[IAEP] Is "Most Sugar Users Use XO Laptops" True?

[Adam Holt]

+support-gang (where the Unleash Kids community support volunteer
collaborative originated, for many similar reasons as outlined below --
community support was never taken terribly seriously within uppercase OLPC
-- to make an obscenely long, painful and sometimes unprintable story very
succinct ;-)

On Sun, Apr 24, 2016 at 11:44 AM, Adam Holt <holt at laptop.org> wrote:

> On Apr 24, 2016 1:18 AM, <forster at ozonline.com.au> wrote:
>
>> Does anyone disagree with the assertion that "most Sugar use is in a
>>> school/classroom setting"?
>>>
>>
>> Hi
>>
>> The two largest OLPC deployments, Peru and Uruguay account for 50% of XO
>> laptops.
>>
>> Peru, 60% of use was in school [1]
>> Uruguay home use > school use [2]
>>
>> Uruguay was 100% take home, Peru had a mixed take home policy.
>>
>> It is not clear what happened in the remaining 50% of deployments.
>>
>> These statistics are 4-6 years old. It is not clear how the usage changes
>> as XO's have got older. They are presumably perceived to be less valuable.
>> This could relax take home policies, it probably tends to lower school and
>> home use.
>>
>> So I disagree with the assertion that "most Sugar use is in a
>> school/classroom setting". I think its too close to call. Home and school
>> use are roughly equal.
>>
>
> Huge thanks Tony Forster highlighting those 2 critical data points,
> surrounding initial Peru/Uruguay uses in the years after XO acquisition.
>
> There are more than a few flies in the "One Laptop Per Child" ointment
> both those well-known, and more we're learning from every day.  I know of
> more than a few schools (which do not want to be named, in the name of
> self-preservation) where, to oversimplify the numbers: 100 XO laptops
> arrived, of which 90 were used for 100 hours each, and the remaining 10
> laptops were used for 1000 hours each -- roughly speaking a common outline
> is:
>
>    - 9,000 hours of XO/Sugar use, by 100s of students broadly, back in
>    the day
>    - 10,000 hours of XO/Sugar use, by a few elite IT/Sugar/community
>    gurus, ongoing today, the best of which are giving back to their
>    communities in powerful ways
>
> These are arbitrary numbers to illustrate the larger common pattern, and
> not to embarrass specific schools which do not want to be named.  The lack
> of structured project ideas / professional development of teachers /
> culturally relevant content/pedagogy needs to be addressed at some other
> time, among other fundamental reasons that many XO/Sugar dreams gathered
> dust.
>
> But back to the original question, if (as Tony Forster and I suspect)
> most-if-not-much-all Sugar use is happening outside of class time in 2016
> -- starting many years back now: how can we now get a better grip on these
> very real, evolving, important extracurricular -> personal patterns?
> Moving beyond glory days anecdotalism?  Where do we have a moral
> responsibility to move beyond our Negroponte founders' days "don't measure
> it, just do it" idealism?  Where have we unintentionally expanded
> male/female rich/poor digital divides, as several OLPC communities
> privately ask me to keep quiet about?  When Silicon Valley companies now
> publish gender/race stats routinely, to expose accidental/unconscious
> injustices, how do we too learn to look in our own mirror?
>
> Half a decade later, we can collect as many anecdotes as we want, let's
> jeep at it keeping our blogs fired up before the clock runs out.  But
> before the clock runs out, we require professional sociologists too, if we
> are halfway serious about our Environmental Impact at all, and moving
> beyond statistics that can easily made to lie for any fundraiser.  Many
> people ask me very pointedly -- are we across the OLPC/Sugar legacy a
> listening organization, or is there a core tone-deaf MIT dream unwilling to
> self-assess, needing a firm kick in the rear-end like even George Bush gave
> to Donald Rumsfeld, to finally force an existential assessment of our
> purpose?  The bare minimum groundtruthing being serious amateurs like
> Christoph Derndorfer, Tony Anderson and Morgan Ames etc who chose to put
> their life in the village, stepping outside of the Jeep, to spend Many
> Weeks Each in a broad diversity of communities -- Rwanda, Uruguay, Peru for
> sure -- and many others too thankfully.
>
> Who today will follow in their footsteps spending weeks and months in
> community, in listening mode, challenging their own assumptions, bridging
> the various self-serving post/neo-colonial narratives?  How do we help our
> new generation find heartfelt diaspora families, willing to struggle for
> progressive truths/opportunities beyond the happy-happy-joy-joy
> founding/fundraising narratives?  How do we help the embedded visitor speak
> the local/indigenous language enough to get inside heads and then beyond
> the founding days' multi-stakeholder mythologies, as new generations of
> kids/siblings have come AND gone?  What humility does the embedded visitor
> need to bring to scratch below the surface building confidences among
> several Confederates in the grassroots community, exposing Actual
> (post)Implementation Challenges -- even if Not All Are Printable?  What
> Wayan Vota's (detached from the founders) will fund the Christoph
> Derndorfers of our time over the coming decade, getting to the core
> spiritual truths of what we have and have not accomplished?  How do we
> cultivate dry-by voluntourist visitors ethics to develop loyalty with the
> community's generation-long asiprations they are now increasingly a part
> of, while developing journalistic integrity at the same time?  What
> spare/repair/support companies must develop do bring rebirth to this OLPC
> ecosystem like Activity Central and iLoveMyXO and XOexplosion.com and the
> broad map of community repair centers we once had?  (
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Repair_center_locations)
> Etc!  We will face or ignore these exitential questions at our own peril
> :-)  Compare: http://laptopstudy.net
>
>
>
>> Tony
>>
>>
>>
>> [1]Frequency: sessions in last week By place % at school
>> Table 9 Technology and Child Development: Evidence from the One Laptop
>> per Child Program , IADB Feb 2012
>>
>> [2]"Children reportedly use the XO's about an 1 to 1.5 hours per day at
>> home...The XO's are not used as much in schools"
>>
>> http://www.olpcnews.com/countries/uruguay/plan_ceibal_a_better_designed.htm
>> May 2010
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>
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