EduTechDebate: OLPC in South America

As people following this blog or my tweets will know I spent my summer traveling through Uruguay, Paraguay, and Peru to try and get a better understanding of how the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) projects in these countries are going.

Apart from documenting my experiences over on OLPC News, the OLPC (Austria) blog, Flickr, several OLPC and Sugar Labs related mailing lists, this blog, and plenty of tweets I also had an opportunity to share some of my thoughts during talks I gave in Montevideo, Lima, and Washington, D.C.. However the most important component of these documentation efforts awaited me after my return to Austria and have kept me quite busy over the past few weeks.

The result of these efforts is a series of five articles with a total of more than 15,000 words which was posted over on EduTechDebate.org, a discussion platform about ICT for education in developing countries which is sponsored by The World Bank’s infoDev and UNESCO:

OLPC in South America: An Overview of OLPC in Uruguay, Paraguay, and Peru

OLPC in Uruguay: Impressions of Plan Ceibal’s Primary School XO Laptop Saturation

OLPC in Paraguay: Will ParaguayEduca’s XO Laptop Deployment Success Scale?

OLPC in Peru: A Problematic Una Laptop Por Niño Program

OLPC in South America in Context of Deployments Around the World

I thoroughly enjoyed the process of writing these articles as it gave me a chance to reflect upon my experiences, go through all of my notes, look at the photos I had taken, etc.

In terms of what happened after the publication of the articles it was particularly interesting to see the reactions to my piece about Peru’s Una laptop por niño. My critical views of the project resulted in a significant pushback by Oscar Becerra (head of DIGETE - the Peruvian Ministry of Education's department which runs Una laptop por niño) who posted a numbered 19-part response to my article in the comments. Combined with two Peruvian media reports which mentioned my article, several discussions threads on Spanish mailing-lists, a Peruvian blogger translating the entire article to Spanish, an honorable (or maybe slightly less so;-) mention in Walter Bender’s Sugar Digest, and a total of 147 comments on the article itself it’s save to say that it created quite a stir and some good discussions.

Photos from Paraguay

I’m making use of the surprisingly fast Internet access in my hostel here in Lima to finally upload some photos from the past two weeks which I spent in Paraguay.

To say that I had a great time there would be quite the understatement. With outstanding company, a very dynamic olpc project run by ParaguayEduca, multiple interesting school-visits, a long-awaited hands-on with OLPC’s XO-1.5 HS laptop, and an amazing weekend trip to the waterfalls at Iguazu and the Itaipu dam my time in Paraguay was packed with awesome experiences.

From a touristic point of view the Iguazu and Itaipu trip will very likely be the highlight of this year’s travels. As always the photos can’t do these places justice and it’s also hard to describe them in words. The one thing I can say is that the waterfalls at Iguazu are one of the most impressive natural sights I’ve ever seen (right up there with the Gobi desert!). The massive human artifact that is the Itaipu dam on the other hand also left quite an impression on me.

Iguazu waterfalls

 Itaipu dam

Apart from that weekend I spent most of my time at ParaguayEduca’s office, talking to people there and working on olpcnews articles. Additionally I went to Caacupé a couple of times to visit some of the schools there which are part of ParaguayEduca’s 4000 XO pilot project. Needless to say I had a great time observing how the teachers and students use their XOs, especially when they were as much into it as this pupil:

Hard at work

Click on the links for more photos from Paraguay and the Iguazu / Itaipu trip.