“A program for donors to employ between 100 or more laptops for small-scale deployments, called “Give a School,” has been removed from the participation page of the nonprofit’s Web site. The nonprofit is now offering options to directly donate laptops or to make corporate purchases.”(Source)

This could be a serious problem! While there are plenty of XOs out there (near here) to accomplish things with, being unable to buy more units is going to have a serious impact on how things proceed for a lot of the community that supports the OLPC project.

Before outlining how you can get an XO, it is important to understand that these computers are not like normal laptops, they really are specialist collaboration devices meant for children aged 5-12 to be used in the classroom as part of their normal education process. They won’t necessarily make great gifts in isolation, because most of the value comes in collaborating and sharing with others, particularly in an educational setting.

Check out the post over at OLPCFriends and get involved!

“Like many other nonprofits that are facing tough economic times, One Laptop per Child must downsize in order to keep costs in line with fewer financial resources. Today we are reducing our team by approximately 50% and there will be salary reductions for the remaining 32 people. While we are saddened by this development, we remain firmly committed to our mission of getting laptops to children in developing countries. We thank team members who are departing for their contributions to this important mission.” (Source)

While this is sad news I think the hard yards of this project have been done, in many regards. The XO-1 units are fully operational, have a half-a-million user base and a strong support community. The emerging netbook market, spawned by OLPC’s demonstration that you don’t need to pay thousands for a laptop, is going to give birth to technical developments that future XO models will take advantage of. But since the development that I’m interested in (read: content) was not the primary directive of OLPC Inc staff I don’t see this affecting the day-to-day lives of people currently using the tech.  A weak global financial economy is showing us how vulnerable we have made ourselves – OLPC’s rich social economy will demonstrate the true value of the project in the coming years.

You can watch the whole video here!

“Yesterday, iGoogle launched “Themes for Causes” with One Laptop per Child as one of their first 25 causes. “Themes for Causes” are ways to customize your Google homepage to show your support.

http://www.laptop.org/igoogle”

I’ve enabled it on my account.. and i’ve most certainly seen nicer themes, I have to say. Still, a cool way to show support!

Chester Community School in Pennsylvania is deploying 1,400 XO laptops to students, one of the larger deployments of laptops from One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) in the United States. The initial rollout will begin this week.

PA Charter School To Deploy 1,400 OLPC XO Laptops : December 2008 : THE Journal

Head over to her blog to read the details, convincing!

Cynthia, the daughter of my friend Sue, has cerebral palsy and uses a small touchscreen with picture icons to speak. Sue explained that this is a costly piece of equipment at $6,000, with a $400 fee when it needs service – expenses that many middle-class families with special needs children in even the developed world cannot afford. I had just received my OLPC through the Give One Get One program and had a sense of curious excitement about this new platform, and little idea of the possibilities. “Hi Matt, what’s that thing?” asked Sue. The green laptop had caught her eye. After I explained, she immediately thought, “Could this help my daughter?”

Free Icon-To-Speech: Open-Source Speech for Disabled – One Laptop Per Child News

Today Pia Waugh has posted on her blog a link to the technical documentation of Australia’s first OLPC trial. The details can be found here and it includes how to work within a typical relatively secure school. This is a great step for proving the value of the project for both Aussie kids, and kids in a “Western” country. It is also a world first of inter-school collaboration and the delivery of specialist services to remote schools.

OLPC Friends Announcement
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Australia%27s_first_deployment

Dailymotion, one of the world’s largest independent video entertainment websites, and One Laptop per Child (OLPC), a non-profit organization dedicated to improving education in the developing world, today announced a holiday contest to support OLPC’s Give One, Get One campaign.The contest, which runs from November 17, 2008 to December 15, 2008, calls for Dailymotion users to upload original commercials for the Give One, Get One campaign. One winning commercial will be selected from among the submissions. Along with bringing greater attention to this important campaign, the winning commercial will be aired on a major network/cable TV channel during the period of December 15th to December 31st.

Dailymotion and One Laptop per Child Launch Search for the Best Video for Giving Campaign

Event management seems to be a very particular and peculiar lifestyle. You’d have to have boundless personal energy and integrity to do it on a regular basis. You’d have to be interested in what you’re putting on, and interested in the people you’re putting it on with. Although this was the first time I managed to make it down for the expo it felt like, and other people said that, we’d gelled as a team as well as we could under the circumstances.

So what went down? Thursday’s “bump-in” was probably the most draining, although that could have been due to my early start (managed to get return air tickets for $96!). The cherry pickers, forklifts and army of construction people were a clear sign there were big things to come. Saturday got busy fast, the harder core of the gamers even getting up early I dare say, to attend. Every single machine/console/screen was occupied for almost all of the day (with the exception of the evacuation due to fire alarm at around lunch time.. fortunately everyone stayed calm and we didn’t have to wait too long to go back inside..) and by the end, I’d given my OLPC XO demonstration dozens of times. Sunday was bigger, though, especially in terms of the XOs. Families and groups seemed to dominate the final day, and the attendance for the semi and grand finals taking place on the main stages was good.

I didn’t have a huge amount of time to take photos, but I did get some. Pus there’s a tape’s worth of footage that I have yet to compile. Below are some of the highlights:

Naturally there’s some good phonecam footage of the evacuation on saturday:

At least it gave us a chance to have a look at the size of the crowd, and in the end everyone stayed around potentially thanks to the efforts of the guys from australiangamer.com, although the jury is still out on that one…

more post eGames links to follow…

I managed to get a small amount of playtime yesterday as the Expo was packed. Red Alert 3 has some chop, and the Quantum of Solace demo was fun. I’ve been watching Wii Music on the Nintendo stage and, not content to go on the word of so many others, I may line up and see if it holds some hidden gems. 

Last night I managed to seriously hurt my little toe which has now become an interesting shade of yellow. That’s going to complicate the whole walk-around-and-do-things-at-the-expo thing, which hasn’t put me in the best of moods. Still, I have a chair with wheels on it, so as long as people clear a path, i’ll wheelie-bowly my way around. Or just sit at the EOL booth.

Friday was big, Saturday was big and today promises to be bigger. If you’re in the area, make sure to come down to the Melbourne Exhibition Centre. I aim to have some sort of media up today, as long as I can find working peripherals.

Colombia will become the second country to use the One Laptop Per Child Project’s (OLPC) XO laptops running Microsoft Windows XP in schools after signing an agreement for pilot programs in two towns, Microsoft said late Monday.Schools in the towns of Quetame and Chia will be outfitted with the small green XO laptops developed by the OLPC. The pilot programs are expected to expand over time.Download the latest Network World Executive Guide – Virtualization Reality CheckMicrosoft and OLPC will donate the XO laptops and work with teachers on how to use them in schools. The groups did not say how many laptops would be handed out as part of the trial nor when it would start.

Colombia signs up for OLPC laptops with Windows – Network World

eGames is packing some interesting things this year. Yahtzee Croshaw, the fast talking pom behind Zero Punctuation will be hosting a gaming trivia session, which promises to be hilarious. I’m keen to see Call of Duty World At War taken through its multiplayer paces (this is taking place at the Alienware PC Zone) and what comes out of the Retro Game Challenge. When Elroy called and said there was going to be a significant N-Gage presence, I had to think a bit. Nokia’s N-Gage? That was dead and buried years ago – but they’re trying to bring it back, apparently. I’m curious as to what their second attempt is going to look like.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, really. So starting from tomorrow I’ll begin a series of regular eGames related posts, in theory video content will be included, as I jet to Melbourne to begin what’s going to be a long couple of days. We’ll be based out of the Elroy Online Booth, where you’ll be able to check out the latest Powers Cosmic and Remote Viewing caper, and unwashed computer geeks that haven’t had enough sleep. Some extra space has been donated to the buzzmoo.com element so that I can put on some OLPC XO demonstrations.

If you live in Melbourne, consider coming along!

Show Times

14th-16th November

Friday 1pm – 7pm
Saturday 10am – 7pm
Sunday 10am – 5pm

Ticket Prices

Adult $18
Concession $13
Family $40
(2 Adults, 2 Children)
3 Day Pass $33
(Fri-Sun)
Children under 6 admitted free

Melbourne Exhibition Centre, Southbank.

For further info check the official website:

eGames Expo @ iDEF

No amount of hardware or software can replace a good teacher. However, I remain convinced that hardware, software, and well-thought out tools can help children learn in individualized ways and work very well within the context of solid classroom instruction. It’s for this reason that I believe Intel’s Classmate PC model can be really successful; it was designed to supplement classroom instruction rather than turn kids loose with a PC like the OLPC XO.

Is George Ou right? | Education IT | ZDNet.com

Educational tools, collaborative software, running on Sugar is about as far from a “PC” as you can get. Has Christopher Dawson not seen the large amount of complaints coming from users trying to use XOs as a “regular” Windows based laptop? He recognises collaboration as part of the Classmate PC, but has missed that collaboration is the heart of an XO.

This appears to be a marketing issue. But marketing not towards the customer (the weird thing is the kids receiving these things  don’t care what they’re called) but marketing towards potential social supporters. I’d hate to see such a huge effort tangled up in lexical semanics.

One Velociraptor Per Child’s mission is to increase the Darwinian fitness of the world’s poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-energy, internet-enabled velociraptor with content designed for collaborative, practical, self-empowered survival.

[M]etabrain [E]ntry [L]og » One Velociraptor Per Child

As for me, I’m tired but glad things went well. There are plenty of things I learned, one important one is that you need practice to demo a large number of these things effectively. Being intimately familiar with the devices will make the difference when trying to pitch their case, and that takes time.

So what’s next? Basically wait and see what the powers-that-be decide what they’ll do next (In Australia, specifically) we’ll see something solid on the OLPC wiki (wiki.laptop.org) shortly, I believe. More to follow…

It is clear that the One Laptop per Child effort requires strong involvement from governments to be effective. The insistence by some that Windows be packaged with the laptops reflects policies and legislation that were born in a Microsoft world, so these policies give lawmakers limited options. It might not be that they’re opposed to open source solutions – it’s just that bureaucracy is difficult to change once it’s set up. Earlier this year it was reported that Egypt was interested in the OLPC venture only if Windows was the operating system. At the same time we know there is great support for FOSS in Egypt, we also know that Egyptian bureaucracy is the slowest of the slow.

Throughout the chatter today I haven’t seen a single mention about cross-compatibility. I see the heart of the XO as collaboration, both in terms of users and extended community. So my question is, are Windows and Linux XOs going to be able to wirelessly mesh? And, I’ve asked before, is software developed for Windows based XOs going to be compatible with Linux XOs?  Does this mean we’re going to need two separate communities working on basically the same thing, without the ability to share? What happens when kids form different schools meet and some of them aren’t able to join in due to incompatibility?

A dual-boot option goes some way to alleviating my concerns, but there’s a fiscal cost associated with it that takes the machine further away from being affordable. I guess we wait and see!

The nature of the beast is that content has to come after the device, and the OLPC project is mature enough to focus on that now, I feel. As i write this I get a ping about the Wologna Traditional Dance. Didn’t know much about it until right now, but I know that the OLPC Etheopia Cultural Content pack that has just been released is going to explain it to me. And I know that, at a time where indigenous knowledge is disappearing, this is just the kind of content we need to be creating. If we can blend learning traditional knowledge with learning technology, ancient tradition can be secured and shared, while empowering those who are recording it. Cool.

“The reason the political leadership has never bothered with providing quality education in public schools is because most moneyed politicians ship their children abroad for quality education leaving children of peasant workers to fend for themselves at home.” suggests Jerry Okungu.

Pointed. At The Australian National University we have a huge international student population, but they’re not all rich. I have a Sudanese friend who spent most of his childhood in Uganda, and his family managed to send him across to Australia. His African perspective was incredibly valuable when it came to studying International Relations and I’m grateful he was there.

So, some get lucky. But we’re also lucky to receive them over here. The OLPC Project (which Rwanda appears to be committing hundreds of millions of dollars to) will let the unlucky ones at least get some access to the level of education I was fortunate to have.

Read the article at New Vision and see what Rwanda has planned.

I’ll have more to say when I’m up and running.