Boston OLPC Meeting March 12, 2011

From Adam, Mike and Andreas:

What a great meeting of 14 minds on Friday, March 11 at 6PM at OLPC office, One Cambridge Center (right above the Kendall/MIT Red-Line Stop), facing OLPC’s most serious challenges. Meeting’s Agenda:

1. eBooks on Sugar Realities (New Read 89)
2. Map jams: http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2011-February/012568.html and each OLPC/Sugar CITY that will follow in March (Paris, then French Africa) )
3. West Somerville eToys training by Solution Grove
4. Uruguay Summit May 5-7
5. Intel/Computer Clubhouse’s new global mentoring network (“starting soon
right here in town”)

One of the topics was about using eToys or Scratch to engage older kids and/or adults with programming. Nick Doiron summarized some ideas on this topic for the group:
“There are a lot of ideas out there about how to do intro-to-programming and I like what people have done with eToys at the primary school level (if you haven’t seen Waveplace’s experiences in Haiti, read http://waveplace.org/news/blog/ )

As you target middle school level students or above, they’re interested in the internet and media.  Some are interested in technical details – ask any programmer you know when they started.  You can make a high school kid an expert in eToys, but they won’t be any closer to making their own website or Space Invaders game.  If you would give someone a power tool in shop class, you should give them a real programming language on the computer.

Mozilla’s Hackasaurus program is designed for learning HTML at this level. Two amazing workshops in the past month:
http://spotlight.macfound.org/featured-stories/entry/at-hackasaurus-jam-mozilla-encourages-young-programmers-to-change-the-web/and http://brettgaylor.tumblr.com/post/3526122151/web-made-movies-at-bavc

They have information about setting up your own workshop at hackasaurus.org. Also, check out http://palpable-video.appspot.com/sample ”

This meeting had tremendous value for all participants as it presented an opportunity to connect to people who are interested in similar edu-tech ideas. Photo Courtesy of Mike Lee.

Invite to E-Toys Training and Teacher Volunteer Project Boston/Haiti February 14, 2011

Dear Boston OLPC Community,

What: Class to train adults to train teachers/create content with E-Toys

E-Toys is a childrens’ programming environment used extensively around the world including Haiti with Waveplace.org.

Who:  Techies interested in education, Educators interested in technology.

We are working on a project at the Haitian Coalitian and the Clarendon Hill Apartments housing project in Somerville, and we need your help! Read on if you’re a techie, teacher, Haitian translator, or anyone else who’s interested in educational software.

The focus of this class is an educational program called eToys – I’m sure many of you have heard of it. For those of you who haven’t: eToys is a multifaceted program that is currently being used in courses in Haiti on XO laptops. With it, kids can learn basics of programming, animation, and logic, but it’s so much more than that. Waveplace has created an innovative curriculum that extends eToys to virtually every subject…math, science, social studies, even language arts.

Teach Kids in Somerville: Our goal is to run our own eToys classes for children here in Somerville. For the kids of all ethnicities at the Clarendon Hill Apartments, we want to run an eToys course on storytelling that will use a similar curriculum to that being taught in Haiti.  We have donated computers for the students to use.

Teach volunteers who will be going to Haiti this Summer: We would also like to run a series of classes for those interested in traveling to Haiti to do their own training – namely adults at CHA and possibly local high school students. That’s where Sprout comes in – we need your help to run these “train the trainer” sessions! These trainers would then bring their knowledge to Haiti to enrich childrens’ education.

Create Curriculum for Haiti: There are a good number of curriculum units available and being used in Haiti with E-Toys, but the need is extensive!  Curriculum needs to be written, turned into interactive E-Toys projects, and translated into Haitian Creole.  Somerville has a wealth of people with each of these skills. We would like your help bringing them together to provide free educational materials for children in Haiti.  All content will be under open licence and will also be available to be translated for use in other countries, and of course here in Somerville!

Learn More about E-Toys and the Existing Curriculum:  You can find examples of existing curriculum and students’ projects at an Illinois school here: http://etoysillinois.org or some tutorials from Waveplace here: http://waveplace.com/resources/tutorials/.

We will be running an eToys training class soon for anyone interested in learning more about eToys or working with us and the Haitian Coalitian. You’ll get to learn how to use basic eToys functions, from creating sketches to animating them by using scripts. You can even create your own games – eToys is LOTS of fun! You will also learn more about education work in Haiti through organizations like Waveplace and locally with the Haitian Coalition.

When and Where? Soon and in Somerville! We will be working with interested people to figure that out.  Please contact me at redfern.derek@gmail.com or Caroline at caroline@solutiongrove.com if you’re interested.

Thanks for your help!

Derek Redfern/Caroline Meeks
–
Caroline Meeks
Solution Grove
Caroline@SolutionGrove.com

Haitian EduTech Dinner January 26, 2011

Community-organized Haitian EduTech Dinner was held at OLPC on Tuesday, Jan 25 at 5PM. Dinner was prepared by Haitian-American OLPC volunteer Alexandra Merceron.

Boston’s http://Haitian-Coalition.org  joined  OLPC_Boston monthly community meeting to discuss EduTech plans (OLPC, Sugar, http://open1to1.org, etc.) emerging in Somerville Massachusetts, as well as the 400 OLPC laptops shipping to Haiti shortly. I joined the meeting at the very end, but I was present when Beth of Waveplace discussed eToy workshop plans for mentors to be organized both in Haiti and the US, and announced upcoming Mentor Workshop in St. John, US Virgin Islands May 23-June 3. Caroline Meeks offered partnership with Waveplace for training mentors.

Remote and In-person Participants from Haitian Diasporas:

Beth Santos, Waveplace Foundation

Franklin Dalembert, Haitian Coalition

Ryan Ansin, Every Person Has A Story

Chris Low, Matenwa Community Learning Center (group of Fayerweather teachers)

Benaja Antoine, Haiti Partners                                     

Gardy Mathieu, Entrepreneur near Cap-Haitien

Myriam Jeannis, UMass Dartmouth

Ryan remotely provided update Haiti in Transition—Watch Via EPHAS and revised Brochure EPHAS Brochure Proof_Rev3 regarding his trip beginning Sunday. “Every Person Has a Story” is exclusive documentarian for a couple thousand people moving from one of the American Refugee Committee’s main tent city.

“Hi all,

It was a real pleasure to see you all at the meeting.  Although my time with you there was very limited due a schedule conflict, I did enjoy being there.  I am impressed by the great work you are doing to help lift up my brother and sister Haitians.  We all share a common vision and have common denominator which is to help develop people’s potentiality to be productive by providing access to education, science and technology. 

Once again many thanks to you Adam, for coordinating this effort.  Bringing all these organizations together to network and share information is very important.

I would like to meet with those that are going to Haiti while I am there, we can probably visit some of the camps where the Haitian Coalition has been working. 

In solidarity, Franklin Dalembert”.

Thank you, Benaja, for this beautiful Haitian Painting!

Haiti Earthquake 2010 (Part Two) January 12, 2011

Waveplace has a special place in Haitian hearts:

On Sunday, Jan 24, Tim Falconer, Waveplace Founder spoke at OLPC about
How we can help Haitians help themselves: Structuring Sustainable Haiti Grassroots OLPC Projects.  Tim discussed his foundation’s vision for progressively expanding its XO deployments around Haiti.

Here are Tim’s answers to Christoph’s question on how the global OLPC Community can support Waveplace’s continuing / fast-evolving work in Haiti:

1. Donate Money so Haitian teachers/mentors/deployment experts can be paid
2. Ship XO’s not being used, to his non-profit Foundation: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Donate_Your_Get_One
3. e-Books: FIND THE BEST copyright-free storybook others, and curate/organize them like a proper librarian please!  Entertainment based initially, Deep Learning later.    

4. Translator & transcriber Volunteers Needed: English or French to Creole especially– can Elissa Carmichael from Miami’s CrisisCamp working with the Haitian Diaspora community there please explain how we can All facilitate beyond http://translate.sugarlabs.org and http://wiki.crisiscommons.org/wiki/Languages_and_Translation ?
5. Find/Recruit the best Mentors for kids, on the ground in Haiti especially, starting right now http://waveplace.org/mentors/.

    The Waveplace Plan:

We’re nearly done with our new Waveplace Accord, which details the roles and responsibilities of Waveplace and our partners. First though, we need to outline what we aim to do together. Here’s the text from our accord called “The Waveplace Plan”. This is a pretty good summary of the parameters we’ve tweaked throughout our 18 pilots. It took a while to get these right.

• Each Waveplace class consists of five mentors and 20 children between the ages of seven and eleven. Classes are usually held after school for 90 minutes each day.
• Each child and mentor receives for their personal use an OLPC XO laptop with the Sugar platform and Squeak Etoys learning environment.
• Daily lessons are taught from the Waveplace Courseware, a collection of two-week units covering topics from a general primary school curriculum.
• All classes teach the Basic Etoys unit first, which covers the Etoys learning environment itself. The remaining units can be taught in any order.
• Mentors use techniques such as guided discovery, iterative refinement, and peer collaboration to foster a sense of ownership by each child of their own education.
• Children build projects which can then shared through the Internet with other children and distance mentors for ongoing inspiration and guidance.
• Children and mentors continuously reflect and write about their experiences, providing the basis for dynamic assessment and evolution of ideas.
• Mentors are trained in two week workshops with five trainers and 20 mentors.
• Mentors are typically taught concurrently with children at the start of a pilot. This allows them to witness our teaching approach directly as they reinforce their own understanding.
• Waveplace stays in continual contact with all mentors, providing support and encouragement while requiring weekly progress reports and frequent uploads.
• Waveplace assesses mentors at six month intervals, promoting mentors to higher pay levels as they meet specific criteria. Each mentor manages four mentors of the next lower level.
• Mentors are encouraged to create new units to share with the Waveplace community, just as they use units created by educators worldwide.

Please, also see today’s post from Beth http://www.travelgogirl.com/?p=7218. Great work, Waveplace!

Haiti Earthquake 2010 (Part One)

One year ago, Jan 12, I was on my way to Vietnam.  I didn’t hear Haitian news until I arrived in Saigon which was two days later. Needless to say, the support gang and OLPC/Sugar community reacted to the news in Haiti much quicker. As I was going through my email box days later, there was a flood of emails about initiatives trying to help Haiti in all possible ways.

 OLPC and the whole world:

On Jan 26, Official letter from Nicolas Negroponte reached thousands of people who participated in G1G1  program in 2007, urging them to donate their laptops to Haiti.

Starting in 2008, OLPC partnered with the Inter-American Development Bank to send 13,700 XOs to Haiti, for the students and teachers in 60 schools.

Subsequently post-earthquake in 2010, almost 3,000 used XOs have been donated by individuals around the world. 200 of these were granted to the Waveplace Foundation in March 2010.

Dozens of millions of US dollars were donated by citizens of different countries so that Haitian people have a better chance to build a normal or better life than before.

Volunteers:

“CrisisCommons / Crisis Camps are an open/grassroots movement to use open source technologies (primarily) to help Haiti recover and hopefully later reinvent itself“. See a Video about the event that took place on Jan 16 in Washington DC, Silicon Valley and London. Our own Nicki Doiron (CMU) played important role as a Haiti Community Mapping Software Developer. Nick worked with community-informatics tools for haiti, like http://haiti.ushahidi.com and http://hypercube.telascience.org/haiti“

“Hey All, The haitianquake.com site, now 30 hours old with zero sleep, is looking for help developing an API for getting input into their site, basically a POST. They have an add page but want to be able to add using a POST. Anyone who might be able to help, or who has insomnia, should write to Tim Schwartz. C.”

“Adam is correct – we ‘re absolutely swamped at the moment. Lots of simultaneous efforts-both stateside and in Haiti-going on all at once. We are preparing to deploy to Haiti early on Sunday and intend to bring three Xos with us…”

“Please now begin drafting a similar/carefule public appeal for Haiti Relief Contributors who can _genuinely use XOs for (post)disaster response, to be broadcast after midnight tonight.”

“Hi Adam, Given the much limited power and connectivity options in Haiti, I think a deployment of Sahana on the OLPCs would be valuable…. If we can get a team from OLPC to work on integrating Sahana on a LAMP stack on the new 1.5 version that would be great.  The sahana project is actively responding and you can find details (including the custom code for Haiti) here. Join us on Freenode IRC at #sahana where we are gathering to respond to this.”

Adam Holt wrote a great blog post summarizing immediate efforts  http://blog.laptop.org/2010/01/15/mobilizing-haiti/

Thank you to all who helped!

OLPC Realness Summit June 9, 2010

I had a chance to speak to the OLPC Afghanistan Director Mike Dawson about his experience at OLPC Realness Summit, which took place in St. John May 28-31. Mike said it was beneficial for him to meet representatives from other OLPC deployments around the world. It was the first time OLPC-doers had an opportunity to meet and talk openly about what has been done and should be done in the future. Unfortunately, not everyone was able to come due to not enough advance notice, but 40 people still made it to the Caribbean to attend the summit and mentor workshop. The ideas have sprung from every continent: to start creating content together, to launch a company to help small deployments, to unite resources to work on software improvements without duplicating efforts, to create user-friendly deployment guides, etc.

Everyone had a chance to show to others new tools and approaches. Mike demonstrated eXe, a program that will help non-programmers to create educational games and content in any field for free. (Mike showed to me Hangman letter game, which he was working on when we first talked on Skype several months ago). Afghanistan is waiting for another grant to go forward with planned activities.

Besides their similarities, Summit participants also accepted their differences, which is the first step to working together. The differences are about: Which deployments are better: micro deployments or nation-wide? Should XO and Sugar be taught as part of normal school curriculum or extracurricular activity? Who should create software: Academia (Chris) or developers (Bernie from SugarLab argued that Academia takes away fun and constructionism element). Who exactly should help deployments?

Read more about the Summit by Chris, from OLPC News, and Beth, from Waveplace, the organizer of the event. I like what Bernie wrote on his blog about the Summit. He concludes:

“By the end of the summit, a strong binding was formed among all the participants, regardless of our widely different professions and approaches to world-wide education.

Many of us asked to follow-up by creating some kind of super-organization embracing volunteers from all camps: OLPC (hardware), Sugar Labs (software), educators and deployments.

As a representative of Sugar Labs, I’d be more than happy to embrace this idea. We’ve been traditionally been very weak on the education front and loosely connected with deployments. We’ve been trying to solve the problem by attracting people with those interests into our organization, but our overly technocratic community managed to repel them.

By starting off with a balanced blend of educators and technologists, we might be able to achieve what our individual organizations couldn’t. Rather than trying to focus everyone on one particular aspect of education technology, it would endorse a wide spectrum of skilled professionals involved in solving the same fundamental problem of radically improving education world-wide through technology, constructionism, interactive curriculum, free software, rugged laptops, teachers without borders and the organized enthusiasm of thousands volunteers.”

(Both pictures Courtesy of Realness)

Unexpected post