One Laptop Per Child News

The second annual OLE General Assembly to be held on 11-15 October in Kigali, Rwanda, will explore what is known, what needs to be known and how we can know about scalable approaches to achieving Quality Universal Basic Education with marginalized children around the world.

What Works?: 2010 OLE General Assembly
Exploring Scalable Approaches to Quality Universal Basic Education with Marginalized Children
Kigali, Rwanda, 11-15 October 2010
Register to attend/

Why?

While there are literally thousands of basic education initiatives underway in all parts of the world, very few of them are based on evidence of their effectiveness. Most of these initativies are faith-based: They appear to be worthwhile and they help their providers feel good. Most such programs, however, have not demonstrated that they are effective or that they can be scaled beyond a few limited silos of presumed excellence.

Because of the urgency of achieving quality basic education systems that scale to all children, not just the priviledged few in a region or country, it is essential that we move quickly to evidence-based practices that scale. Since no one approach will fit the learning needs of all children, we need to begin developing a more differentiated matrix of evidence-based solutions that are cost/effective for different groups of children. And, because the costs of most approaches to quality education are substantial, it is essential for us to examine the return on these investments compared with other approaches for achieving the same goals.

Finally, we must address the challenging question of how to measure quality. Things that are important are not easy to measure and things that are easy to measure often are not especially important. Models and examples of valid and reliable assessments of educational quality, particularly among marginalized children in poverty settings, present major challenges for practitioners and policy-makers.

In light of the above considerations, the theme of the 20 2010 General Assembly of the Open Learning Exchange is "What Works? Exploring Scalable Approaches to Quality Universal Basic Education". The Assembly will address these three critically important issues:

1. What do we already know about scaling quality education with marginalized children?
2. What are we learning from studies and research already underway that promise to increase our understanding of what works well for learning.
3. What more do we need to know about cost/effective ways to scale quality education with all marginalized children and how will we learn these things?

What will happen?

The What Works? Assembly will be a purposeful, action-oriented experience, as distinct from a lot of one-to-many "seat time" sessions. Participants will have an opportunity not only to listen but to actively engage with practitioners and policy makers concerning specific topics directly relevant to their missions.

Field trips to some of the educational initiatives underway in Rwanda will complement the workshop framework of the conference. A preliminary agenda can be found below. We are inviting President Kagami to open the conference and expect senior members of the Rwandan government as well as key representatives of international organizations to participate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From what I'm hearing Monday's talk at the World Bank about the status quo of OLPC in South America is attracting a lot of interesting people ranging from OLPC employees to long-term olpc community members and people working on related projects for various NGOs and other organizations such as Inter-American Development Bank. And it's not too late to RSVP if you want to attend in person:

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

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

1:1 Computing costs are a difficult thing to nail down, because there are so many factors that go into it. I worked with GeSCI's Roxanna Bassi to create a worksheet to help guide cost calculations. I took a first stab four years ago, and came out with a $972/laptop cost over a 5 year program. To say that that cost estimate was not popular at the time would be an understatement.

OLE Nepal has put together a great TCO of the laptop program, based on their pilot project. Where I pieced together training budgets from USAID ICT4Edu projects and Internet connectivity estimates from UN/ITU global averages, they have on-the-ground numbers, (and a few ideal estimates on repair costs). The total for a 5 year program in Nepal? We're still looking at $753, if you read carefully:

The Hueiyen News Service reports that the Manipur state government of India has ordered 75,000 XO laptops to implement a wider One Laptop Per Child deployment in state schools. This is in addition to the 1,000 laptops already bought and distributed to four schools - two each from Imphal East and West districts recently.

So congrats to OLPC India to finally making this order happen even with this history of this order from the OLPC India Wiki:

Even though I had heard quite a bit about ParaguayEduca's OLPC / Sugar efforts from Daniel Drake and Bernie Innocenti (aka "the olpc volunteer rock stars") it wasn't really possible for me to grasp how the project was going until I spent two weeks in the country as part of my ongoing OLPC News South America road trip. Note that I wrote "OLPC / Sugar efforts" because - unlike most other deployments I'm aware of - ParaguayEduca has spent a lot of resources contributing to the Sugar platform. The organization's technical team hasn't just fixed bugs and made slight customizations but in combination with work contributed by Plan Ceibal's developers and others they have improved and enhanced Sugar in more than one way. I'll dive into the details in a separate article so for now you'll just have to believe me that their build 353pyg has turned my XO-1 into the best machine it's ever been. (If you're interesting in testing the latest Release Candidates yourself then head over here.) I also found it really interesting that ParaguayEduca recently started testing new Sugar versions with a 6th grade class before rolling them out to their whole 4000 XOs deployment in the city of Caacupé. There are many bugs or issues that software developers themselves would never find even though they become immediately visible when observing a child using Sugar. Therefore this is a great way to get feedback and improve things before upgrading a large number of XOs.