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One of the most frustrating aspects of my 2010 journey through Uruguay, Paraguay, and Peru was seeing how many children had to use XOs whose keyboards were broken. Uruguay seemed to be particularly hard-hit by this issue. From what I gathered this is due to the fact that they received many XOs which were produced fairly early on when OLPC had yet to implement changes to make the membranes of the keyboards thicker and thereby more robust.

As such I was very excited when I saw this photo showing off a new and seemingly much improved membrane keyboard which is the standard option for the upcoming ARM-based XO-1.75:

A comment on the wiki page of the photo refers to this as a grid style keyboard. As you can see the gaps between the individual keys are now protected with a plastic cover. This should really go a long way in reducing the number of broken keyboards and the associated maintenance hassles and expenses.

It will also be interesting to see whether OLPC will make these keyboards - or rather the whole bottom portion of the XO - available to deployments. That would allow them to gradually replace the machines hit by this issue rather than having to purchase XO-1.75s. Though of course one question here is at what cost such a replacement (parts plus shipping/handling and actually repair procedure) would be available to Uruguay and other projects.

In any case it's great to see this improvement become standard for future XO-1.75 owners.

Resumen en español: Una fuente de frustración durante mi visita en 2010 de los proyectos en Uruguay, Paraguay y el Perú fue el número alto de alumnos que que tenían XOs con un teclado roto. Por esto me emocioné mucho cuando vi la foto arriba que muestra el diseño nuevo del teclado que será la opción por defecto en los XO-1.75. Ahora el espacio entre las teclas individuales esta protegido por una cubierta de plástico que debería ayudar mucho en mejorar la resistencia del teclado.

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Yesterday the Mobiles for Education Alliance - which includes many big players such as USAID, U.S. Department of State, Peace Corps, World Bank, IADB, UNICEF, UNESCO, and others - announced an upcoming event with Sugar Labs' Walter Bender.

The topic for the February session of the mAlliance's Seminar Series is "The OLPC Project, Learning and the XO 3 Tablet" and according to the invitation it will focus on:

• The move to a tablet device for OLPC
• The relationship between device design and learning
• The OLPC model and the Sugar operating system

The invitation also mentions that:

An interactive and informative discussion will follow Walter's presentation, and attendees will be invited to explore hands-on the XO 3 tablet and the soon-to-be-released XO 1.75 and XO 1.75 touch.

The event will take place on Friday, February 10th between 9:30 - 11:00 a.m. (EST). For those of you who are based in D.C. the physical address is Ronald Reagan Building, North Tower, 1300 Pennsylvania, Suite 700 but there's also an option to follow the presentation virtually. In either case mAlliance asks that you RSVP to mobilesforeducation@gmail.com.

I'll do my best to attend the virtual presentation as this is certainly promising to be an interesting session.

Resumen en español: El 10 de febrero Walter Bender estara dando una presentación enfocado en OLPC, el aprendizaje y el XO 3.0 en un evento en Washington, D.C. Felizmente tambien hay una forma virtual de seguir el evento de la distancia y voy a intentar de verlo así. Hay más información sobre el evento en la invitación (en Inglés) y para regitrarse hay que mandar un correo a mobilesforeducation@gmail.com.

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Even though it was widely reported when Nicholas Negroponte first mentioned that he was planning a new deployment model based on dropping laptops or tablets out of helicopters, few media outlets have bothered to follow up on the idea since then. The one notable exception is New Scientist which conducted an interview with Negroponte in early December where he revealed a few details and the fact that pre-pilots were scheduled to start in January.

Now, it shouldn't come as a surprise that we have tried to keep a close eye on the relevant developments. As such I was more than happy to speak with Clark Boyd, the host of PRI's The World Technology Podcast, when he got in touch just before Christmas to discuss Negroponte's idea and the overall status quo of OLPC.

You can find the resulting 9 minute piece in episode 351 of the podcast (direct MP3 download), it starts about 15min 45sec into the show.

On a related note: I hope to learn more details about how the aforementioned pre-pilot project is going during my upcoming visit in Boston in the last week of February.

Resumen en español: Antes de navidad hice una entrevista con The World Technology Podcast donde hablaba sobre el estado de OLPC y la idea de Nicholas Negroponte en cuanto a la distribución de laptops y tablets con helicópteros. La entrevista se encuentra en episodio 351 del programa (descarga directa del archivo) y la parte sobre OLPC empieza en 15min 45sec.

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I saw the following interview thanks to a volunteer who shared it on the olpc-uruguay mailing list. In it Isaac Asimov - most widely known for his science fiction writings - spends several minutes talking about the use of computers and what is essentially a description of the Internet in education.

While that in itself would already be noteworthy the fact that the interview took place in 1988 makes it all the more interesting. It's not hard to find similarities between what Asimov described 24 years ago and ongoing projects such as Khan Academy, Wikipedia, and indeed OLPC. Interestingly enough some of the questions the interviewer asks are also very similar to the ones often heard around aforementioned projects.

In any case I think the first few minutes of this video are well worth watching:

Resumen en español: Este video muestra Isaac Asimov - más conocido por sus obras de ciencia ficción - hablando sobre el uso de computadoras en la educación en una entrevista en el año 1988. Lo interesante es que muchos proyectos actuales como Khan Academy, Wikipedia o OLPC estan parecidos a ideas que el describió hace 24 años.

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A team of students from the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago has been working on a charging station for XO deployments in developing countries. Like the laptops themselves, the design needed to be rugged and inexpensive, but also simple enough to be reproduced in their area of deployment. Using a three-legged PVC structure, hardboard shelves, and dulled nails for support, the final cost of each charging station ended up being under $1.00 per XO when constructed in the US; and when using a simple jig, the construction time is under an hour for a station with 20 shelves.

In August 2011, the team installed a solar power system at a primary school in Lascahobas, Haiti. Upon returning in December, the site was updated with, among other things, the new charging station design. Previously, all 400 XOs had been stacked in piles of ten, which proved to be a mess (as seen in the first picture below). With the new stations installed, the children were able to easily find available charging cables and plug the XOs into the system.

An assembly guide for building these XO laptop charging stations is available in two different versions: 11x17 one-pager / multiple 8.5x11 pages.

IIT Empowering Haiti is a team of undergraduate students at the Illinois Institute of Technology who, with the support of faculty and industry advisers, are working to improve the conditions of education in Haiti. For more information you please visit the team's Web site or contact them at contact@iitempoweringhaiti.org.

Resumen en español: El equipo de IIT Empowering Haiti construyo un sistema de estaciónes para poder recargar los 400 XO en una escuela en Haiti. El costo del sistema es menos que $1 por XO y existen un guia para que cualquier otro proyecto puede replicar este sistema: una página / seis páginas.

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English summary at the end of the article

Gracias a un post en la pagina de Plan Ceibal en Facebook vi este video sobre una calesita que se diseño para cargar unas XO en una escuela del departamento de Flores en Uruguay:

La calesita surge de un proyecto escolar iniciado en el 2010 por niños de 3er año de escuela en conjunto con una maestra, la directora y un voluntario de RAP Ceibal. Durante dos años estuvieron trabajando para concretar su proyecto. El mismo permitió nuevos abordajes de temáticas referentes a ciencia, energías renovables, medioambiente, entre otros.

Ya hemos visto muchos proyectos interesantes en cuanto a la produción de electricidad para las XO:

• en la India se usaron vacas
• en Afganistán se construyó algo parecido a una máquina de coser
• en Paraguay y la India se adaptaron fuentes de alimentación de computadoras de escritorio
• en Haiti se diseño una instalación solar para 500 XO
• y la otra semana OLPC publicó un video de una XO que esta corriendo de un panel solar y sin batería

Lo que me encanta en particular sobre este proyecto es la participación de los alumnos en la construcción de la calesita y creo que también se nota su interés en el video:

English summary: Over a two year period pupils, a teacher, a principal, and a volunteer at a school in Uruguay built a carousel which can charge several XOs when in-use. This is just the latest example of a series of interesting projects to design alternative ways to charge XOs and I particularly like the pupils' involvement here.

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Last August we ran a piece about a large solar installation which a team from Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago, Green WiFi, and Haiti's National OLPC Coordinator had setup at EFACAP school in Lascahobas, Haiti. With the system having been designed and built to power 500 XO laptops it was - and very likely still is - the world's largest single-school solar laptop charging deployment.

Recently I spoke with Laura Hosman, one of the project's leads and an assistant professor at IIT, about another very interesting power-related project her students have been working on. In the process she also mentioned the following 12 minute video which provides a great overview of their project in Lascahobas and is well worth watching:

Resumen en español: En agosto del año pasado presentamos este proyecto (artículo en ingles) hecho en Haiti donde se instalaron paneles solares en una escuela para para proveer electricidad a 500 XO. El video arriba muestra el proyecto y su instalación.

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While we all lust for OLPC's new XO 3.0 tablet computer, don't forget that XO-1 laptops are selling for cheap on eBay and the prices are dropping fast.

As you can see by the closed auction above, XO laptops are going for $90 or less now. Three years after Give One Get One, OLPC has finally achieved the $100 laptop goal - get yours today!

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Zunia, the public information channel for Development Gateway, is now conducting interviews with thought leaders in development and they've just recently published a great interview with Satish Jha of OLPC India Foundation. In the interview Satish has a great response to the question of "Why OLPC laptops?":

Giving them OLPC laptops, not just any computer, transforms their world beyond what a teacher and a regular computer could achieve together. My experience is that wherever we have OLPC deployed, virtually anyone visiting those schools has almost had an "spiritual" experience of what learning learning can be.

How children can be engaged in learning by themselves, as a class and engage the teachers as well... It transforms the school from a place where children are forced to go into a place they don't want to go away from.

I agree with Satish - seeing a child's eyes light up when they get a computer is magical. And their capacity to astound you with simple pleasures of exploration and learning humbles even hardened critics like myself. Which is why seeing discarded, dust covered laptops is so soul crushing. Yes, I have actually cried when shown a stack of un-used computers.

In this time of hardware hype and geek lust, may all of us in ICT4Edu be religious about usage so we can find god in a child's eyes and not the devil of disuse.

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Earlier this week Chris Ball (OLPC Foundation's Lead Software Engineer) posted a great video of Richard Smith (OLPC Foundation's Director of Embedded Engineering) demonstrating an ARM-based XO-1.75 laptop running directly off a 10W solar panel. And before you ask, yes, they did remove the battery of the laptop to show that it's indeed only powered by the sun.

This video certainly makes a great demonstration of what Richard previously said about the XO-1.75's reduced power-consumption and versatility when it comes to accepting alternative charging solutions. These improvements should make solutions such as the massive solar power deploymenty by IIT, Green Wifi, and OLPC in Haiti quite a bit easier to implement.

If you're interested in more details about the power consumption and charging requirements for the XO-1.75 as well as the much-discussed XO 3.0 tablet (which uses almost the same hardware) then I'd also recommend you to read Richard Smith's extensive e-mail update from earlier in the week.

Resumen en español: En un video de OLPC Foundation en Boston se muestra una XO-1.75 (basada en la plataforma ARM) que se alimenta exclusivamente de un panel solar de 10W. Esto sirve como una demostración muy buena de la reducción del consumo de energia de la nueva generación de XO y su flexibilidad en cuanto a aceptar soluciones alternativas de carga.

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In early January Sameer Verma (Web site, Twitter, Google+), who is a professor at San Francisco State University and one of the heads behind the OLPC San Francisco community, announced that his university and OLPC Association signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU).

Article I of the MoU (full PDF) reads:

OLPC and SFSU will use their best efforts to establish a long-term cooperation and collaboration in the field of 1:1 computing in certain primary schools in California and around the world. OLPC is interested in pursuing opportunities in the areas of Education, Technology and Outreach.

The Parties agree to work together to support the San Francisco Bay Area volunteer community through its monthly meetings, lending library and annual summit. Further, the parties agree to support faculty research, community service, student projects and internships in the OLPC context. These may include, but are not limited to pedagogical approaches, content generation, software development, hardware testing, network analysis, community outreach and other related topics that go towards ensuring the sustainability of OLPC in different parts of the world.

As SJ Klein (OLPC Foundation's Director of Outreach) explains in a blog post it's possible that we'll see more such MoUs in the future:

This may be just the first of many MOUs with universities in the US, as we develop a network of supporting organizations working with OLPC on international projects.

Here's to more MoUs such as this one! After all other universities and professors (and not just in the United States) such as for example Stephen Jacobs from Rochester Institute of Technology and his students have also done some great work related to OLPC. Having a more formalized process for universities, faculty, and students to establish working relations with OLPC can only help such efforts.

Resumen en español: La Universidad Estatal de San Francisco (San Francisco State University) y OLPC Association firmaron un memorando de entendimiento sobre los esfuerzos actuales y futuros proyectos en cuanto a OLPC.

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As the first bits of information become available ahead of CES 2012 the XO 3.0 (aka "the tablet formerly known as XO-3") has been getting a lot of attention in the technology blogosphere and on Twitter (including on @olpcnews, @random_musings, and @olpc). I'll hold of writing a full post about it until Sunday evening or Monday morning as I want to hear about people's hands-on impressions of the prototype. Having said that I do recommend to read Joanna Stern's article over on The Verge for a great summary of what's known at the moment including some fairly up-to-date looking renderings.

An early XO-1.75 motherboard

Aside of the XO 3.0 OLPC and Marvell - which gave $5.6 million to OLPC back in 2010 - are also using CES 2012 to show off the ARM-based XO-1.75. As mentioned yesterday we already knew pretty much everything about the machine except for its price and availability.

With regard to the price I confirmed with OLPC Association's CFO Bob Hacker that the XO-1.75's list price will be $185. As with the XO-1 and XO-1.5 the exact price depends on a number of variables such as the specific hardware configuration (RAM and NAND flash for mass storage) and other details.

As for the availability a joint press release by Marvell and OLPC which Engadget published says that:

Marvell and One Laptop per Child also announced today that the XO 1.75 laptop will begin shipping to customers in March 2012. Over 75,000 units of the XO 1.75 have already been ordered by OLPC projects in Uruguay and Nicaragua.

An interesting detail here is that it seems like Uruguay decided to go for 8GB of NAND flash for mass storage while Nicaragua opted for 4GB.

In combination with the previously mentioned reduction in power consumption of the XO-1.75 this price point is certainly a welcome improvement over the currently available XO-1.5 machines.

Resumen en español: El precio de lista del XO-1.75 (que esta basado en la plataforma ARM) es $185 y las primas 75,000 maquinas van a ser enviados a Uruguay y Nicaragua en marzo.

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Joanna Stern (@JoannaStern) over at The Verge seems to have beat the rest of the tech world by being the first one to publish a fairly extensive report and video with hands-on impressions of OLPC's XO 3.0 tablet (formerly known as XO-3) from CES 2012.

I've embedded the video for your viewing pleasure below but I'd also really recommend you to read her article which contains some additional information.

Oh, and if you still haven't gotten enough of the XO 3.0 after that then you can also head over to Engadget for a short article and slightly more hardware focused 5min video.

Update (#1): More XO 3.0 coverage and hands-on impression from CES 2012 can be found over on Gizmodo, ARMdevices.net, and TechCrunch TV.

Update (#2): My friends over at Netbooknews.com have also published a 6min video with their impressions of the XO 3.0.

Resumen en español: En el CES 2012 en Las Vegas OLPC esta presentando los primeros prototipos del tablet XO 3.0 (antes llamado XO-3). El video y los links contienen primeras impresiones sobre el prototipo de varias publicaciones de tecnologia.

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A couple of weeks ago I mentioned a great presentation which Plan Ceibal's president Miguel Brechner gave at a festival in Madrid in early October. Upon re-watching it over the holidays I caught an interesting detail which I had previously missed: The figure for Plan Ceibal's 4-Year Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) went up from $276 to $400 over the last two years.

The first slide below is taken from a presentation which Brechner gave in Washington, D.C. in late 2009:

Red circles added for emphasis.

The second slide comes from the aforementioned talk in Madrid in early October 2011:

Red circles added for emphasis.

I'm not surprised about this increase and had actually expected it as I outlined in a message to a colleague regarding the $276 figure back in May of 2011:

Personally I'd take this number with a grain of salt as it's from relatively early on in the project and seeing how Plan Ceibal has changed in many ways (e.g. different maintenance system, more extensive teacher training, etc.) I would assume the current figure to be higher.

Speaking to some Plan Ceibal folks about this they also explained that besides the changes mentioned above there have also been significant investments in fibre optic Internet connections for urban schools, a system for managing educational content, a digital library, and the expansion of the project to secondary schools.

Considering the fairly recent expansion of Plan Ceibal's new maintenance system and its many other 2011 plans (e.g. around robotics and online evaluations) it's quite possible that this figure will continue to increase, at least a little bit.

I would really like to see comparable data from other OLPC and 1-to-1 projects which have been going on for several years. It's not like we haven't had a lot of discussions about the TCO of such projects here on OLPC News and in many other places. However as an IADB report from earlier in the year points out:

"there is still surprisingly little data on the costs of One‐to‐One models in developing countries" (emphasis added)

Plan Ceibal is in somewhat of a unique position to start providing such data. Therefore it would be great for them to break down that $400 figure and explain how the individual changes and investments impacted educational use. This would enable other countries and initiatives to learn and thereby benefit from Uruguay's experiences.

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Between January 10 and 13 the massive CES 2012 IT tradeshow will be taking place in Las Vegas. While this excites the general gadget geek in me there's also a good chance that we'll see some interesting news on the OLPC front.

XO-1.75

XO-1.75 at the FCC

Back in mid-December several Web sites reported that the XO-1.75 made an appearance at the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Combined with the XO-1.75 page on wiki.laptop.org saying that "definitive XO-1.75 laptop specification will be available soon" this is a good indication that the machine is very close to being finished and will likely hit mass-production soon.

The XO-1.75 looks identical to the XO-1 and XO-1.5 from the outside yet its hardware guts are quite different as OLPC switched from an x86 architecture to an ARM platform. I had previously expressed doubts whether this move would really led to a much improved battery life. However reading an e-mail that Richard Smith (OLPC Foundation's Director of Embedded Engineering) sent out in November it seems like my guesstimates where quite off as he mentions feeling...

"...safe in saying that regardless of what you do on the 1.75 you are going to get 3.5 hours of battery life. Period."

Additionally he wrote:

An interesting data point is that the 1.75 is the first laptop of the XO series that has ran 100% from a solar panel for an extended period. During my solar testing I often swap in different batteries. The 1.75 can consistently survive battery removal under moderate solar conditions when connected to the OLPC 10W solar panel.

Aside of these promising power characteristics the XO-1.75 also includes a three-axis accelerometer which people like Bert Freudenberg and Saadia Husain Baloch have already used for some cool things such as this little eToys project or an "etch-a-sketch" program in Turtle Art.

The big unknown at this point is the price of the XO-1.75. The New York Times recently reported that the price for the XO-1.5 is between $209 and $229 these days and I hope that the XO-1.75 will come in below that. It will certainly be interesting to see whether OLPC reveals any information here during CES 2012.

XO-3

XO-3 A1 board prototype

At this point we know quite a bit less about the XO-3 tablet than about the XO-1.75 but again I hope that CES 2012 will change that. My best guess at this point is that OLPC might show a very early prototype of the XO-3 at the show.

After all OLPC Foundation did receive the first prototypes of the XO-3 in mid-December according to this page on wiki.laptop.org. In terms of the hardware platform the XO-3 will be quite similar to the XO-1.75 as both use the Marvel Armada 610 ARM SoC. However the motherboard itself will be significantly smaller than in the laptop-version as you can also see on the photo to the right.

XO-3 with solar cover design

In a presentation at the Social Good Summit back in September 2011 Nicholas Negroponte briefly talked about the XO-3 and mentioned that it will come with a cover that doubles as a solar-panel charger. This certainly sounds like an interesting solution, especially when combined with the low-power characteristics of the ARM platform mentioned earlier. However it remains to be seen just how effective such an approach really is.

In terms of the timeframe of the XO-3 development the XO-3 page mentions that "it is hoped that production might begin in the latter half of 2012" which goes along well with the aforementioned New York Times article also referring to the "XO-3, which it hopes to introduce late next year". In terms of the price that article also says that the "XO-3 is intended to cost less than $100, or so OLPC hopes".

Nell

Early Nell tech-demo

In autumn C. Scott Ananian (OLPC Foundation's Director of New Technologies) announced that he's working on a system for the XO-3 code-named Nell which he hoped to be able to demo at CES 2012.

The name Nell is a hat-tip to Neal Stephenson's book The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer where a young girl receives an interactive book which teaches and guides her over many year. Having said that C. Scott also wrote that Nell could just as well be an acronym for Narrative Environment for Learning Learning.

If you're interested in hearing some of the early ideas C. Scott had about how such a software environment might be useful in the OLPC context then I'd recommend you to follow the links and watch the video embedded in the OLPC Foundation Update post from mid-June. Plus you can find links to some of the first puzzle pieces, benchmarks, and technology tests for Nell in this November update on C. Scott's blog.

So overall it looks like CES 2012 could turn out to be a very interesting show from an OLPC perspective. As we sadly can't go to Las Vegas ourselves we'll keep our eyes open for relevant content and news to be posted online. I'll particularly focus on video-blogger and OLPC fanboy deluxe Charbax as I'm sure he'll upload any OLPC related videos to olpc.tv the very second he's done filming them.

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As you can see from the lack of updates over the past 1 1/2 weeks I did a good job of staying away from doing any work during between Christmas and New Year. I did however spend quite a bit of time reading all kinds of articles, blog-posts, and research papers related to OLPC and Sugar.

Among them was also Walter Bender's look back at the early days of Sugar. I had been aware of the general history of Sugar but it was really great to be able to read his account and learn some details which I hadn't known before.

Here's a short excerpt:

Sugar in late 2007 ~ early 2008 Much of the early development of Sugar took place in the MIT Media Lab. We began in the spring of 2006, in parallel with the work of the teams responsible for developing other aspects of the XO laptop's software, including device drivers, power management, and security. One might ask how OLPC was able to create an entirely new learning platform from whole cloth, and do so with almost no investment in software engineering. The short answer is that they didn't. OLPC solved the problem of how to develop the Sugar software with limited resources by attracting external resources--not creating them from scratch--while articulating clearly defined objectives. OLPC built upon decades of research into how to engineer software to promote learning and amplified OLPC's staff resources by leveraging key partnerships within the Free Software movement. ...

Continue reading the full post over on Walter Bender's Web site.

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Before the mixture of quality family time, delicious food and drinks, setting up the tree, false singing of Christmas songs, and of course unwrapping of presents starts here at the Derndorfer home I briefly wanted to wish all of our readers a Merry Christmas and A Happy New Year. (Well, at in case you happen to celebrate those two occasions that is.)

Once aforementioned Christmas celebrations are over I'm planning on taking it easy until New Year's. I have a stack of books including Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs biography, Jeff Jarvis' Public Parts, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun sitting on my desk and I hope to get through at least two of them. Additionally I still hope that we'll get a half-decent amount of snow over the coming days because I'd really love to go skiing again after a couple of years.

Overall the idea really is to stay away from any work for a week or so. Though I might just sit down at one point or another to write up some reflections about OLPC and Sugar in 2011 and an outlook for the next year.

Anyway, thanks a lot for being a great and engaging audience, see you again in 2012! :-)

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Video blogger deluxe Charbax (aka Nicolas Charbonnier) who also runs olpc.tv caught up with XO designer Yves Behar at the recent LeWeb 2011 conference. I really enjoyed the interview and from an OLPC perspective particularly the first 5 minutes of it are very interesting.

Aside from hearing Behar's thoughts on the role of design in a project such as OLPC he also indicates that the XO-3 tablet will make an appearance over the coming months. As previously mentioned I believe that the CES IT tradeshow taking place in Las Vegas between January 10 and 13 is somewhat of a natural stage for any announcements in this area. Therefore I'll make sure to keep a close eye on olpc.tv and Charbax's Google+ profile on January 10 to see whether the XO-3 will really make an appearance there.

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Looking back at 2011 there are two OLPC projects which I've been particularly keen on learning more about: OLPC Australia (aka Australia's Toughest Linux Deployment) and OLPC Rwanda which became the largest non-South American deployment in the world earlier this year.

Country Case Study: OLPC Rwanda

As such I was very excited when SJ Klein (OLPC Foundation's Director of Outreach) blogged about a report summarizing the first four years of the Rwanda project. And I certainly wasn't disappointed as it's a very good read in terms of explaining the context that the country's OLPC project is taking place in:

"With the overarching objective of disseminating ICT throughout all educational institutions in order to equip learners with 21st century skills, the government is focusing on expanding its ICT infrastructure to provide widespread access to power, connectivity and equipment; developing capacity by training teachers how to integrate ICT into teaching practices; developing and distributing digital content that is adapted to the Rwandan context; and strengthening partnerships to encourage participation of local institutions and civil society in ICT in education."

The report also mentions that plans are underway to expand the current 100,000 XO deployment by another 100,000 XOs by mid-2012. And by 2017 Rwanda's National OLPC Coordinator Nkubito Bakuramutsa hopes to distribute half a million laptops to primary school pupils.

This is certainly no small undertaking considering the list of significant challenges that the project - like any other major ICT for Education (ICT4E) effort in developing nations - faces. In fact the challenges outlined on page 8 of the report align remarkably well with the following six criteria for successful implementations of ICT for Education projects in developing countries which was compiled by Tanja Kohn, a PhD researcher at University of Innsbruck, and me in early 2010:

• Infrastructure
• Maintenance
• Contents and materials
• Community inclusion
• Teacher training
• Evaluation

It's the recognition of the importance of these key components in combination with what sounds like an incredibly challenging environment which will make OLPC Rwanda a very interesting OLPC project to keep an eye on in 2012 and beyond.

If you want to do just that or simply learn more about OLPC Rwanda then I'd recommend you to read the full report and keep an eye on the project's Web site as well as its Twitter account.

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Gracias a Carlos, un voluntario uruguayo, ví esta presentación sobre el estado del proyecto que Miguel Brechner (el presidente de Plan Ceibal) dió en un festival en Madrid al inicio de Octubre. La verdad es que la presentación me impresionó mucho porque Brechner logró dar una impresión amplia sobre el proyecto, sus beneficios y desafíos dentro de 20 minutos.

Hay varios citas excelentes en la presentación pero una que me gustó mucho fue esta:

Acá no hay magia, Ceibal no va a resolver los problemas del Uruguay, pero es una tecnología que puede ayudar a resolverlos.

Así les recomiendo ver los dos partes de la presentación que he puesto abajo:

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