I already mentioned OLENepal earlier on my blog. Sunday was a beautiful day in Boston. Nancie and I were lucky to meet Rabi Karmacharya, Executive Director from the Open Learning Experience Nepal. Rabi went to MIT, where he received his B.Sc. and M.E. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Then he worked as a design engineer for 3Com in CA for three years before he returned to Nepal. He co-founded a software company HimalayanTechies, and seven years later he met Brian Berry through a running club and they together started OLE Nepal in 2007.
Both Nancie and I were interested to meet Rabi, because he is running such a successful OLPC deployment and just returned from Hanoi, where he attended the OpenCourseware consortium meeting on May 5-7, and met with Serge, who is contributing to the OLPC Vietnam project.
Serge Stinckwich has lived in Hanoi for almost two years and is a professor at a university. You can find more about him here: http://www.doesnotunderstand.org/. He follows the localization efforts to get Sugar running in Vietnamese and other languages. Serge wrote:
“Right now, I’m mostly involved in the Squeak/Smalltalk community and I know very well the people behind Squeak EToys.
I’m part of a project called SqueakBot : http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Projects/SqueakBot where kids could use
EToys to control robots. I have also made a seminar in Hanoi some months ago about Etoys&Dynabook vision: http://www.slideshare.net/SergeStinckwich/an-instrument-whose-music-is-ideas-2036947“.
Serge has put a Google group together for OLPC Vietnam. He is visiting Vung Vieng village right now and will report his observations and suggestions to other OLPC Vietnam members during an upcoming meeting on June 5.
Finally OLPC grassroots’ movement is taking off in Vietnam, thanks to Nancie, the OLPC pioneer in that far-away country. Hurrah!