly publicized One Laptop Per Child. Like last week's WSJ article, Negroponte again came off looking the fool. Why? Because he ignored local user groups in favor of dealing with governments - federal governments. Now let's have Iqbal Quadir give the money quote on why GrameenPhone is a success and OLPC isn't:

"I have learned from history that actually, the countries that are developed, where governments behave and serve the public, are those where the citizens have empowered themselves through technologies and business,"

So let us take a tour of XO laptop users where citizens have empowered themselves through technologies, through education, to form more holistic communities. First up, a news report on OLPC Peru's Una computadora por niño program in Institución Educativa Santiago Apostol de Arahuay

.

Tags: Arahuay Video | Galadima Movie | Khairat News | OLPC India | OLPC Nigeria | OLPC Peru | XO Laptop User Group |

All Education and Educational Decisions are Local, Not Federal | Comment (17) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It