One Laptop Per Child News

BoomingBang: XO Laptop Role Playing Game

2009-11-06T15:01:41Z

BoomingBang, a RPG game, whose release is due till late OCTOBER 09. The BoomingBang project, started by me, Abhishek Indoria, initially, and a friend, was a small deployment. It was started in March 2009, when none of them (us, actually) have heard of OLPC. Back again, in June, 2 XO laptops were requested, and the project was started officially.

The basic mission of players is to eliminate all other players from the game in a funny way.

You control a team of creatures, be it a penguin or Pigeon or a bull. You try various methods, like dropping them into water by pushing them towards water from a hill, or hitting them with bat and send them flying, to give them a vomiting injection and you'll see them vomiting (Be careful, stand around the vomited surface too long and you will find yourself in grave), booming them with a funny bazooka and most funny of all, Removing the surface from beneath them, so...If they move...Bingo!

First, the deadline of the project was December 2010. But, after a long time of hardworking, which included as much as 5 hours a day programming, the project's alpha version is ready for testing, in case anyone approaches.

The team started with only two Indian volunteers, but now comprises of whole 20 people, mostly youth and under the age of 18. The team consists of members of all continents (usually), Asia, Africa, South America, Australia,Europe and such that.

The team is working on the BoomingBang project, along with the spreadsheet program, Spread-The-Sheet is intending to soon start working on some more projects, one of them may be an Operating System, named Aura. The team is aiming to complete 10 project till the end of 2010, and progressing at a fast rate.

The Aim of the Project, was to provide children a game, which is fascinating, funny and improves their skills. First, when I saw OLPC and XO, I knew instantly that there were games, many perfect games, but not a single funny and game like BoomingBang (RPG, Thinking Skills etc.)

The basic objective of BoomingBang is fun. Others fall afterward.

BoomingBang helps players to think logically, like "What will happen if I do it? and Why should I do it?" Players just get deep down in the game.
BoomingBangs allows players to take decisions within the time limit. Players can set the time limit according to them, for their convenience, but however, this makes players think reasonable and quickly, improving their decision making ability.
One wrong decision and it'll be over. This is BoomingBang's speciality. Players' ability to think harder and quicker at each step is required

With the help of OLPC and its volunteers, the game is ready now, and its Alpha version will be released nearby Late October 2009/Early November.

OLPC: The Best ROI for Indian Children

2009-11-05T14:00:20Z

Yesterday I had an interesting talk with Satish Jha of OLPC India. Overall he had an compelling theme - India has the ability to finance One Laptop Per Child for all 25 million children in India, and it should do this now - for if children are not studying on a screen today, they (and India) will not reach full potential in the future.

Satish Jha of OLPC India

OLPC is affordable to state governments

Education in India is a province of the state governments, not the national one, and Satish has visited many of them to bring the one laptop per child to their attention. Through OLPC, Satish sees this goal as attainable, since he figures they're really looking at $1 per student per week. How? By financing the $220 cost of the XO laptop and the taxes and other costs of $80 over 5 years, which even with India's mortgage interest rate, would be about $1 per week.

State governments are buying OLPC

Just this week, the state of Manipur decided to buy 75,000 XO laptops, but wisely, put down payment for 1,000 and will procure at a pace that can be effectively deployed. In this way, both Satish and the state government can manage implementation. There are three more states, Kerala, Uttar Pradesh, and Himachal, that are also committed to OLPC. Four more are interested and going through the paraphernalia and Satish expects all of them to join once they realize the benefits to their children.

States get OLPC how they want it

Satish did mention that if a state government wanted Microsoft Windows XP on the XO laptop, he would provide it to them. He feels they will be both impressed and satisfied by the Sugar Learning Platform, but if they wanted it, why should OLPC deny them? We have to move past Microsoft vs. Open Source - this is not a religious war, its educating children.

OLPC India is about the children

I enjoyed the conversation with Satish, he's quite the talker, and he kept coming back to a central phrase, famous in the USA: a mind is a terrible thing to waste. It was clear that he's not in OLPC India to make money, or a name for himself - he's done both already. He really has high hopes for the XO to empower learning and advancement of India's children.

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OLPC Video of Twinning Canadian and Kenyan Schools

2009-11-04T15:00:40Z

Hi, my name's Amal Chandaria, and I'm one of the four students from Upper Canada College who researched, designed and deployed an OLPC laptop implementation program at the Ntugi Day Secondary School in Kenya in March 2009.

A few weeks ago, Connor Cimowsky and I created a video documenting our trip, its challenges, and its successes. The National Middle School Association's invited students to submit short films to a contest for their annual conference this week in Indianapolis. The videos had to address the conference's theme: 'Making a World of Difference'. Since we felt our trip really embodied that theme, we decided to submit our video . The thrilling news is that our film was selected to be screened, and, this Saturday, will be shown in front of an audience of 7,000 people at the General Session.

Our video took us about 45 hours to complete and we are extremely proud of it. We feel that it really gives a good sense of the purpose and achievements of the trip. One of the challenging aspects of making the film was finding a way of compressing the huge scope of our trip into a short movie. However, we overcame these obstacles and are proud of the final product. We hope that you enjoy watching it!

The main purpose of our trip was to provide the Ntugi Day Secondary School, through the use of computers and the internet, the same access to knowledge as we do at our school in Toronto. To do that, we had to find a practical, sustainable and economical model which could then be used in other schools with similar challenges (ie. no power, no internet infrastructure).

Despite a few mistakes along the way, we finally overcame most of our technical difficulties and developed a package which was sustainable (solar power), economical (OLPCs) and practical (use of existing Safaricom mobile phone network in conjunction with CradlePoint wireless routers). This is detailed in earlier posts which you can read here and here.

Before we'd first left Canada for Kenya, there were some who felt that the project was too ambitious. They told us that rural Kenyan students weren't ready for the technology and that the project would most likely fail. We were worried, but were reassured by our hosts and partners in Kenya, the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy, and by the school's principal, Jacob Mbijiwe. Faith Riunga, who runs Lewa's education programme , had selected the school, and she and Mr. Mbijiwe had helped them prepare for our arrival. Together with our peers at Ntugi, we proved the doubters completely wrong! The students were more than ready for the technology and it was great to see them embrace the new resources with such enthusiasm.

I guess we'd all had preconceived ideas about the level of the education at the school. We'd thought that, because of the scarcity of textbooks and other resources, that the Ntugi students wouldn't be at the same academic level as we were at our school in Toronto. However, upon our arrival, we realized how wrong we had been - the students were learning exactly what we were learning in chemistry, math and several other subjects! The only problem was that the students' ability to do research was limited to their textbooks. Now, however the students are able to use the Internet to find answers to their questions.

To give you a sense of how ready the Kenyan students are for change and technology, take a look at this short clip of our friend, principal Jacob Mbijiwe. He recorded this message to our own school's principal, Dr. Jim Power, in July.

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Negroponte: XO-1.75 goes ARM, XO-2 is canceled

2009-11-03T10:30:00Z

This morning I woke up to find an e-mail in my inbox which contained a link to an xeconomy.com interview with Nicholas Negroponte. While reading it over breakfast I managed to spill my tea because I couldn't believe I was really seeing the words I was looking at. XO-2 development canceled? An XO-1.75 to replace it? Talk about an XO-3? Going from OLPC to olpc? But let's take it step by step, shall we...

Nicholas Negroponte of OLPC

From XO-2 to XO-1.75 to XO-3

NN: 2.0 has been replaced by two things: 1) model 1.75, same industrial design but an ARM inside, 2) model 3.0, totally different industrial design, more like a sheet of paper.

Now there's something I didn't see coming! While I never believed that the XO-2 had gotten much beyond the concept stage I always considered it to be a strong vision of where OLPC was going in terms of device design. Sure, both the hardware and the software for an XO-2 are massive undertakings which would probably overstretch OLPC's limited resources but then again that's what everyone thought of the XO-1 design as well and arguably they did a great job there.

An ARM based XO-1.75 on the other hand is much more of an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary step into the future. So many people, especially a certain Charbax, had long expected OLPC to move from an x86 to an ARM design. I've been following the ongoing x86 vs. ARM race quite closely and it's my understanding that they're now closely matched when it comes to the all-important price / performance / power-consumption metrics. What I however cannot estimate is how much engineering by OLPC, Sugar Labs and Fedora it takes to make the current software run, and run well, on an ARM platform. It also remains to be seen when OLPC plans to release the XO-1.75 but I'd be very surprised if it happened within the next 12 months.

Early XO-2 mockup

On the topic of the XO-3 xeconomy updated their original story with a quote from Negroponte:

Not much to say other than its aspirational aspects: 3.0 is a single sheet, completely plastic and unbreakable, waterproof, 1/4" thick, full color, reflective and transmissive, no bezel, no holes. 1W. $75, ready in 2012.

To me that sounds like a slightly souped up XO-2 vision and given the timeframe for such a device I can't help but simply not care about it at this point in time.

From OLPC to olpc

X: Are there any new goals, and if so, what are they?
NN: We have separated the Foundation and Association, making two non-profit entities, moving from OLPC to olpc. The Association, based in Miami, deals clearly and professionally with sales, support and deployment. The Foundation, by contrast, is more focused on advocacy, engineering and humanitarian missions.

It's interesting that Negroponte talks about olpc here since for many of us this term has been used to describe the global one laptop per child community for quite some time (as opposed to OLPC for the Cambridge, MA based organization). Seperating advocacy and engineering from sales and deployment generally strikes me as a good idea though from the outside it's hard to judge what effects this organizational difference has on day-to-day operations.

olpc accepted?

One of the most interesting quotes comes towards the end of the interview when Negroponte says:

NN: People no longer question olpc as a concept. It is accepted. There is only one question and everybody asks it. That is: how do we pay for it? Turns out that is not hard, because the total cost of ownership, including buying the laptop, maintaining it and connecting it, is $1 per week, per child. While that is high for the poorest nations, it is not outrageous. The issue is how to front the money.

Now I don't know where Negroponte hangs out but whenever I talk about OLPC I definitely hear this "why one laptop per child" question. A lot that is. While I personally also believe in the enormous potential of each child having it own device (else why would I be here;-) I think it's way too early in the game to confidently say that the whole notion really makes sense. Let alone that it's been widely accepted. On the topic of cost it's good to hear a more realistic view of things that goes beyond the $100 laptop term. However I think that the true cost will turn out to be higher once things like digital educational content development and extensive teacher training are included.

At the end of the day I have to say that the interview turned out to be a good and interesting read though as ever so often it leaves me with more questions than I had when I got up this morning...

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WinPro and Orphans Gain - OLPC India Loses XO Believer

2009-11-02T15:16:36Z

Back in June of this year, René Seifert, entrepreneur and global citizen, had a vision to create OLPC for Vatsalya Girls Orphanage in Bangalore, India. As an internet-entrepreneur and sublime nerd who spends a big chunk of the day in front of the computer, he felt that bringing children from an early age in touch with technology as part of their fundamental education was an imperative mission.

But his vision turned into a nightmare of dead ends and foolish tangents with OLPC India. His quest for 11 XO laptops ended in failure - OLPC India never delivered the computers.

That's not XO Sugar smile

So what did René do to keep his dream alive? He skipped OLPC and bought Wipro laptops with Windows XP for the orphans, instead of XO laptops. Here are his results:

Today we solemnly celebrated in the traditional Indian way the inauguration of something new. This novelty felt like two well crafted pieces of a puzzle came together to form a harmonious whole. One the one side, the phenomenal preparation of the Vatsalya team with setting up the room, installing broadband internet connection and putting tables with chairs in place.

From the other side the delivery and installation of the Wipro netbooks. Plug and play. And it just worked. Connected to the internet, connected to view through this window of the word. From Bangalore to anywhere. Therefore, to symbolize these limitless possibilities, I set Wikipedia in English as the home page on each of the 12 browsers.

All the pictures of the inauguration here on my Flickr-set.

This event should upset anyone who believes in OLPC. Here was a committed believer in the power of the XO laptop to change the world, but due to OLPC arrogance or mismanagement (pick one, suggest your own), he had to turn to a commercial netbook - one inspired by OLPC, to gain satisfaction.

Keep current on OLPC India - subscribe to OLPC News via RSS Feed, Email or Twitter .

OLPC Can Fight Insurgencies with XO Laptops, Not Guns

2009-10-29T14:10:48Z

I have been following the current debate about sending troops to Afghanistan. I have no idea of how many troops are needed but in our rush to stop the violence, we should not forget that the basic problem is lack of education and development.

I feel we should fight insurgencies with laptops, not guns. We are spending a billion dollars per week there using guns; we could have a long lasting and positive effect with laptops for a billion per year.

OLPC has been piloting the "fighting insurgency" approach with Maureen Orth, special correspondent to Vanity Fair and wife of the late Tim Russert, on the ground in Columbia. Here's an MSNBC video:

I posted these ideas on my Facebook page but got no response. I then sent a note about it to OLPC in Afghanistan and got the following reply:

"Thanks for spreading the message of OLPC Afghanistan. First I would like to thank you for you afford in bringing peace and prosperity to the people of Afghanistan. Let me introduce me self, My name is Salim Hayran an Afghan British national currently working with the Ministry of Education in Afghanistan as the Director of ICT and I am Afghanistan OLPC project coordinator.

I am absolutely agreed with Maureen Orth, that OLPC can be used as one of the tools to fight insurgency and narcotic business in Afghanistan. Since all the current insecurity problems are due to the lack of literacy in Afghanistan.

The feedback that I have from the pilot deployment of OLPC in Afghanistan is incredible. The initial result shows that within couple months of OX laptops deployment a 15%-20% increased made by kids in term of reading, writing and analytical thinking. Therefore, lets1 work together in the world arena to mobilize funding and moral support for a massive deployment of OLPC laptops in Afghanistan."

My feeling is that when Mr. Obama asks his generals what to do in Afghanistan, he gets their knee-jerk answer to send more troops. The generals don't like to talk about nation building because it is expensive and takes decades. Laptops offer a way to help build nations at low cost. And not kill people in the process.

Sure, critics will say that laptops promote the spread of pornography. I say the results outweigh the dangers. Or that laptops will be stolen. Well, so what? They are cheap and patient teachers. Others will say that the Afghans need food, clean water, and medicine more than computers. That is true, they need it all; but with education, they are more able to help themselves.

So, if you would like to support Mr. Hayran, let Congress know. We have wasted too many lives and too much money already.

Douglas McLain, at 71 years old, is becoming a grouchy old man.

Sugar Learning Platform is Big - in Chile

2009-10-28T14:13:23Z

Sugar was presented in Santiago as part of the Free Software events that were done locally in many parts of the world on October 7-9, on equal footing as, for example, Ubuntu, who were on the very next booth.

Sharing Sugar on Classmate PC's

Chile keeps doing Good Things

The credibility the Sugar people in Chile have is first rate. Of course, they could do even more if they got some help from OLPC, but their grassroots work remains definitely the best I've ever seen as to message, ability to reach, honesty and openness in sharing the ups and downs.

As we know how hard it is for us to open doors for our proposals, they are right in already, a respected part among those who have something good to share. And to help beyond their borough: the guy in the background of the photo is a volunteer from Bolivia.

During this event they presented 4 Classmate running SoaS (Sugar on a Stick) and 2 XO for people to try them out. Werner Westermann presented a conference, and of course the Acevedo clan, with Patito, Franco and Amaya were in the thick of things.

Pictures and links here.

Twinning Canadian and Kenyan Schools with Solar Power

2009-10-27T14:06:47Z

My name is Derek Chan, I'm 16 years old, and I was part of Mark Battley's team of high school students from Upper Canada College that initiated a small scale OLPC implementation at the Ntugi Day Secondary School. As explained in our previous post, part of our goal was to provide Ntugi with power for their initial complement of 8 XOs and 2 Cradlepoint PHS300s at a school that had no access to the country's power grid.

Ultimately, we were successful, but not without missteps and failures along the way. We did lots of things right, but we made a few newbie errors. Here's what we learned!

Learn as much as you can about your destination school's physical resources.
Don't assume that tests in the lab will duplicate conditions in the field.
Read all the relevant blogs, forums and bulletin boards before implementing.
Don't underestimate the sophistication of local technology and expertise at your destination.

With Kenya's abundant sunlight, the answer was to use solar power to charge the XO and CradlePoint batteries. With help of OLPC expert Mike Lee our panels of choice became the 10 watt PV Master fibreglass solar modules, these work horses were lightweight, flexible, resistant to hot, dry weather, and were able to directly plug into the XO's.

We planned to carry 8 of the panels over in a suitcase and pair each panel with an XO, allowing the students to power their laptops outside under the Kenyan sunlight. However, back in Canada, because of the cold and the lack of sunlight during our winter, we weren't able to test this system under outdoor conditions and, instead, tested our system using an array of compact florescent bulbs as a substitute for the sun; this would eventually lead to one of the problems we encountered when we arrived in Kenya.

And so, with our panels and laptops packed into our luggage, we concluded our testing on home ground and braced ourselves for a trial by fire in a world none of us had ever seen.

1) Learn as much as you can about your destination school's physical resources:

Like any live experiment, we ran into unexpected problems during the actual implementation. Our first mistake was the lack of knowledge we had about Ntugi prior to the trip; we expected wooden of classrooms since that was what Ntugi had when one of our teachers had visited four years prior to our trip.

That's why we envisioned the students working and re-charging outside in the sun. In retrospect, that was a foolish assumption. In the intervening years, Ntugi had built excellent classrooms and Kenyan weather was so hot and dry that day-to-day outdoor use proved impractical. We were forced to re-evaluate our set-up and find ways to allow for indoor use.

2) Don't assume that tests in the lab will duplicate conditions in the field:

Other than needing to accommodate indoor use, we had another problem. In our winter lab-test with light-bulbs in Toronto, we had neglected to consider two things; the Kenyan sun would alternately produce too much solar power and, of course, there would be clouds!

That meant that under peak sun, the laptops would stop charging and, when there was cloud cover, the flow of electricity from the panels to the laptops would drop precipitously. Mysteriously, this meant that we could never seem to charge the laptops beyond about 30% of their capacity and, even more mysteriously, they actually seemed to be losing their battery charge when the panels were attached. That brings me to our next newbie error!

3) Read all the relevant blogs, forums and bulletin boards before implementing:

Had we been more diligent about reading OLPC News's forums (among other sources) we would have discovered the concept of reverse polarity before we arrived in Kenya - after all, we weren't the first implementation to have this problem. Mr. Battley told us that his father used to say, "electricity flows downhill," and that's what we belatedly discovered.

Under direct sunlight, the OLPCs would charge exceptionally well however, when clouds blocked the sun intermittently, the power flow would reverse and the laptop batteries would discharging itself into the panel.

Our tests in Canada had failed to account for this because we exposed the panel directly against incandescent light bulbs for testing purposes without mimicking cloud cover. This was humiliating. After all our preparation, we were tripped up by a preventable error. Had we spent a few more minutes researching online, and investing in charge controllers, we could have stopped any reverse polarity. But in our negligence, we had also disregarded looking for a local solution.

4) Don't underestimate the sophistication of local technology and expertise at your destination:

We had foolishly assumed that Kenya wouldn't have much in the way of solar technology. We figured if Ntugi hadn't used computers before, it would be unlikely that there would be sophisticated solar expertise in the local town of Meru. Thank heavens we were wrong because, with the reverse polarity problem unsolved, our implementation seemed dead in the water.

Happily, it turned out that Ntugi, with support from Safaricom and the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy already had plans for some solar power at the school.

Chloride Exide is a local company that has years of experience in solar panel installations and they came to our rescue.
Joel, their local representative, kindly helped rig a frame for our panels and helped us install a controller, battery and inverter - all for about $700 US.

We hooked up our North American OLPC chargers to a universal power bar purchased from Nakumatt (the Kenyan Wal-Mart). This solution proved to be far more practical than our original plan and allowed us to leave the panels outside to receive sunlight, while the OLPC's could be kept inside for charging and conducting classes.

Although the current set-up is not ideal because of its vulnerability to weather and theft, it has functioned beyond expectations for 8 months. Ntugi now has 20 OLPC laptops and four CradlePoint routers working with Safaricom's USB modems - all powered from our jury-rigged solar panels!

Currently, Ntugi is trying to raise $7000 to replace our current set-up with a proper series of 120 W panels from Chloride Exide that will accommodate the inevitable growth of their laptop program.

As for the four of us, this little experiment has taught us more than we could have ever expected but most importantly proven the concept of a small rural school able to leapfrog into digital age learning using renewable and self-sustainable resources.
More about our journey to come....

1.6 Million XO-1 eBooks from Internet Archive

2009-10-25T14:07:16Z

Soon, your Read Activity is gonna be overflowing with content. Internet Archive director Brewster Kahle, made a great announcement at the Boston Book Festival:

Brewster Kahle & XO laptop

All 1.6 million books digitized so far by the Internet Archive, the San Francisco-based non-profit dedicated to the universal sharing of knowledge, will be available free to children around the world who have laptops built by the Cambridge, MA-based One Laptop Per Child Foundation (OLPC)

Does anyone know how this will work, exactly? Will we need to connect to an online repository? Or will these eBooks come as SD cards - with each card having a different selection fo books so children have to share to get an entire library?

Yet my greatest question is if this content will also be available to those who Give One Get One'ed (G1G1) in 2007 and 2008. I would home that the 100,000+ XO laptop users in North America, the third largest deployment for OLPC, get the same access to content as everyone else. Especially since the Internet Archive and OLPC will need our support.

These Internet Archive books are not in PDF format, but have been scanned using optical character recognition software to transform images into digital text, and children will need experienced readers to correct typographical errors via Internet Archive's Wiki-like typo correction system.

Is OLPC Bhutan Worthy Without Internet Connectivity?

2009-10-23T14:09:41Z

Recently the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and OLPC donated 220 XO laptop computers to Bhutan for 20 community schools. These XO's will be part of a pilot program to see if the Bhutanese Department of Information and Technology should buy more. Yet Kuensel Online brings up an issue:

XO laptops going to Bhutan

[A] major aspect of the XO laptop that may be underutilised in Bhutan is that most of the community schools, which will receive the computers, lack internet access. Since all the computers have wireless internet capability as part of its goal to create access to the world's information for the children that use it, this major option will not be available for another two years, said Bhim Suberi.

Now lets ask the larger question: Is the XO laptop a complete learning experience without Internet connectivity? Back with the boys from Bhutan, we hear that the XO laptop works just fine without Internet access:

[S]tudents will still be able to create local networks and exchange their information with each other, said Sonam Dukda, which would still make the experience entertaining for the students using it.

While that is a great sound-bite, do you think it is accurate? I have three XO laptops now, and its fun to use Speak or Squeak, but from the chatter on OLPC News Forum, I'd say Browse is the most used Activity on the XO. Kinda like Safari on the iPhone, the web browser opens up an endless landscape of information that's beyond the capacity of the XO memory.

Without Internet access, the XO has its tricks, but is it an offline Library of Alexandria? And can Bhutan really understand the XO's promise without Internet access in their pilot schools?

Teotwawki Net: Distributed Discussion System You Control

2009-10-22T14:06:05Z

What if you didn't need the Internet or a telephone system to communicate electronically with your friends? Imagine you could independently share electronic information with friends through wireless devices without external hardware or software. Think of how excited people get about checking in with friends using Twitter and Facebook.

Now, with the right software and your current hardware, people could do those same kinds of activities in their local community--without any need for the Internet or the restrictions of Internet service providers. People could use their wireless devices for personal communications where there is no Internet or when there is no Internet, such as in a disaster situation, or when public networks are banned, such as in places like Iran. We believe that having independent control of our communications networks can be a valuable resource that opens new possibilities for communities.

What makes TEOTWAWKI Net relevant to OLPC?

The One Laptop per Child XO laptop has native mesh networking that inspires ideas for new applications that take advantage of independent wireless networking. One such idea was born during a meeting at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in upstate New York, when Professor Jeff Sonstein talked about how netbooks, like the XO with their zeroconf mesh network, could be used in disaster recovery situations.

Today, with TEOTWAWKI Net, you can have a discussion forum that is distributed across every machine or storage device using it, and each machine or device is 100% independent and available for reading and replying to discussion posts, even if it is totally isolated from any network. Whenever that machine or device comes into the range of other machines running TEOTWAWKI Net, its news articles (forum posts, if you like) will be synced up and exchanged with the machines or devices that it has contacted.

To expand the network of collaborators, TEOTWAWKI Net can be easily shared with new friends and devices. Such a portable, self-generating network may be needed because of disasters, both natural and man made, or just because you happen to be operating in a very remote area, or have no other choice.

I hope to see TEOTWAWKI Net developed for use as an alternative to Internet-based discussion groups and social sites for the simple reason that TEOTWAWKI Net is, by design, focused on the local area in which it is operating. (Although, long-haul links could be employed to connect different regions.) Conceivably, inter-networking could be accomplished with smart phones and other capable computing devices to dramatically enlarge the potential for free and independently connected communities.

How does TEOTWAWKI Net work?

TEOTWAWKI Net is an electronic, community networking system intended for deployment anywhere there is no permanent communications infrastructure, other than what people actually carry with them. It currently provides a distributed, de-centralized discussion group system, implementing a private version of Usenet, communicating over 802.11 ad-hoc Wi-Fi links (or physically with USB flash storage devices), and runs on XOs and most generic GNU/Linux systems that have standard wireless networking adapters. The system might be expanded in the future to incorporate other models of collaboration, such as with wikis and other forms of social networking.

(The way it works is very similar to the Information Without Borders project Sneakernet proposal. I do not use any of their code or implement their protocol, but on a high level, TEOTWAWKI Net employs a similar concepts, except that it uses Usenet posts instead of email messages, and it does not have connecting back out to the Internet as a specific goal.)

Each device running the system can store and forward traffic to all other such devices that can establish a wireless or physical USB device connection. All the message passing and traffic control occurs automatically without user intervention. A user need only install the software, and then they can read and post news in a forum on the system. Thereafter, as community members come into range of their running devices, theirs and others' messages will be distributed automatically. One device can fully distribute all messages that have reached it, and messages will propagate, if not already shared, through any device that is connected to another. Gradually, the messages flood out to all devices that have directly or indirectly shared a common connection.

To propagate the community's content through the flooding behavior and the concept of gossip, TEOTWAWKI Net runs a news server and a web server with a web-based news client, and, at the heart of the system, is some perl and shell scripting code that defines the behavior of the collaboration model. A personal wiki is included as an example of other useful web applications that could later be included in the collaboration system.

The system listens on a pre-determined 802.11 ad-hoc network with an ESSID of teotwawki on channel 11, or XOs can connect to each other on a mesh channel. It runs avahi-autoipd to get a link-local IPv4 address that avoids collisions with other machines, which might have the same address. Once that part is up, the system broadcasts its presence to the wireless (and other connected networks) every 5 seconds. A mapper and sync dispatcher daemon listens for these packets and uses them to create a map of all systems that are currently in range. It then uses that map to execute another script that syncs the news spool with those systems it sees in the map.

Timestamps are used to make sure we don't re-transmit anything that we have already sent, and the normal mechanisms inherent to Usenet servers cope with the typical problems that arise in this type of flooding communications system (such as, rejecting duplicate posts, etc.).

Independent of wired or wireless networking, the system watches for the mounting of USB storage devices that contain TEOTWAWKI Net news articles, and then synchronizes all connected device stores. This enables off-the-air and off-line private electronic communications and data sharing.

You can see a diagram showing how the various parts fit in at http://teotwawki.steubentech.com/doku.php/playground:playground

How you can use TEOTWAWKI Net on the XO?

If you would like to use TEOTWAWKI Net you can download binary builds for sugar and DebXO or the LiveCD. The builds on the website are currently still early demos of the software and should not be considered stable releases.

I am planning to do official releases with numbered versions soon. The best way to track development right now is by the anonymous CVS server and my TEOTWAWKI blog articles.

How can you help improve TEOTWAWKI Net?

I am looking for people that are interested in the idea of TEOTWAWKI Net and want to help in its development. I need help from programmers, document writers, and people who can do some real world tests. I also really want some help in making this system work in a more hostile environment. As it stands right now, it is very easy to attack.

I think that derivatives of TEOTWAWKI Net could eventually be used to make an even greater collaboration tool set for OLPC XO and Sugar Learning Platform deployments. Currently, while you can put a discussion group on the OLPC School Server or out on the Internet, once you leave the classroom and go out of range of the mesh network portal, you are on your own and disconnected.

TEOTWAWKI Net features a software system that is waiting to reconnect and automatically update your collaboration once you are back in contact with your friends.

William Schaub is a freelance, UNIX consultant operating out of Hornell, NY, and a member of the OLPC user's group at RIT.

Openmoko WikiReader: Portable Wikipedia in Your Pocket

2009-10-21T14:28:08Z

The openmoko group announced the WikiReader - a portable touchcreen device that is pre-loaded with wiki's. While the screen is very small and not very usable for typical computing tasks it does offer:

Capacitive touch screen interface
Tempered glass screen for durability
Simple 3 button design
Updatably by micro-sd card
Open platform (hackable)
Standard AAA batteries (x2)
Up to 90 hours of use per battery set
$99 retail price

The WikiReader is used entirely off-line, it does not have any type of radio (cellular, wifi, bluetooth, etc.) but it contains 3 million wikipedia articles built in. It is upgradeable using the micro-sd card and can last up to a year on one set of batteries (with approximately 15 minutes of use per day).

Users could bring their WikiReaders to the local school, library, nearest city, etc to be upgraded with more current information. The upgraded wiki's could contain traditional K12 educational content, textbooks, medical information, agricultural information, business and people directories that are specific to each locale.

Openmoko has been behind large open-source initiatives such as the openmoko/freerunner opensource wireless phone that hasn't had as much success as they had hoped, but the WikiReader is built upon the same type of openness and should encourage hacks by the community for added features. They say:

NGOs and governments in emerging countries are key to the core value of the WikiReader. We believe an uncomplicated device with long battery life and no strings attached could bring this vast repository of knowledge to many people around the world who otherwise could not access it.

I am Christopher Segot. I have been in the eLearning field for a while now, and I believe this has some serious promise, my daughter (12 years old now) gets assigned internet related homework on a regular basis and the school curriculum specifically tells them to look at wikipedia and wikianswers for help and information. Here's a video about the WikiReader:

The $99 retail price is today and not a projected price of newer devices (read xo-2). While it is not a laptop it could provide information to remote regions where it wasn't available before.

Perhaps with the help of the community or an organization perhaps the cost could be much lower if purchased in very large quantities or in a collaboration with the openmoko group to build a more advanced device that better meets the communities needs at a price that's affordable to developing nations.

I could certainly see an offline email/rss reader that can send/receive new messages when being updated (this of course would require new processes that would require reading from the old micro-sd card before updating it)

Previously Chris Segot wrote about the Teachermate Adoption in Chicago

What They Think They Think (I Think) on Education

2009-10-20T14:08:37Z

[sigh] There's nothing like bureaucratic bafflegab. Fortunately. Does this mean anything to you?

Some research indicates that countries are pursuing a wide range of strategies and goals to encourage the use of computers and information technology for instruction, suggesting that there might be much to learn in this area from international benchmarking.

Wagemaker, H. Highlights of Findings from Major International Study on Pedagogy and ICT Use in Schools. 2006.

The purpose of bafflegab is well-known: to cover up the fact that you have nothing to say, and don't know what you are talking about. Well, I don't speak this language all that well, mostly because I do have something to say, and I do have some idea of what it's about. But I can read it well enough, and tell you what it means in plain English.

My translation, mostly to words of one syllable, makes it clear that the essence of this statement is ignorance. "We hear that there is a lot of it going on (computers in schools around the world), and perhaps we should find out more about it." But in fact, they have done pitifully little, and most of them don't know what the questions are. Worse yet, after raising the issue, this report goes on to say precisely nothing about it. (It is worth noting that a large fraction of all government communication comes down to the same single sentence, with only the topic changed. From this sentence alone, it is impossible to tell whether the purpose is actually to find out something and to act on it, or to put off or prevent action.)

So here I am to tell you something about it. The information is there, if anybody really wanted to look for it.

The passage above is quoted in a report from The Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), "a nonpartisan, nationwide, nonprofit organization of public officials who head departments of elementary and secondary education in the states, the District of Columbia, the Department of Defense Education Activity, and five U.S. extra-state jurisdictions."

The report is Benchmarking for Success: Ensuring U.S. Students Receive a World-Class Education. It's almost complete rubbish. Warmed-over platitudes, with no substance.

I say almost, because it gives lip service to two important ideas. First,

At the same time, the U.S. ranked high in inequity, with the third largest gap in science scores between students from different socioeconomic groups.

The essence of our current problem. But it comes up against another problem: we are not ready to discuss it seriously. The remedy is obvious: put more resources into education for the poor and otherwise disadvantaged. That idea is barely on the table in our current political climate--maybe for next year. And that's a major improvement compared with the previous climate. The report itself makes no recommendations.

Second,

Benchmarking is the practice of being humble enough to admit that someone else has a better process

So far, so good.

and wise enough to learn how to match or even surpass them.

Lost it there. What good is pretending to be humble starting out if you show you don't mean it one second later? No, if you are actually humble and wise, you start a long way back, where you actually are, not with matching or surpassing. You can't assume that you will outdo everyone else, because generally you can't. Nobody can. Oh, sure, you might be able to be the best at something. Whatever you look at, somebody is best at it. But you can't get there just because you decide to. There are little matters of political will, talent, resources, support from others, long and hard work, and a bit of this, that, and the other besides.

Most of all there is the competition. All of those other countries are busy catching up with the US in other areas. The US isn't behind only in education. And even where the US has had a lead, that lead may be shrinking, and it may be shrinking specifically because of one or another of our strengths, as happened in the automobile industry. Try this:

If a machine can score computer-based writing assessments effectively, should we care how the machine does it? - Educational Testing Service

ETS is of course in the business of selling standardized testing services and materials. The US has long been a leader in standardized testing. But that means that we test only what we know how to standardize. What about everything else? What we know how to standardize in education is limited to what we thought we were teaching, and is a crude measure of how much of it the student has learned. What about the ability to learn something new, without being taught? This is the most valuable skill a student can have, but we neither teach it nor test it. We don't actually know what it is.

This sentence from ETS is in a much more sophisticated version of bafflegab. Instead of verbal obfuscation, it relies on misdirection of ideas, in particular on asking the wrong question and making it seem reasonable.

My answer to the ETS question is, first, that the assumption in the question is invalid, and necessarily invalid, and that the rest of the question is therefore irrelevant. (Short of Strong AI, that is, at which point we have other problems to deal with, because we may have just made ourselves irrelevant.) However, the answer to the second part is still a resounding, Yes, we should care.

This isn't the first time this error has appeared in the world. The Ming Dynasty Chinese government standardized the literary exams for its civil service in the form of the "Eight-Legged Essay", resulting in the most soul-crushing education system in the world for more than 500 years. These essays were required to have a tightly specified form in eight sections, for ease of grading. The structure of individual sentences was prescribed, and the number of sentences in each section.

Almost all of the rest of the world followed the later example of Prussia, which reorganized its public education system on factory automation lines in the 18th century. A large part of the project consisted of dumbing down each subject and limiting its scope as much as possible, and concentrating the minds of teachers and students on only what was in the textbooks, and only the pre-approved right answers to questions in any subject. To be sure, the Universities encouraged research among graduate students and faculty, but only after making sure that nobody would attempt to do research outside of his assigned subject area. (Women didn't enter the question at the time.)

There is no question in both cases that the resultant dumbing-down of education was intentional. Neither China nor Prussia wanted creativity or outstanding competence in their civil services. They wanted intelligence, but only highly domesticated intelligence that would follow orders without question, and a level of competence sufficient for doing what was expected, but no more. Creatives were shunted into the arts, or into specialties where they would not interfere with the running of government.

We have begun to understand, here and there in the world, how to help children learn how to learn, and some of us have begun to want to do it, and to think about how to break out of these government-imposed straitjackets. Seymour Papert raised this question more than 40 years ago, in his book Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas. He wasn't the only one, of course, and he wasn't even the first, but I single him out because much of the Sugar software for the OLPC XO and other computers is built on his work, and on 40 years of Alan Kay's Smalltalk, as well. But we clearly don't all have this idea, and it is equally clear that most people involved in education have not gotten out of the old models.

XO better than rote memorization

The truly astonishing thing about using XOs and Sugar is not the results on standardized tests (which are excellent in some cases that have been measured) but their transformative effects on society and on the very idea of education, particularly their ability to lead teachers to new models of education.

The change in Ethiopian trials from pure rote learning to discovery, and from treating questions as insults to deciding to put question time into lesson plans is the best documented. We have seen particularly good results for disabled students in the US. Bryan Berry has described a simple counting program that brought Nepalese children up several grade levels in arithmetic.

I raise these issues because I do want to teach children more than we have in the past, and allow them to learn as much as they want. To that end, I have been talking with politicians and educators about getting together on one-to-one computing research, development, and deployments. I'm getting a good response in places that I know are ahead of the curve, but I know that we will run into all the obstacles to education reform that have ever been, because they still exist in much the same forms, for precisely the same reasons. Large segments of the population are afraid of children learning how the world really works, and getting together to do something about it.

It might be different this time, because One Laptop Per Child with Free Software means that all of the children can have the same tools, and that we can integrate those tools into the curriculum for the first time, at less cost than printing and distributing paper textbooks. The fact that the information and tools are Free means that bureaucratic committees and regulations cannot block them out from the classrooms.

It will only be different in the way we hope if we make it so. So who would like to go talk with local politicians, school boards, PTAs, and the rest of the stakeholders? We can work out appropriate pitches for different audiences together, and we can create a national and global framework to make it happen.

Now, I know that the usual naysayers are out there. For them I have the same question as always. Would you rather curse the darkness, or teach children to make candles?

400,000 XO Laptops in Uruguay Cannot be Wrong

2009-10-19T14:15:49Z

Another quotable from the Reinventing the Classroom IADB seminar was "in a few years we will be wondering why we needed this kind of meetings", This was said, of course, by people who expect their solution for education will be the one everyone else will adopt...

What Happens When...

I actually have been reflecting a while already on possibly unexpected impact(s) of XOs delivered by Ceibal. Since us here at One Laptop Per Child News are also in a revisiting / refocusing season, let's also remark that something like what Ceibal has done has never happened before anywhere, thus there is, indeed, a marking point here.

Yes, most previous initiatives have usually reverted back to jungle, a Poisonwood Bible scenario, the usual result of ethnocentric and self-righteous efforts to fix other people's problems by pretending that deeper issues of disenfranchisement will go away, quietly, as progress moves in. However, be it ICT4D, plain development aid, whatever, attempts at transplanting paradigms have little chance of getting anywhere - they just don't take roots outside of Boston town café halls. Something about the Charles river water may just be missing...

Now, the Ceibal thing is quite different from trying in Cameroon or Thailand, and hauntingly so. For one thing, it is happening in the "Switzerland of the Americas", a place where there is already a cultural affinity to communicate and deal with conflict in post-modern ways. A place where roads, pre-existing levels of education and a lot of the infrastructure are pretty good, compared. And secret banking!. Implementation cost might seem lower than, say, Haiti, since so much of basic costs is already paid for.

For another, even while mimicking OLPC ways in the disregard for educometrics and preference for top-down policies, they have really worked hard to make it their project, with their own look and feel. They may not go as far as the Portuguese who think the Magalhao Intel Classmate is their own design, but close. Their security system is theirs, and to much deserved kudos the infrastructure and logistics are well-nigh impeccable, a lesson for the rest of us on how to deal with those specific areas.

Yet the clincher is the sheer number. Some private school may still make it a matter of pride that "they" use the Redmont legacy software, but for 97%+ of kids, 400.000 computers, in a country with 3 million people, that has to make an impact. At least a third of the families in the place have one of the "Ceibalitas" at home, daily.

Impact

OK, some of the doomsday scenarios did not happen. I will not revisit them here, no need to jinx things. Neither have many of the expectations. Of course, to be fair, it may be just Too Soon To Tell, either way.

When You See These Wonders, You Will Know The Time Is Close

Details, details we have very few of, way too few. "Evaluations" so far have been mostly of opinions. In a country where Egalitarian is close to be the State religion, Monitoring and Evaluation is not a priority. A big change is coming, in itself quite surprising, The Primary Education Council (agency that supervises all schools in Uruguay) might indeed do a country-wide evaluation by the end of October (originally scheduled for September).
All 2nd graders will be tested on-line, and somewhat reasonable providences are taken to deal with the widely known fact that not all students have XOs that work, and not all schools have connectivity.

See the May evaluation forms here

OK, you will ask me, where are the results of the evaluation of actual use of the XO in the classrooms that were done in May? I will have to answer that I have no idea. You would have thought that Brechner would show them in Washington, and he didn't, so I cannot help you.
That study was very simple and very forthright: check how many teachers in 3rd A and 6th A actually did put in their lesson plans/logs that they used XOs in class between April 27 and May 8. I guess we will never know.

Will these October results be made public? now, that would be a miracle, but considering Ceibal itself is a bit miraculous already, maybe we are on a roll, and we'll get to see how botijas (uy. kids) do.

So what!

Well, maybe solid evaluations are not needed, because the impact is all around. OK, let's try that one more time

That's a lot of computers, check.
Connectivity? mostly, check.
Content? somebody getting hired, volunteers paying more attention, check
Same video bits rehashed on each new infomercial, check

What we are unprepared/prepared/excited is for the disruptive something that might just happen, when pretty much every gifted kid in the country has access to this tool, no matter where they come from. Up to now it didn't matter your giftings, let's get your round shape in the (same, government issue one-size-fits-all) square hole as every one else.
Now, for the first time, those few, they have a chance- It almost covers up and doesn't seem to matter many of the rest are losing theirs (does it?). What will happen if 2 or 3 of those anklebiter-geeks just come together, and start doing Good Things... That will be something to see!

a sideline, will hiring this rather expensive consulting firm mess up the razor thin cost that we have been told Ceibal has?

Sugar Labs Oversight Board Election Results

2009-10-16T14:07:18Z

The results of the Sugar Labs Oversight Board election which took place these past 2 weeks were announced last night. The 2009-2010-2011 Oversight Board will consist of:

One of the SLOBs

Walter Bender (Sugar Labs founder)
Tomeu Vizoso (Sugar Labs developer)
Mel Chua (Red Hat)
Bernie Innocenti (Sugar Labs infrastructure coordinator)
Chris Ball (One Laptop per Child)
Sean Daly (Sugar Labs marketing coordinator)
Adam Holt (One Laptop per Child)

In case this is the first time you are hearing about the Sugar Labs Oversight Board (or SLOB as most people call it) and wondering what it does here's its mission statement:

The mission of the oversight board is to ensure that the Sugar Labs community has clarity of purpose and the means to collaborate in achieving its goals.

If you want to learn more about the people on the SLOB I would recommend taking a look at the original list of candidates where some of them have posted their motivation for running in the elections and what areas of activities they want to focus on.

Congratulations to the winners, I'm looking forward to your ideas, plans and efforts, in particular from the newcomers.

XO Laptop from OLPC on display at Mercy Corps Global Retreat - Side view [Flickr]

2009-11-02T11:59:03-08:00

Wayan Vota posted a photo:

XO Laptop from OLPC on display at Mercy Corps Global Retreat- Front View [Flickr]

2009-11-02T11:58:58-08:00

Wayan Vota posted a photo:

XO Laptop from OLPC on display at Mercy Corps Global Retreat - detail [Flickr]

2009-11-02T11:58:54-08:00

Wayan Vota posted a photo:

Ian (@iso100) photo of Tweeting on XO running Ubuntu 8.1 and Chrome in direct sunlight. [Flickr]

2009-10-25T16:37:05-07:00

Wayan Vota posted a photo:

See twitter.com/iso100/status/5155628708 for more details

mode screen" backlight off xo-1