[Its.an.education.project] Its.an.education.project Digest, Vol 2, Issue 72

[Bryan Berry]

Ed Cherlin wrote:
> The principal issues
> are
> 
> * Internet access in remote villages
> * Electricity in remote villages
> * Connectivity in dense forest and mountainous terrain
> * Content in local languages
> * Education research
> * Economic research
> * Political coordination
> * Collaboration between schools
> * Funding
> 

> As far as I know, nothing
> prevents the volunteer community at OLPC from taking up all of these
> issues on the Wiki and the mailing lists, and creating an
> all-volunteer organization to invite others in as partners. Or
> Sugarlabs could take up these issues. We have initiated conversations
> with Engineers Without Borders, the Free Information community, and
> others, and we have a good idea where to look for the others.

I don't think you can accomplish this w/ a purely volunteer community.
Volunteers can't afford to these countries and find out their needs.
Guessing or making judgements based on their own educational experiences
is not sufficient. Engineer w/out Borders don't have enough in-depth
knowledge of this problem space and their engineers come in for limited
periods of time.

There needs to be an organization w/ full-time experts who know
inside-out the technical challenges of deployment, teacher training, and
the Sugar + supporting software stack. Basically you need 30 Carla
Gomez-Monroy's + a team of roving sugar experts that can show country
teams how to adapt and develop activities for their own milieu 

Basically, you need a version of IBM Global Services to lead OLPC
implementations, as Ivan suggests in his recent blog posts. Such an
organization should involve volunteers and the larger community but an
undertaking of OLPC's scale needs a dedicated full-time team.


-- 
Bryan W. Berry
Systems Engineer
OLE Nepal, http://www.olenepal.org