MHRD India Should Stop Attacking One Laptop Per Child
Share As Satish Jha was quoted, OLPC India would like to support any initiative of the Indian Government to bring down the cost of delivering quality education to its poorest. Then why is Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) hell bent on attacking One Laptop Per Child?
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MHRD India Should Stop Attacking One Laptop Per Child
Original published as India’s $35 tablet is based on AllGo Systems design (specs inside) on ARMdevices.net Indian minister for HR Development HRD, Kapil Sibal announces $35 tablet project. It seems to be based on the Freescale i.MX233 system on chip, with a 7″ resistive 800×480 touch screen
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The Real $35 Tablet from India: an OLPC Complement, not Competitor
Last week, India’s Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) announced a $35 tablet computer and listen to how The Wall Street Journal describes it: Hello! That’s a single prototype “This is real, tangible and we will take it forward,” Kapil Sibal, minister for human resource development, said at a press conference in New Delhi.
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Needed: Reality Check on India’s $35 Tablet Computer
Even if I were to spend my weekends writing articles non-stop – instead of eating tons of asado, talking all things olpc , *and* writing articles – I couldn’t possibly put all my olpcnews South America road trip experiences and thoughts into readable blog posts. Already now, after only two weeks of traveling, my paper notebook is overflowing with notes, diagrams, and drawings that could probably be the basis for two dozen 500 word articles. So while I’ll obviously do my best to cover the most interesting findings of this trip I’ll probably not be able to satisfy the curiosity for all things olpc that our diverse readership is has been demonstrating over the past few years.
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Want to know more about OLPC in South America? – Just ask
ceibalJAM – the content and software focused organization which I described in more detail in Tuesday’s article – has organized an event called miniJAM! artístico to take place this Saturday, July 24, between 2PM and 7PM. The detailed program has just been published and I’m very excited to have the opportunity to give a talk introducing the efforts of the European OLPC and Sugar communities as well as share a little about last year’s experiences volunteering with OLE Nepal. Additionally there’ll be an introduction into robotics controlled by XOs (really can’t wait to see that!) as well as a workshop focused on how to make stop-motion animations with Scratch
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This Saturday: miniJAM! artístico in Montevideo
I had previously mentioned RAP Ceibal ( Red de Apoyo al Plan Ceibal – Support Network for Plan Ceibal ) in the overview of the various organizations and communities working in the context of OLPC in Uruguay. Given the vital role it has played in many ways in the past few years I thought that it’s worth taking a closer look at this community.
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RAP Ceibal – Uruguay’s volunteer network
After the topic of tablet-style devices recently came up in discussions on Sugar Labs’ “It’s an education project” mailing-list as well as while talking to various people in Montevideo I felt like summing up my own thoughts on this topic. Like it or not, touch is here to stay The short version I think tablet-style devices could be quite well suited for use by primary-school children however I don’t think that the products currently available or foreseeable to be available within the next two or three years will be well suited for secondary-school use. The slightly longer version In my mind tablets are generally more suited for content consumption rather than content creation
One of my first takeaways from Uruguay is that OLPC here is so much more than just the official Plan Ceibal. I had always heard of the different organizations and groups of people doing OLPC related work in the country but it wasn’t until I got here and started talking to some people that I realized just how many different entities are working in this space
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OLPC in Uruguay – More than just Plan Ceibal
One learning from Beth Santos’ experience in San Tome was the need for teacher training on XO laptop maintenance. As XO’s succumbed to the wear and tear of student usage, teachers and students need to know how to fix the laptops. But how to give them the confidence to repair XO laptops on their own
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XO Laptop Maintenance and Repair Training for Teachers
While I put the finishing touches on some of the more in-depth articles about the status quo of the OLPC efforts here in Uruguay I thought I’d publish some impressions from an exhibition called eXpO fotos which I visited on Thursday. The cool thing is that all of the photos were taken by pupils from four different schools here in Montevideo
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eXpO fotos: an exhibition based on photos taken with XOs
One Laptop Per Child’s new XO-HS laptop , the XO-1.5 blue and white colored laptop for Uruguayan high school students will feature a one-click switch from the Sugar Learning Platform to Gnome desktop environment. This will allow teenagers to use Gnome and adult Linux applications, expanding the software choices for Plan Ceibal.
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XO-HS: One Click Gnome-Sugar User Interface Switching
Do you remember back when Greg M. Lamb said the following about XO mesh networking: OLPC mesh networking design Built-in Wi-Fi antennas that automatically create a “mesh network” with any other XO computer within about one-third of a mile
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Mesh Networking Just Doesn’t Work on XO-1.5 Laptop
This short was created as a complimentary piece to “La Sierra.” It was edited from footage taken for the feature documentary film, Web, and serves as an introduction to one of the film’s primary locations: the small jungle village of Jose Pardo in Peru.
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Truly touching video about XO laptops in Peru
What most people do not know about the making of software: It Is Hard . My life the night before the v.2 Blueberry release of Sugar on a Stick: instead of packing my luggage before getting on a plane to Toronto early next morning to attend FUDCon , I was desperately respinning the final image because nobody had noticed earlier that we’d announced an image labeled “TEST!” as the final release. This was not hard to fix, but it was the final straw in a long series of last-minute deadline-shifting panics; in the two weeks before this, I had been getting consistently less than 5 hours of sleep a night doing SoaS release engineering work and panicking about (again, last-minute) content-licensing issues for the SoaS library and wondering why earlier discussions hadn’t prevented this situation.
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The Correlation of Mirabelles and Sustainability
New extensions to the eXe learning platform, recently developed by our team in Afghanistan, make it possible to create interactive educational content in minutes that can be exported as XOL library files or HTML / Javascript, for use in any web browser. XO eXe activity running It provides a point and click graphical interface to create a variety of different interaction formats, such as; sorting, assembly of parts, hangman games, moving object speed answer games point in click / find quizzes, and more.
The Taiwan based company Aiptek have launched these E Readers that are clearly aimed at the kids market, as the devices are coloured in pink and blue. However, despite all of that these are handy devices offering an eight inch display, 1 GB of internal memory and the opportunity to expand this up to 16 GB with the use of an SD card. Here are the features and specs of the interesting Aiptek E Book reader: 8-inch TFT LCD display at 800 x 600 resolution, 1GB of internal memory with support for SD / SDHC Memory Card (up to 16GB), USB 2.0, can be a Digital photo frame, MP3 player with support for JPEG or MP3 formats, a rechargeable Li-Ion Battery and it comes with 20 pre-loaded illustrated audio books with language support for English, Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese Priced at around $180 Source [Eee PC] Post from: Laptop Pimp Blog – Laptop Reviews for Laptop Whores E Reader aimed at the kids market e-Reader , Kids Laptops , kids market , Laptop Fun Related posts The 7” Shenzhen e-Reader
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E Reader aimed at the kids market
Wayan Vota posted a photo: OLE Nepal has created extensive lesson plans and teaching guides to help Nepali educators empower children’s learning, using technology. Note that the emphasis is on education, not technology. Read more at OLPC News
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Rabi Karmacharya proudly displaying Nepali teacher workbook [Flickr]
Whether one could definitively show a causal link between OLPC and the creation of the netbook category is unclear, although the Wikipedia article for netbooks discusses the introduction of the somewhat OLPC-like Asus Eee PC and notes, “The OLPC project, known for its innovation in producing a durable, cost- and power-efficient netbook for developing countries, is regarded as one of the major factors that led top computer hardware manufacturers to begin creating low-cost netbooks for the consumer market.” This same article references the specs of the Asus Eee PC in its discussion of the origin of the term netbook, “The generic use of the term “netbook”, however, began in 2007 when Asus unveiled the ASUS Eee PC. Originally designed for emerging markets, the 23 x 17 cm (8.9″ × 6.5″) device weighed about 0.9 kg (2 pounds) and featured a 7″ display, a keyboard approximately 85% the size of a normal keyboard, a solid-state drive and a custom version of Linux with a simplified user interface geared towards netbook use.” My initial reaction to the Asus Eee PC was that it took the good things about the OLPC laptop (small size, low cost, rapid boot times), took away features most people wouldn’t want (a hand crank), and raised the target price to $200. The lower cost was made possible through changes to the computing model, and the Linux operating system was a big enabler of this lower price
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Is There a Causal Link Between OLPC and Netbooks?
Check out the comparison that Charbax made between the Apple iPad screen and the Pixel Qi dual mode screen in broad sunlight during an interview with Mary Lou Jepsen: I love Charbax’s commentary during the interview: “I think iPad should use Pixel Qi. That’s kinda what I was hoping they would announce, world’s first distribution of the Pixel Qi screen” You’re not the only one – this Apple fanboy is also expecting something dramatic next week at WWDC 2010. .
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Apple iPad Should Use Pixel Qi Screen: Hands-On Video
I am Gerald Ardito, a doctoral student at Pace University , and have been studying the impact that the XO Laptops and their Sugar software have on the classroom environment of a suburban, 5th grade cohort in The Shape of Disruption .
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XO Laptops Create Spontaneous Helping Interactions