[Sugar-devel] NPR story on OLPC in Peru

[Edward Mokurai Cherlin]

On Sun, October 14, 2012 11:07 am, Christoph Derndorfer wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 14, 2012 at 2:42 PM, Dr. Gerald Ardito
> <gerald.ardito at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> I wanted to share that we have faced the same criticisms in our school
>> regarding the XOs. For the last four years, the teachers and students
>> have
>> complained that the devices do not connect well or reliably to our
>> wireless network.
>>
>> Obviously, in our case, we have a wireless network and essentially
>> continuous access to the internet. But, what I have had to fight against
>> is that this is the most basic use of any computing device.
>>
>> The only way I have been able to stem this tide is to come up with
>> projects and programs that made use of the XOs as standalone or mesh
>> networked devices. For example, we have done a lot with Memorize and
>> Etoys
>> and Scratch (and beginning to work with TurtleBlocks). I have found that

Are you finding the Turtle Art Tutorials from Tony Forster and me helpful?

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/TurtleArt/Tutorials

>> once the students and teachers are involved with these activities, the
>> internet stuff goes away.
>>
>> But the bigger point that is missed in the story, and the broader
>> conversation, is that the XOs and Sugar tap into non-traditional methods
>> of
>> teaching and learning. When this invisible line is crossed, real magic
>> happens. It is the conversations which illuminate this invisible line
>> that is tough.
>>
>
> Gerald,
>
> please don't forget that very few of the teachers in Peru have the
> affordances available to you when you worked against that tide and helped
> your pupils reach that invisible line. You have received countless years
> of professional training, have ready access to the world's and the
> community's
> accumulated knowledge about using XOs and Sugar (thanks to the Internet),
> deal with student bodies who generally don't go hungry, have a pyhsic and
> social infrastructure that's available at very few Peruvian schools, etc.
>
> In short, I believe in the importance of crossing that invisible line and I
> have been lucky enough to see some glimpses of that happening in the past
> few years. However a significant number of pupils and teachers in Peru are
> miles and miles away from that line and will need other ways of support to
> even get them close to it.

I believe that far more is going on than we see. I have considerable
faith in children discovering how things work for themselves, and
sharing the information they discover.

But then, I have had to put a lot of work into determining what
children _can_ discover for themselves, and where they need hints or
outright explanations.

I can see a time coming when students who have learned on XOs or other
computers running Sugar get into teachers' colleges and onto school
boards and into government, and begin to explain to their elders how
it really works.

I can already see those in authority refusing to look into Galileo's
telescope again, because it, or the XO, overturns everything that
everybody _knew_ for certain that forms the bedrock of society. But
one can no more turn back the OLPC revolution than the Galilean
telescope (although Galileo was put under house arrest for the rest of
his life) or the Gutenberg printing press (although Gutenberg was
thrown out of his own company). Neither of those revolutions is over.
Look at the space telescopes, or the Ice Cube neutrino telescope, or
LIGO for gravty waves; and look at the invention of the World-Wide Web
for sharing physics preprints, and the Open Access movement for
scientific journals. For us, it is Kofi Annan's Digital Challenge to
Silicon Valley in 2003, and us, and more recently Open Educational
Resources, all still in their infancy; and at improvements in wireless
technology, renewable energy sources, batteries, and the rest. Look at
Africa, which only a few years ago had no fiber optics south of the
Sahara, and know has dozens of cables laid or in progress. And on the
other side, look at the teenage girl, Malala Yousufzai, shot in
Pakistan by the Taliban for daring to champion education for girls.

And so on.

> I also think it's odd to see how the role of the Internet and the
> connectivity it enables between people is apparently deemphasized in this
> conversation. I remember a time where Connectivity was one of the 5
> principles of OLPC, and for good reasons I dare say. Due to the
> limitations
> of the Mesh network (and similarly so the newer ad-hoc networking options)
> and the lack of infrastructure components such as access points most
> pupils
> and teachers in Peru barely have access to local connectivity and all the
> affordances (incl. Sugar's collaboration features) and value it provides.
>
> Also I believe that people here will simply have to get used to bad news
> (whether fully justified or not) coming out of Peru. The project there
> still has potential but unless a lot of additional resources and brain
> power are invested into its overall value proposition and usefulness will
> always remain questionable at best.
>
> Cheers,
> Christoph
>
>
>> Just my two cents.
>> Gerald
>>
>>
>> On Sun, Oct 14, 2012 at 8:29 AM, Christoph Derndorfer <
>> christoph.derndorfer at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> On Sun, Oct 14, 2012 at 2:21 AM, Sameer Verma <sverma at sfsu.edu> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Sat, Oct 13, 2012 at 3:48 PM, Alexandro Colorado <jza at oooes.org>
>>>> wrote:
>>>> > On 10/13/12, Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> >> Alexandro,
>>>> >>
>>>> >> I think you are grossly underestimating the connectivity problem in
>>>> Peru.
>>>> >
>>>> > Yes maybe, but I understand most educational systems dont have
>>>> enough
>>>> > budget to acquire connectivity so getting connectivity from other
>>>> > sources like public buildings, libraries, will allow other resource
>>>> to
>>>> > come through without needing to be funded by the educational budget.
>>>> >
>>>> > Now if we are talking about, the whole town not having ways on
>>>> > connecting, then the next option would be looking for alternative
>>>> > sources, in Mexico they used Satelite modems.
>>>> >
>>>> http://www.scribd.com/doc/10324524/Capacitacion-Para-Maestros-Uso-Del-Aula-Enciclomedia#page=15
>>>> >
>>>> > But other mediums like DSL modems attached to a wifi router will be
>>>> > able to get some basic Internet for HTML/images, IRC, etc. The big
>>>> > question is about the level of connectivity for copper phone lines.
>>>> >
>>>>
>>>> It seems that a fair number of offline requirements will be served by
>>>> the XS school server, but I don't see that show up in any of the
>>>> conversations. Does any location in Peru use any version of the XS?
>>>> (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/School_server)
>>>>
>>>
>>> I'm not aware of any schools having school servers, at least they
>>> didn't
>>> have them when I was there in 2010. The next best thing were USB drives
>>> with some collections of offline materials compiled by DIGETE but as
>>> far as
>>> I can tell only a certain percentage of teachers ever received theirs.
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>> Christoph
>>>
>>>
>>>> cheers,
>>>> Sameer
>>>>
>>>> >
>>>> >>
>>>> >> regards.
>>>> >>
>>>> >> -walter
>>>> >>
>>>> >> --
>>>> >> Walter Bender
>>>> >> Sugar Labs
>>>> >> http://www.sugarlabs.org
>>>> >> _______________________________________________
>>>> >> Devel mailing list
>>>> >> Devel at lists.laptop.org
>>>> >> http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
>>>> >>
>>>> >
>>>> >
>>>> > --
>>>> > Alexandro Colorado
>>>> > PPMC Apache OpenOffice
>>>> > http://es.openoffice.org
>>>> > _______________________________________________
>>>> > Devel mailing list
>>>> > Devel at lists.laptop.org
>>>> > http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
>>>> >
>>>> >
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> Sugar-devel mailing list
>>>> Sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org
>>>> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Christoph Derndorfer
>>>
>>> volunteer, OLPC (Austria) [www.olpc.at]
>>> editor, OLPC News [www.olpcnews.com]
>>> contributor, TechnikBasteln [www.technikbasteln.net]
>>>
>>> e-mail: christoph at derndorfer.eu
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Sugar-devel mailing list
>>> Sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org
>>> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
>>>
>>>
>>
>
>
> --
> Christoph Derndorfer
>
> volunteer, OLPC (Austria) [www.olpc.at]
> editor, OLPC News [www.olpcnews.com]
> contributor, TechnikBasteln [www.technikbasteln.net]
>
> e-mail: christoph at derndorfer.eu
> _______________________________________________
> Sugar-devel mailing list
> Sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
>


-- 
Edward Mokurai (默雷/निशब्दगर्ज/نشبدگرج) Cherlin
Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation.
The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination.
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Replacing_Textbooks