One Laptop Per Child News

Saturday: OLPC San Francisco Bay Area Summit 2009

2009-11-20T21:30:05Z

Come out this Saturday to OLPC events in New Your City, or San Francisco. Here in the Bay Area, we'll have the OLPC San Francisco Bay Area Summit 2009 - a OLPC-SF community event designed to primarily foster collaboration amongst deployment teams in the SF Bay Area. We also hope that the event will help in improving the visibility of OLPC and Sugar to a wider group around this area.

The event is a "Birds of a Feather" type event but largely run as an unconference. Open to everyone. Drop by, and join a session. Bring a friend. Bring your family too!

OLPC San Francisco Bay Area Summit 2009
Saturday, Nov 21, 2009 (whole day)
SFSU Downtown Campus at #553,
835 Market Street, San Francisco

Sessions include:

Stacey Kertsman. (eduWeavers) "XO for teaching and learning."
Education track. Room 553
Sameer Verma. (SFSU) "Moodle and the School Server". Technology track. Room 554
Humaira Mahi (SFSU) and Carol Ruth Silver (MTSA). "Women, health literacy and empowerment". Outreach track. Room 553
Bruce Baikie. (Green Wifi) "Senegal - Deployment lessons and moving forward in 2010" Education Track. Room 554
Ed Cherlin (Earth Treasury). "Teaching Python in schools". Technology track. Room 597
Alex Kleider (Madagascar). "School Server installation and configuration". Technology track. Room 553
Christian Nobs and Ted Kuster (Starr King). "Kid Camp: Discover by doing - Hands-on experience with XO activities for children". Outreach track. Room 554
Ed Cherlin (Earth Treasury) and Sameer Verma (SFSU). "Sugar on the XO, Sugar on a Stick, Sugar in the Lab, Sugar Everywhere!". Technology Track. Room 597
Joachim Pedersen. (OLPC-SF Repair Center), June Kleider (Madagascar) and Anil Daswani (Support Gang). "Repairing and supporting XOs in the field." Technology track. Room 553

A Laptop in Every American Backpack

2009-11-20T15:03:40Z

Editors Note: This article by Alec Ross and Simon Rosenberg, is one of NDN's Series of Modest Proposals to Build 21st Century Skills first published in May 2007. Its introduction is republished here to remind us of an American need for one laptop per child. Read the full article here.

A single global communications network, composed of Internet, mobile, SMS, cable and satellite technology, is rapidly tying the world's people together as never before. The core premise of this paper is that the emergence of this network is one of the seminal events of the early 21st century.

Increasingly, the world's commerce, finance, communications, media and information are flowing through this network. Half of the world's 6 billion people are now connected to this network, many through powerful and inexpensive mobile phones. Each year more of the world's people become connected to the network, its bandwidth increases, and its use becomes more integrated into all that we do.

USA school kids exploring IT

Connectivity to this network, and the ability to master it once on, has become an essential part of life in the 21st century, and a key to opportunity, success and fulfillment for the people of the world. We believe it should be a core priority of the United States to ensure that all the world's people have access to this global network and have the tools to use it for their own life success.

There is no way any longer to imagine free societies without the freedom of commerce, expression, and community, which this global network can bring. Bringing this network to all, keeping it free and open and helping people master its use must be one of the highest priorities of those in power in the coming years.

This paper offers thoughts on one piece of this commitment - how we best bring the power of this network to America's schoolchildren. Achieving the American Dream in this century increasingly requires fluency in the ways of this network and its tools - how to acquire information and do research, how to construct reports and present ideas using these new tools, how to type and even edit video.

We believe we need a profound and urgent national commitment to give this powerful new 21st knowledge, essential for success in this century, to all American school children. We believe that America needs to put a laptop in every backpack of every child. We need to commit to a date and grade certain: we suggest 2010 for every sixth grader.

These laptops need to be wirelessly connected to the Internet, and children need to be able to take them home. Local school districts should choose how best to do this, but there needs to be federal funding and simple, federal standards. Funds and strategies for how training our teachers to lead this transformation need to be part this commitment.

We believe it will cost at first $2 billion a year to provide every 6th grader a laptop, about what we spend in Iraq every week. Hardware costs continue to plummet each year, and the idea of a $200 laptop or classmate PC is coming ever closer to reality. It is not a question of resources, but of vision and political will. Libya has just announced a national commitment to give all its school children a laptop. If Libya can do it, so can America.

Giving our children the tools for computer literacy is the 21st century equivalent to teaching them how to read. In the "flat world" described by Tom Friedman, there can be no life success without it this knowledge, no real chance to seize the American Dream, no secure and prosperous road to the middle class. We believe giving every school child a laptop must be an essential part of any strategy to ensure broad-based prosperity for America in the 21st century.

So, let's look at what it might require to put a laptop in every backpack.

SugarLabs: Sugar-sweet or Sugar-coated?

2009-11-19T15:30:18Z

SugarLabs "evolved" from OLPC with a wider goal to provide an instructionist GIU and computer learning environment for elementary school age kids all over the world.

It's engineering goals call for a (Linux) OS and hardware-agnostic platform, with transparent, free and readily accessible and modifiable code that can be also easily shared among users. The normal user has absolute control over the Sugar part but the core system remains secure from malicious activities.

One aspect that was explicitly stated in the OLPC project but is not even suggested by SugarLabs is environmental concern and energy (code) efficiency. The other aspect that was not addressed either by OLPC or SugarLabs is if free and accessible implies "as long as you do it a certain way".

With SugarLabs maturing and Sugar approaching its 1.0 version I think it worths taking a look at some of these trying to minimize prerequisites and established practices, and see a) if all these are feasible b) if the implemented approaches can achieve them and c) at what cost.

I'm obviously not offering an expert opinion, but rather trying to bring up some issues for (re)consideration. Experience shows that evolutions of goals and ideas tend to curry a lot of the previous practices and components that can actually trouble your progress down the road. I'm not necessarily suggesting to redesign Sugar, but rather (in Linux terms) to (re)define the tree and do an extensive garbage collection.

One GUI?

Although the age-target group of Sugar is not rigidly defined and is ranging for 6 to 16, let's stay with the Uruguay paradigm and say elementary school kids. So the first obvious question is if ANY GUI can be equally appropriate for a 1st grader that can not read and hardly have the motor skills to use a computer and a 6th grader that may blind-type and use keyboard shortcuts because the mouse slows him/her down?

The second obvious question is, given the diversity in kids development/aptitude, if for any given age/class there is a minimal common ability denominator to be based on? If yes, is this "common denominator" sufficient to build a GUI around and is this "common denominator"-based GUI will actually be any good to anyone?

And the third obvious question is how any given GUI can be cross-caltural without imposing a "cultural imperialism"?

Linux is trying to address these issues in the adult world by providing a multiple of highly configurable desktop environments. OLPC on the other hand provides both Sugar and GNOME trying to satisfy both young and older kids.

Sugar must become more configurable too. From plane icons and no text to two-level deep drop-down menus and everything in between if possible. Maybe in a fashion similar to the frame delay selection or the universal access mode. This would allow different user abilities and preferences to be implemented/accommodated.

It is not reasonable to believe that "one size can fits all" and if you do also to believe that this is going to be looking good on anyone too! But how do you decide which one is the best for any given age/ability group? There is only one way. Test with the given target groups!

Also decide what is you "user satisfaction goal" for your given effort/abilities. Going for 100% may end up in a monster structure. I believe that 51% is a good initial goal. Anything above that should be considered on a cost/benefit base.
Talking about garbage collection, may want to reconsider some OLPC XO-1 relics (eg low specs) like the luck of color. Children above all, should not live in a "grey world".

However, for all these to be successfully implemented I guess that the GUI itself should be build in a modular and easily configurable way. Similar to the activities. Components should be added and removed without affecting the remaining parts. I do not know how feasible this may be but modularity and customization are going hand to hand.

The additional benefit of modularity is that it may be adapted to a wider hardware abilities and satisfy user choices like responsiveness over features. I can appreciate that this may generate a havoc with activity building, but to the extend that clear APIs and instructions are there, you can only hope that developers will follow suit. The alternative is "one size-fits-all" and even worse, every change breaks compatibility with pervious builds/apps and introduces a cycle of debugging/rebuilding.

Only (one) Interpreted Language(s)?

From the beginning OLPC and later SugarLabs made one fundamental choice. Sugar code should be _readily_ available to and modifiable by the user. This was translated to "try to do everything in python" that was taken a step further, I guess also because of the XO-1 space limitations, to "do not use/keep python compiled binaries" (the .pyc files).

Python may be great but the specific implementation introduced a major burden in lowspecs hardware, increased energy consumption (CPU cycles), wasted time (multiply few minutes of waiting per day with millions of users) and frustration (patient is not a characteristic of young age).

The argument is that this option increases programming literacy and freedom. However, if nothing else Sugar already has plenty of programming applications including Python. If the need for seeing and modifying application code arises (not the most common need for 7-12 year old) you can have source code provided with all apps.

The issue of limited storage space could be taken care by the School server or the internet that could keep and distribute source code files on demand. Will be some delay and the (non functioning) "view source" button will not work, but comparing to the overall delays introduced by the current scheme the choice should be clear.

But python has run-time code evaluation, someone will argue. True, but this is a convenience for the developers mostly (if not only). Them doing their work faster/easier and everybody else paying the bloat/delay price can hardly be an "educational" justification. But python looks like real spoken language. True, but other languages do it and some without the bloat. What about gnome's newer addition, Genie? Python-like syntax, no VM under, no 10 layers to get to processor, use of existing libraries, C-like performance. Should it be "banned" from Sugar?

The multiple programming language/binary packages approach on the other hand will:

allow the most appropriate language to be implemented for any given task,
attract/utilize developers with different programming skills,
allow easier use/adaptation of existing apps without reinventing the wheel for everything
increase program execution speed and efficiency
allow exposure/teaching of multiple programming language instead of just one
teach a mainstream programing skill eg compile/debug apps from source
improve compatibility/distribution with other linux distros.

I certainly do not suggest to rewrite Sugar from scratch. It could start with always keeping and using the .pyc files (as it is done for some core elements and indeed many activities lately in Sugar 0.84+) and open the door to other language and the binary/source code scheme. Allow the use of non-python languages (maybe with a python wrapper if needed) for now and encourage more energy efficient languages for the future.

I can imagine that this may create other technical/operating problems but this approach is something that has been used and solved in most of the standard linux distributions (including the Fedora core mostly used by SugarLabs) that utilize packages written in all sort of languages.

Mavrothal as this question first on OLPC News Forum

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OLPC Germany Meeting this Sunday!

2009-11-19T08:31:00Z

For those in Europe, its time for a trip to Hamburg this weekend! Why? Because OLPC Deutschland e.V. will be having its annual meeting to decide how to spend all its ~~loot~~ donations over the next year.

But better than that, Bert Freudenberg will be showing off an XO-1.5 - the first in Germany! And with Rita, talking about their summer visit to Squeakfest Brazil. Bert & Rita will also share first-hand field reports from OLPC deployments in South America.

So here's your chance to geek out this weekend:

OLPC Deutschland Annual Meeting
Sunday, November 22
Sebastian Umlauft's home
Pepermölenbek 4, 22767
St. Pauli/Fischmarkt
Hamburg, Germany
(map)

If you're going, be sure to sign up on the Mitgliederversammlung 2009 in Hamburg wiki page.

Does Afghanistan Need One Laptop Per Child?

2009-11-18T15:40:01Z

Some friends of mine from college asked the following question about OLPC Afghanistan:

Greg Mortensen built 200 schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan for less than the cost of one cruise missile. In doing so, he has done vastly more to end Islamic fundamentalism than the entire US effort in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Is it enough, C.?

No, it isn't enough. Afghanistan needs its own army and police built up, plus a civil service and infrastructure: roads, schools, clinics, electricity, phones, Internet, microfinance. But if you do all of that, and don't build and supply schools, it all falls apart. The Taliban demonstrate this fact themselves by destroying every school they can get to, other than their own boys-only madrassas, and
shooting teachers.

Empowering girls' education

As Earth Treasury, I'm working with OLPC Afghanistan on how we can approach these needs, specifically on education (which includes localization to Dari and Pashto to begin with), electricity, Internet, and microfinance.

The predicted price for the OLPC XO-2 next year is $75. That's muchless than printed textbooks. It is critical for us to write new, Free
textbooks and make them available for translation everywhere.

California's Gubernator has launched such a plan for the state, and I am talking with legislators about how we can extend that plan with a computer for every student out of the savings on printing, storage, distribution, etc.

Should we all be building schools there? C.

I don't mind which part you build, as long as you build something. Or you can go on eBay or Overstock.com and buy an Afghan carpet direct from the weaver, if you like. Some of the 65% or so that the weaver gets will go to food, shelter, clothing for the weaver's family, and some might go for education, or health, or more looms and wool. They know better than we do what they need most urgently.

Contrary to the American experience, you don't need a computer to get into e-commerce in Afghanistan. You may need to know someone who knows someone who has a computer, and you certainly have to be able to get your goods to Kabul. But the Taliban destroyed the Afghan economy so thoroughly during their reign than in the summer after the war, in 2002, the government certified Overstock.com as its largest employer. It is of course much bigger since then, but at the same time there has been extremely rapid growth in mobile phones and other areas of the economy. No. 2 back then was a brick factory with 400 wage workers.

Or you can just give me your political contacts and any likely sources of funding, and I'll do it.

Keep up with OLPC Afghanistan - subscribe to OLPC News via RSS Feed, Email or Twitter .

OLPC News Meetup in Washington DC - This Thursday!

2009-11-17T16:50:56Z

Proper OLPC News meetup style

With the OLPC Learning Club DC going to NYC for the Community Summit, its time for us to have an adult-centric XO user group meetup in Washington DC.

OLPC News DC Meetup
Thursday, November 19, 6:30pm
Looking Glass Lounge
3634 Georgia Ave NW
One block from the Georgia Avenue-Petworth Metro
[ Map ]

Mike Lee and I will be there for sure. We'll have an Xtra Ordinary OS XO's and be full tilt on OLPC's recent announcements about ebooks and XO-3 laptops

Amping Up OLPC in NYC: Community Summit Nov 21

2009-11-17T14:08:26Z

Its time for a One Laptop Per Child & Sugar Labs Community Summit in New York City. Key community members from OLPC, Sugar Labs, the OLPC Learning Club are converging in the Big Apple to re-catalyze the NYC-area community and touch off regular meetings again. Time, location and agenda details:

Saturday November 21; 1 - 4PM
The Church of St Mary the Virgin
3rd Floor Meeting Room, Mission House
133 West 46th Street (between 6th and 7th Avenues)
[ Google Map, Church web site ]

The formal presentation will include highlights of OLPC and Sugar Labs, like:

OLPC's brand new XO 1.5 B2 Laptop
Summary account of the 1 Million XO Laptops now shipped around the world
Previews of upcoming Sugar Learning software
Some directly personal explanations of our movement's strongly maturing "volunteer ladder".
Come see some actual books written by our Community!
Participate and strategize around OLPC and Sugar's unheralded successes
Local Projects, and long-term forward path.

Please join us and spread the word if you're interested in impacting education worldwide. More information about the summit can be found on the wiki page. There is also a collection of promotional graphics, Meetup event listing and email list. So you have no excuse not to be there.

Good News from OLPC Sur is Complaints (Yeeha!)

2009-11-16T15:14:44Z

A few months back I was visiting a classroom in Round Rock where they were had been using the Teachermates for already a few months. For the rest of you, the Teachermates are these tiniest of learning computers that, at that time, I wasn't convinced about.

After watching the kids go through their "centers", two of those involving Teachermates, it was quite interesting to see these First graders pick up their units, activate them, and in all appearance be using them intently.

Sometimes things didn't seem to work right away, and the respective kid would fill up a sticky note and attach it to a specific place in the whiteboard. Two parent-helpers were hovering around, working the 6 or so different "centers" and helping kids - it was noticeable some needed that help more than others, most seemed to be doing fine on their own.

Then we had a chance to talk with the teacher about her experience so far using these one-to-one platforms. Open Learning Exchange (OLE) had been at the time considering the Teachermates with much interest. I won't bore you with further details, just remark that I came back convinced of the Teachermates as a great platform for ages younger than 9, better than the XO, and very intrigued about one particular remark.

The Teachermates, apparently just like any computer, sometimes just don't work, and the standard approach after trying some basic troubleshooting is to reflash them, an operation that takes, including preparation, about half an hour.

Turns out this teacher had to reflash two units so far, in about 3 months, and that appeared to be her biggest complain, she would want this to be more stable. It seemed to bother her enough that she was quite specific.

A very simple principle: you don't complain about what you don't use.

Now, maybe half an hour to reflash, but probably those units were out of commission for a couple days already, maybe more, before she decided to do the no-return measure. That meant several days that a couple kids had no access to this learning tool. A learning tool, that as I saw by myself, was used every single day by every single kid. Thus the thorn.

Meanwhile, XOs had been around in actual deployments for well over a year. Oh yes, there were complaints, but those were mostly by geeks or wannabees that couldn't run some legacy buggy software. If you fine tuned and did your best, you could hear a teensy sound of discomfort in Sur, the email list Greg Smith and I started in April 2008 to help connect Latin American teachers to the rest of the community, but nothing as clear and specific as this teacher was saying.

Of course you could blame it on American softness, us Sudacas (a probably political incorrect term you may not qualify to use unless you're one of us) are a tough bunch, maybe those Perú and Uruguay teachers were just doing great things without nary a complaint. Which could have a bit of truth, when we are used in some places to buy our own chalk if we expect to use the blackboard.

Or you could assume the XO - Sugar thing was problem free. Yeah, dream on.

Or, maybe, you could suspect that there was little need to complain, when the reports of XO use that was trickling up said little of classroom use, and thus having one, two or many units unavailable for long periods really made not that much difference that the teacher needed to mention.

But now we have complaints! Bring in the bubbly!

Oh man, just look at Sur now! It's a quiet day there when someone isn't trying to figure out some bug or issue, asking for help or suggestions.

If I just revelled on that I would give too much fodder to those who see me as a "half-empty cup" kind of guy. Let me celebrate in passing also the fact that for every such request there's half a dozen or more offerings of activity ideas, curricular content, potential concepts and general working-together-for-a-common-goal that a good list is all about.

Now, I did not start with those "affirming contributions" as my measure for success, for they are meaningless in themselves, even though beloved by denialist administrators. Yes, you could do this and that! But there's no proof you are doing any of it. Now, if people are complaining that something doesn't work, that means, boy oh boy oh boy, that they are actually trying things out, some of those teachers actually developing pretty complex stuff, the kind of that gets them invited to international meetings and such.

It's an exciting time at Sur.

Do We Really Need ICT in Education Evaluations?

2009-11-13T12:10:37Z

Back when One Laptop Per Child started, they made an interesting point around evaluations of computer usage in schools. Their core belief was that all evaluations were flawed because we don't have the right tools to assess the impact of ICT in education, and therefore talking about testing the efficacy of 1:1 computing was wasted effort.

Nicholas Negroponte holding electricity

I've heard this refrain repeated often since then, and not just by those promoting technology in schools. Its a equal thought from those that feel geek lust is clouding our judgment and we should focus on teachers, not technology. Its also promoted by those that point out changes to educational methodologies have often happened by force of will, not empirical results.

Now, Nicholas Negroponte is putting forth the idea that one computer per child is like electricity - such an accepted benefit for society that we've moved on from discussing its impact to just looking for the right models to fund it.

While we may have differencing opinions on OLPC or its benefits, the basic questioning of ICT4E evaluations is compelling. Starting with the simple question of "Do we need assessments?", the November Educational Technology Debate is Assessing ICT4E Evaluations, and we've already started with two compelling positions:

ICT in Education Assessments are Biased and Inaccurate
Would accurate ICT4E assessment be great? Definitely. The more we know about education and teaching, the better we can educate. However, the most remarkable thing about any ICT4E assessments to decide on the introduction of ICT in education would be their uniqueness in history. One reason such assessments are so scarce is that there are few (if any) historical examples of assessments of any kind done before the introduction of an educational reform. Even less examples where the outcomes of the assessments really mattered in decision making. Read more....

ICT4E Assessments Help Avoid Wasteful Tragedy
ICTs can be powerful, essential tools for learning: understanding, interpreting and communicating about the real world OR they can be black holes into which we pour our money, intelligence and time, getting very little in return. Still, yes we do need to assess ICT4E initiatives more particularly when we are working in environments with scarce resources as in the developing world where investment in ICT can constitute what Unwin (2004) describes as a 'wasteful tragedy' if it is not managed and utilized properly. Read more....

If you have an opinion on either position - and I bet you have many - please click on through to the Assessing ICT4E Evaluations debate and join in the conversation.

Sugar's Impact on History: The Age of Heroes

2009-11-12T14:56:26Z

Whenever we get around to writing a World History textbook (or the individual books for particular countries) for Sugar, we have to find more than Ambrose Bierce did.

HISTORY, n. An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.

The "unimportant" events brought about by knavish rulers particularly include war, pillage, and oppression (which is quite important to the victims, of course), as opposed to advances in the arts and sciences, religion, and the general welfare. The conquest and rule of one people by another, as described in several books of the Bible, the Iliad, and other early sources, appears to go back to Neolithic times.

The scale and organization of such operations requires the support of agriculture. Racism appears to go back much further, if we can judge by the historically documented practice of calling one's own tribe People (for example, "Bantu", plural of "mtu" person), and everyone else by pejoratives such as "Barbarian" (Greek onomatopoeia for "person who cannot really speak; babbler", who just says buh-buh-buh).

Age of Empires

On a larger scale, kingdoms and empires with their even larger-scale wars, pillage, and oppression go back as far as we can trace in recorded history, and undoubtedly well before that. Akkad, Egypt, Persia, India, China, empires in Africa and South America...coming down to Greece, Macedonia (Alexander), Rome, Parthia, Attila, Arab Muslim empires, Genghis Khan, Turkey, and the European global empires in the Age of Sail and the Industrial Age. Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, France, England, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia/Soviet Union, Japan. But Spanish control of almost all of its colonies fell apart in the 19th century, and almost all of the rest unraveled in the aftermath of World Wars I and II, culminating with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The ills of empire did not go away with the dissolving of imperial regimes. Land ownership and corporate control of resources remain major problems. Various forms of Neo-colonialism have followed, along with corruption, civil wars, diseases, and natural disasters that the former colonies could not or would not cope with. The current form of undue influence goes by the name of Globalization, in which governments, corporations, political parties, and public commentators pretend that a market open to corporations but not people is a Free Market.

In many respects the 20th century before this collapse was the worst of the Imperial period, due to the technologies of war and of centralized mass media, unchecked by effective freedom of speech and press.

We had the tyranny of the Belgian Congo, when Mark Twain called King Leopold of Belgium the most hated man in the world. But Leopold is almost forgotten today, eclipsed by Kaiser Wilhelm II, Lenin, Stalin, Ceausescu, Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Togo, Mao, Ho, Pol Pot, Milosevic, Castro, the Kims in North Korea and the Colonels in Burma, and an assortment of "tin pot" dictators, warlords, and theocrats in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. And, according to some, the Bush/Cheney Administration.

One major reason for the collapse of the smaller tyrannies, and the collapses of a number of civil wars and terrorist operations since 1989 was the end of the Cold War. The defunct Soviet Union couldn't pay its supposedly anti-capitalist tyrants, and the US no longer felt the need to support its supposedly anti-communist tyrants. There are arguments made about this, but since it has nothing to do with the larger empires, I don't want to get into it here. Certainly we have not seen the last of the South American coups, and a variety of other disasters.

The Role of ICT

I attribute much of the collapse of empire to improvements in Information and Communications Technology (ICT). Some empires, such as Turkey in World War I, the "Sick Man" of Europe, were also decrepit. There were major social changes worldwide after the Axis powers were defeated in World War II. Economics comes into it. Transportation technology and wider trade have important effects. Asymmetric warfare is a factor in several former colonies in the Middle East, Southeast Asia and North Africa. But I claim that it was the breakdown of central control of information by governments, and the growth of international information systems, that were the most important factors.

Governments have attempted to control information in every age, and some are still able to do it. There was not so much information to control before the printing press, which enabled the Protestant Reformation (Luther Bible and all that followed), the Scientific Revolution (books by Galileo and many others, scientific journals, and so on), and assorted political uprisings in Europe (the Eighty Years War between the Netherlands and its previous Spanish rulers over trade and religion, and many others since) and later the Americas.

If you know where to look, you can find that historians and others have documented the importance of printing and of later ICT, including the telegraph, telephone, facsimile, computing, mobile phone, and the Internet. In various ways in various times and places each has advanced formal and informal civil society institutions and thus governance, notably in campaigns against slavery and in favor of expanding human rights.

The Committees of Correspondence in the American Revolution are a well-known example. Fax machines and personal computers are credited with a major role in preserving the Yeltsin administration in the USSR from the 1991 coup attempt, and we have all seen the effects of Internet access for uploading videos to Youtube and elsewhere since the election in Iran.

Sugar's Impact

Thus I believe that one of the most important impacts of XO computers, Sugar software, and all that will follow is going to be a massive acceleration of these trends. Children will first be able to access existing information and each other, in particular to learn languages. Then, as they get older, they will create more and ever more information, make a great number and variety of informal connections, and start up formal organizations for all sorts of purposes.

One of the starting points for this process is that children in Uruguay can blog about their school experiences. I would suggest the creation of a social networking site specifically for millions, and eventually hundreds of millions, of such children, and I am talking to Free Software companies about how such a system could be created.

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Re-Starting Pacific Northwest OLPC User Groups

2009-11-11T14:45:43Z

My neighbors and friends on Bainbridge Island remember my active campaigning in December 2007 to get as many people as possible to order a One Laptop Per Child device for their children. Now it's being started up again at Amazon.com but so far you can only buy them for other children in poor countries - not yet for our own children.

I hope this changes, but whatever happens am curious to see if folks in the Pacific Northwest are interested in connecting around the topic of OLPC. Is this something we could work together on here at Kabissa? Ping me if you have an XO and want to work together.

This week I also got an email from the current stewards of the Seattle XO group, also posted to their blog.. the first post there since November 2008. They are looking for new stewards:

DC user group geeking out

Friends:
It's been many months since we communicated. We are writing now to see if anyone is interested in taking over the domains for the Seattle XO User Group along with the tools we've created to manage the group. They are coming up for renewal in the next month or so. We'd be happy to turn them over to someone else along with the membership list, such as it is, if someone would like to take this on.

It is a sweet little laptop, but we don't have the time or inclination to keep the domains registered.

Thanks,
Chris, Wayne, Tim

I realized a few things that have been going through my mind that I should probably share in connection with this post

So what can we do together? There are many people on Bainbridge Island and in the Pacific Northwest who have acquired OLPC laptops for their children. In strength is numbers, and a heck of alot more fun too.

Given the nature of the laptops, they are alot more fun to learn about and play with in a community than in isolation. We could organize regular face to face play sessions.
We could set up a safe closed network through the Internet so that our kids can do collaborative activities together.
As a community, we could help each other with upgrades, tech support, hardware issues, tips and tricks etc.
We could work with our local schools to integrate OLPC activities into the computing curriculum
We could connect schools in our community with schools in Africa or elsewhere in the gobal south (Ometepe?) to do a project like this one I read about recently in which Canadian children helped a school in Kenya get connected with OLPC laptops, solar panels and the Internet: "Twinning Canadian and Kenyan Schools with Solar Power"

Tobias Eigen originally published One Laptop Per Child program starts again this fall on Kabissa - Space for Change in Africa.

Conversation and Community in One Laptop Per Child

2009-11-10T14:53:07Z

One Laptop Per Child has helped another person improve a career. Anne Gentle has used her experience in Book Sprints for OLPC to create Conversation and Community: The Social Web of Documentation.

It features last August's pioneering OLPC/Sugar Austin book sprint to create Sugar and XO manuals, that we covered here:
OLPC / Sugar - Book Sprint, part I: Preparations
OLPC / Sugar - Book Sprint, Part II: Action
The printed OLPC Laptop and Sugar manuals have arrived!

And as Web Worker Daily says, the book has lessons for all web workers, whether they are technical writers or not:

The book's coverage of wikis built upon the author's real-life experience with the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Project and working as a senior technical writer inside a major technology corporation. This is a highlight of the book, because she nails down the challenges of using social media - and wikis in particular - for writers and other content creators through real-life experience, versus the academic pontification that sometimes weighs down technical writing books. She also makes smart and appropriate usage of examples, focusing on well-known wikis.

Anne also makes a key point: planning and management of wiki's is what makes them a success (or failure), not the technology used, as anyone who uses the OLPC Wiki can attest. While there are some good pages in the OLPC Wiki, finding them, and trusting their content is an ongoing issue.

Over 1.1 Million Sugar Activities in the Wild!

2009-11-09T14:42:38Z

In the New York Times article Nonprofit Laptops: A Dream Not Yet Over, we are teased with the suggestion that next month we'll have the OLPC 1.5 in production, with double the speed and four times more memory than the XO-1.

Before we get geek lust for OLPC hardware, I'd like to congratulate Sugar Labs on its software - the ever demure Walter Bender let it slip this week that his team has passed a very important psychological milestone:

1. I had been meaning to mention that already several weeks ago we exceeded one-million downloads from activities.sugarlabs.org. We are now over 1.1 million.

While you can't assume one Activity per child, this statistic shows that the 1 million XO laptops in the hands of children worldwide are being updated with the latest code - those 1.1 million downloads can't be from G1G1 donors alone. But it does make me ask a few questions:

From which countries are the most downloads coming from? Is Uruguay leading in yet another level of XO laptop usage? Or could Rwanda or Peru actually be beyond even the USA in Sugar activities?
What is the most popular Activity overall? Most popular Activity standard with XO (denoting updates)? Most popular optional Activity (showing exploration)?
What's the download numbers for Sugar on a Stick? Could SoaS + Sugar on XO laptops be 2 million people "learning learning"?

Regardless of the answers - congrats again to Sugar Labs and their increasingly popular Sugar Learning Platform.

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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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

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