OLPC

Christoph Derndorfer posted a photo:

Christoph Derndorfer posted a photo:

Christoph Derndorfer posted a photo:

Christoph Derndorfer posted a photo:

Christoph Derndorfer posted a photo:

Christoph Derndorfer posted a photo:

The second annual OLE General Assembly to be held on 11-15 October in Kigali, Rwanda, will explore what is known, what needs to be known and how we can know about scalable approaches to achieving Quality Universal Basic Education with marginalized children around the world. What Works?: 2010 OLE General AssemblyExploring Scalable Approaches to Quality Universal Basic Education with Marginalized ChildrenKigali, Rwanda, 11-15 October 2010Register to attend/ Why? While there are literally thousands of basic education initiatives underway in all parts of the world, very few of them are based on evidence of their effectiveness. Most of these initativies are faith-based: They appear to be worthwhile and they help their providers feel good. Most such programs, however, have not demonstrated that they are effective or that they can be scaled beyond a few limited silos of presumed excellence. Wayan Vota http://www.wayan.com

XO sitting on top of the Butía platform As previously mentioned I spent my last day in Uruguay at ceibalJAM's second miniJAM! artistico (photos from the event can be found on ceibalJAM's blog). Apart from my short talk about the various efforts by OLPC (Austria) and other European OLPC and Sugar communities (which was the first time since school that I gave a presentation in Spanish!), being able to meet a lot of great people and say my good-byes to them, my favorite part was when the team from Butía took the stage and presented their robotics project. The goal of the project that is run by Universidad de la República's Faculty of Engineering is to create an inexpensive robotics platform to attract students in public schools to robotics and programming. Having somewhat of a thing for robotics, especially when it comes in combination with an XO, I was immediately fascinated by these efforts. Gonzalo Tejera started his talk with a general introduction into the progress that robotics has made in the past few years as well as describing the current status quo of the use of robotics in education (or lack thereof due to the high cost of many available kits). Then he outlined the history of the Butía project before diving into the meat of the talk. Christoph Derndorfer http://christoph-d.blogspot.com/

I'm not a big fan of Train the Trainer methodologies to scale teacher training. I agree with Juliano Bittencourt, Learning Development Coordinator for OLPC Rwanda when he says: Even when we talk about developed countries, this model of training a small group of people that in their turn train another group of people and so on, has failed. Cascading trainings has proven to decrease quality along the chain. The first and second levels might be good, but by the seventh iteration most of the principles have got lost remaining only the skeleton of the original ideas. Yet that poses a very serious problem for Juliano and the whole OLPC Rwanda team, as he discusses in The Challenges of OLPC Scale Implementation in Rwanda: Wayan Vota http://www.wayan.com

The World Bank talk about OLPC in South America will start at 12:30PM EST / 4:30PM GMT / 6:30PM CEST and as previously announced we'll be streaming it live right here:

Please note that we'll also be monitoring Twitter for the #olpcSAbriefing hashtag so if you have any questions or comments during the talk then please make sure to include that hashtag.

Update: The slides I'll be showing are now available here.

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The World Bank talk about OLPC in South America will start at 12:30PM EST / 4:30PM GMT / 6:30PM CEST and as previously announced we'll be streaming it live right here: Please note that we'll also be monitoring Twitter for the #olpcSAbriefing hashtag so if you have any questions or comments during the talk then please make sure to include that hashtag. Update: The slides I'll be showing are now available here. Christoph Derndorfer http://christoph-d.blogspot.com/

I have just now posted an entry in the SOCAP10 Impact Challenge, sponsored by the Social Capital Markets Conference. I'm here to ask for your vote to make such people take note of our work, and the work of a multitude of others around the world.

What, they want to know is the Next Big Thing in Social Capital that will unlock the projected $120 billion business opportunity in helping the poor. Naturally, I pushed the global OLPC program, to educate a billion children and lift all of the world's poor out of poverty. Equally naturally, if you know me, I told them that they aren't thinking big enough.

If I win, I get to attend the conference at Fort Mason, San Francisco in October, and present this idea at much greater length. Here is what I said, within the word limits that the challenge sets, except that you get to see it with links. Unfortunately, the word limit means that I didn't get to talk about many important issues, such as low power consumption, ruggedness, green design, total cost of ownership, teacher training, and the like. Don't worry, I haven't forgotten about them.

You know about those naysayers, right?

• Microsoft
• Intel
• The Wall Street Journal
• The American Enterprise Institute
• The government of India
• Irvin, down in the comments

Oh, and I always tell Irvin, "Thanks, Irvin. Coming from you, that's high praise." Because Irvin is always telling me I'm crazy, but I always wonder whether I am crazy enough to have a chance of being right.

I have just now posted an entry in the SOCAP10 Impact Challenge, sponsored by the Social Capital Markets Conference. I'm here to ask for your vote to make such people take note of our work, and the work of a multitude of others around the world. What, they want to know is the Next Big Thing in Social Capital that will unlock the projected $120 billion business opportunity in helping the poor. Naturally, I pushed the global OLPC program, to educate a billion children and lift all of the world's poor out of poverty. Equally naturally, if you know me, I told them that they aren't thinking big enough. Edward Cherlin http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Earth_Treasury

Christoph Derndorfer posted a photo:

From the São João secondary school on the island of São Tomé and Príncipe, Beth Santos writes the following in her post So Much to Say, So Little Energy:

There are students that are stealing computers now. If they are stealing them permanently or if they are just taking them home for the night without permission, I do not know. But I do know that some students are bringing backpacks to school and secretly slipping the computers into the backpacks.

It's a little heartbreaking. On one hand, I thought the students understood that these computers are on loan to them for the school year only, as we need to accommodate future students, not to mention the fact that these students will be moving to a different school system next year with teachers who are untrained in the XO laptop. On the other hand, ugh, it's so frustrating that these kids are stealing the computers because they like them so much. It's so frustrating that these kids are spending three hours of their vacation, every weekday, to sit inside and work on their computers BECAUSE THEY WANT TO!

Excited, even on summer break

I had to think of a solution, and it had to work.

When I came to class today, the energy was not working. We were hopeful that it would return, though, so we waited. As we waited, I met with the teachers. FINALLY my missing bag came through on the flight from Portugal today, so I got the teaching materials (and clothes and toiletries) that I was so badly hoping for. I passed those out (the teaching materials; not the toiletries).

I also passed out a handout that I created for the teachers last night, which included notes about teaching these computers. I explained to the teachers that teaching these computers is like teaching an art class- there is an instruction part, but there is also a very important creativity/experimentation part. The teachers here are used to working in a rote structure, which works for them, especially when they've got a large group of students to take care of. But we're trying to stay away from the rote with these laptops.

I explained to the teachers the importance not ordering the students to make a specific object or enter a specific number, but to encourage them to think for themselves, to try new things out, to have fun. I also encouraged them to let students help each other- to not stop class in order to solve one student's problem. In class, things worked better. They weren't perfect, and certainly not as efficient as I was hoping, but they were better. It will be a process, I know. But the good thing is, I feel like we're moving a foundation. It's not a temporary change we're making, it's forever.

Finally, I talked to the teachers about my solution to the stealing problem. And my solution was this:

First we gathered all of the students into one room. I have mastered the clapping exercise to make students quiet. I did this last year-- you clap in a rhythm and then the students repeat you, and you change the rhythm a few times and have them repeat you a few times, and then finally you stop and everyone is quiet since they're waiting for the next cue. This is how I manage a classroom of 100 students (though today there are much fewer...but since it's vacation time, we're not too too worried about attendance). Then I tell the students I have something important I want to talk to them about, and I just need five minutes of their time.

Happiness is an XO laptop

They were attentive.

I explained that the computers belong to the school, and that the idea is to use them for years to come. The computers that students are using right now are going to sixth graders next year, and the year after that, and years after that. They are participating in a really important program but in order to keep this program going, we need to take care of our computers. During vacation, we can't take the computers home because they're going to go to next year's students (the real reason is because the students are no longer enrolled at São João so there would be no way to track them if something happened). I told the students that there was something that was happening that was making us teachers very sad, and can anyone guess what it is?

No one could, so I continued. The thing that is making us teachers sad is the fact that there are some students, who we will not name, who have been taking the computers home without our permission. Because the computers belong to the school, taking the computers without teacher permission is called stealing. Some of the kids' eyes widened when I said that word, "stealing". I know they don't mean to steal. I told the students that the thefts are in the past now, but we need to work together to find the computers so we can keep using them. So if any student knows of any other student that has one of these computers, please encourage them to bring that computer back to the school and no one will be punished.

As to the fun part.

Starting this summer, and in years to come, we will be offering a contest for students participating in the computer program. Since we're just thinking of this contest now, this summer it will be a story-writing contest for who writes the best Etoys storybook (stories need to be 5-10 pages with text and drawings on each page, they need to be written in good Portuguese and need to have at least three animations on them). On the last day of class, we will all leave our laptops on the tables and walk around the classroom and look at the stories. Then students will silently vote on their five favorite stories on a piece of paper. The writers of the five best stories will be awarded with an XO laptop, that they will be able to keep--forever.

A future XO class now possible

The kids went nuts when they heard this. FOREVER?! That's a long time.

In years to come, we can keep the five laptop giveaway going. I can see how it could be controversial- awarding this select group of students laptops to keep forever could perhaps seem like some weird gameshow charity. But I think it's quite in line with the original OLPC ideals of individual ownership. It's also a pretty big deal for the students, and an enormous motivator to do well in the classroom and to attend class in order to work on their projects.

And finally, it's a solution to stealing. Psychologically, if students understand that the computers need to be taken care of because they are simply on loan to them, BUT they also understand that they have the opportunity to legitimately own a computer themselves if they try hard enough, then I strongly believe that it will bring an end to the theft. Students are not trying to hurt anyone by stealing- they just want an opportunity. Now this is their chance to get it.

And if they're not one of the five winners, they need not despair- there are computers available for use at the national high school, and there are also going to be 20 computers available at São João for public use-- all people need to do is ask a teacher and, particularly if they are a previous student, they will be welcome to use the computer anytime during the school day.

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As previously mentioned I spent my last day in Uruguay at ceibalJAM's second miniJAM! artistico (photos from the event can be found on ceibalJAM's blog). Apart from my short talk about the various efforts by OLPC (Austria) and other European OLPC and Sugar communities (which was the first time since school that I gave a presentation in Spanish!), being able to meet a lot of great people and say my good-byes to them, my favorite part was when the team from Butía took the stage and presented their robotics project.

XO sitting on top of the Butía platform

The goal of the project that is run by Universidad de la República's Faculty of Engineering is to create an inexpensive robotics platform to attract students in public schools to robotics and programming. Having somewhat of a thing for robotics, especially when it comes in combination with an XO, I was immediately fascinated by these efforts.

Gonzalo Tejera started his talk with a general introduction into the progress that robotics has made in the past few years as well as describing the current status quo of the use of robotics in education (or lack thereof due to the high cost of many available kits). Then he outlined the history of the Butía project before diving into the meat of the talk.

The heart of the Butía platform currently consists of an Arduino board which is used to both control the motors to drive around the acryl platform which the XO sits on and to connect all kinds of ambient sensors to it. However Butía took care to develop a modular design so that using an alternative board such as USB4all or GoGoBoard instead of the Arduino is relatively hassle-free.

TurtleArt project with Butía blocks

The really cool thing though is in the software as Butía has worked very hard to make it as easy as possible to program the platform via Sugar's standard tools such as Python and, even cooler in my opinion, the TurtleArt activity. What this means is that within TurtleArt there are extra blocks which can be used to read sensor values, control the wheels of the platform or do a broad variety of other things. Admittedly I think that TurtleArt is cool to begin with but being able to control a physical object rather than just seeing a turtle move around on a screen as a result of your work is just absolutely awesome!

Last but not least the Butía team has also created an Android app that controls the robot depending on the movements of the phone. You can see a demo of that in the video below:

Now that the majority of the engineering work is done it will be interesting to see how the project will be integrated in schools. Butía is working with people and organizations from the education sector so I'm confident that we'll see cool projects coming out of Uruguayan schools over the coming months and years.

I for one know that I would have loved to be able to be able to work with something like the Butía platform when I was at school. Well, actually I'd still love to be able to work with this project today!

I'm not a big fan of Train the Trainer methodologies to scale teacher training. I agree with Juliano Bittencourt, Learning Development Coordinator for OLPC Rwanda when he says:

Even when we talk about developed countries, this model of training a small group of people that in their turn train another group of people and so on, has failed. Cascading trainings has proven to decrease quality along the chain. The first and second levels might be good, but by the seventh iteration most of the principles have got lost remaining only the skeleton of the original ideas.

Yet that poses a very serious problem for Juliano and the whole OLPC Rwanda team, as he discusses in The Challenges of OLPC Scale Implementation in Rwanda:

Rwanda has about 43.000 teachers in primary schools. If we decided to replicate this training with the remaining teachers of the country, also in batches of 300, it would took us a little bit more than 2.9 years without a single stop week.

This number really made me reflect regarding our strategy for making the laptop initiative a success. It is obvious that 1 week of training is by far insufficient to prepare a teacher to use the XO inside their classroom. In the Rwanda context, I may say that not even 6 months of continuous training would prepare most teachers. Most of them aren't professional teachers, usually only having completed the secondary school as a criteria to teach in primary. Therefore there isn't a formal understanding of pedagogy or learning. They just reproduce the way they were taught.

So, how to make the OLPC project successful in Rwanda with such a challenge in teachers capacity building?

The common sense answer would be to increase the number of parallel trainings. Although, there is always the constraints of financial resources and qualified people to run such workshops. This last one, the human resources, are a particular issue in Rwanda. There is no academic tradition in the country neither on progressive education nor on computers and learning. This force us, and NGOs with similar objectives, to work with people from scratch in all senses of their development.

What is OLPC Rwanda's answer to the question of scaling teacher training? Juliano says model OLPC schools:

A large part of our work is to create OLPC Model Schools, that will be centers were the laptops integration into the school can serve as reference for the society in general and other schools in particular. Teachers should be able to come to those places and witness with their own eyes what their peers are doing. This will help to make the society to understand that laptops aren't a tool to teaching computer skills, but are really an "object to think with", something that qualitatively changes the way we learn.

Yet model schools have similar issues to train the trainer - you still have to get 43,000 teachers to experience a model school to effect change in their professional mindset. Juliano believes that using local media and direct XO-to-XO idea transmission will expand best practices.

Personally, I'm hoping you'll have a better idea that both of us can agree on.

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From what I'm hearing Monday's talk at the World Bank about the status quo of OLPC in South America is attracting a lot of interesting people ranging from OLPC employees to long-term olpc community members and people working on related projects for various NGOs and other organizations such as Inter-American Development Bank.

And it's not too late to RSVP if you want to attend in person:

OLPC in South America Update
Monday, August 30th, 12:30-2pm
World Bank
Room I 1-200, 1750 I Street NW
Washington DC (map)

For the people who can't make it we'll stream (and record) the talk and subsequent discussions via ustream.tv (or see the embedded video below). We've also agreed to use #olpcSAbriefing as a Twitter hashtag for the event and we'll have a person monitoring Twitter so remote viewers can also submit questions and comments.

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Get OLPC News daily - enter your email address:

From what I'm hearing Monday's talk at the World Bank about the status quo of OLPC in South America is attracting a lot of interesting people ranging from OLPC employees to long-term olpc community members and people working on related projects for various NGOs and other organizations such as Inter-American Development Bank. And it's not too late to RSVP if you want to attend in person: OLPC in South America UpdateMonday, August 30th, 12:30-2pmWorld BankRoom I 1-200, 1750 I Street NWWashington DC (map) For the people who can't make it we'll stream (and record) the talk and subsequent discussions via ustream.tv (or see the embedded video below). We've also agreed to use #olpcSAbriefing as a Twitter hashtag for the event and we'll have a person monitoring Twitter so remote viewers can also submit questions and comments. Christoph Derndorfer http://christoph-d.blogspot.com/

1:1 Computing costs are a difficult thing to nail down, because there are so many factors that go into it. I worked with GeSCI's Roxanna Bassi to create a worksheet to help guide cost calculations. Excited about XO laptop TCO I took a first stab four years ago, and came out with a $972/laptop cost over a 5 year program. To say that that cost estimate was not popular at the time would be an understatement. OLE Nepal has put together a great TCO of the laptop program, based on their pilot project. Where I pieced together training budgets from USAID ICT4Edu projects and Internet connectivity estimates from UN/ITU global averages, they have on-the-ground numbers, (and a few ideal estimates on repair costs). The total for a 5 year program in Nepal? We're still looking at $753, if you read carefully: Jon Camfield http://JonCamfield.com