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.

Recording of my talk at escuelab [video]

On Wednesday evening I gave a talk in Lima's escuelab called "One Laptop per Child: Una perspectiva europea" (slides of the presentation). While the audience in the room - 4 people - was the smallest I ever spoke for we also had a handful of people watching the presentation via a video-stream. The talk itself wasn't that different from the one I gave in Montevideo at the end of July however the audience discussion that followed it was one of the best ones I've ever experienced. People who watched the stream submitted a handful of great questions via the chat and one person even called in to make some comments and ask something. In combination with having a teacher in the room who just received his OLPC XO laptop 2 weeks ago this made for excellent and very enjoyable audience participation. If you're interested (and speak Spanish) you can watch the whole 2h session in the embedded video below:

Sharing photos from Peru in 2000, 2005 and 2010

While wandering around around Trujillo earlier this week I stumbled across the store where I had some photos developed during the 11 months when I lived in the city. This made me think about how the act of sharing photos from my stays in Peru has changed over the past 10 years.

It was the year 2000 and digital cameras - let alone mobile phones with digital cameras – were still unheard of. In order to be able to give my family in Austria a better idea of how the environment I was living in looked at I took photos of my room, my house, my host-family, my school, the city center, etc. I then went to the store mentioned earlier, handed in my film-roll and then came back a day later to pick up the photos. I then wrote a short explanatory sentence on each photo and went to the post-office sending the letter off to Europe. I think it took two or three weeks before the letter arrived and another few days before I saw the e-mail from my mother saying that so.

Fast forward to 2005 when I went back to South America to travel through Peru and Bolivia for five weeks. By that time (and after weeks of research!) I was the very proud owner of a Kodak DX7590 digital camera and two 256MB SD cards. Being trigger-happy I filled up the cards within a few days and for a moment I was at a loss about what to do next. Luckily I wasn’t the first traveler in that situation so Internet cafés had started offering burning photos from memory cards to CD for a little fee. Being worried about losing my photos in case my back bag was stolen I actually got two CDs with copies of each SD card. I ended up carrying one set of CDs on me at all times with the second set being stored at the hostels I was staying in. As I was keen to share the photos with family and friends I spent more than one afternoon sitting in an Internet café, complaining about the upload speed (or lack thereof) and hoping that my e-mails with the photos attached would actually make it across the Internet.

Now in 2010 things have again changed. Instead of my Kodak DX7590 (which unfortunately has shown considerable signs of age after having been a trusted travel companion across Taiwan, China, Mongolia, Russia, USA, Nepal and Europe) I relied on a Canon IXUS 100 IS. In some ways that move meant giving up flexibility in terms of being able to adjust photo settings. On the other hand it gives me more flexibility due to the fact that the camera is so small that I have it on me at all times. And as the saying goes: the best camera is the one you have on you. Equipped with multiple 8GB SD cards and my laptop storage wasn’t going to be a problem either.

In terms of photo sharing I started using Flickr two or three years ago and have been quite happy with it. In particular it has helped me keep up some discipline when it comes to going through my photos, finding the “best of” from each series and also keeping track of what each photo shows since 100_7704.JPG isn’t a particularly useful photo title. I subsequently also mention photo uploads on Twitter and highlight some of them here on the blog.

For my current OLPC News South America Road Trip our publisher Wayan also hooked up the @olpcnews twitter-feed to my Flickr account. This means that every upload photo that I tag with olpc is automatically mentioned on the @olpcnews feed and subsequently also re-tweeted on Wayan’s twitter feed. As a result many of my photos tagged with olpc receive upwards of 150 views with some of them even getting more than 300 views.

What a difference 10 years make, right?

I can only imagine what things will be like the next time I’m back in Peru (hopefully in less than 5 years). Already this time ‘round I could have done the whole geo-tagged, real-time upload thing if my mobile phone wasn’t three years old.

One thing I expect to see in the future are mash-ups that can automatically superimpose relevant information on the photos (e.g. details about the city a photo was taken in) or put photos in useful correlation (e.g. showing photos of the same square or church which I or others took five years earlier).

Oh, and of course the cameras / phones / retinal implants these photos will be taken with will all have >25 MegaPixels, yet still come with crappy lenses and optics…. ;-)

More photos from Peru

Thanks to the relatively good Internet connectivity at my friend’s house here in Chiclayo I was finally able to upload several dozen photos that I took in Peru over the past week or so. You can see some of my favorites below and find the whole Peru album here.

Laguna

Playing soccer with a view

Using Record to take photos is very popular

Typical street vendor in Huaraz

/me, my XO and a llama

First photos from Peru

Due to the lackluster Internet connection in my current hostel in Huaraz I hadn’t really had a chance to upload photos from my first week here in Peru. But tonight - with a couple of hours to spare between an early dinner and going out for drinks - I sat down and started the process. Of course this is turning out to be even slower than I had expected (current upload speed is 9.2KB/s) so let’s see just how far I get before I run out of patience…

For now I’ll leave you with this photo with a view of the Cordillera Blanca mountain range:

Update: Yippie, 100% complete! Head over to the Peru album on Flickr for some impressions of Lima and Huaraz.

OLPC Austria meetups in autumn

After the summer break OLPC Austria is going to restart its monthly public meetups at the Museumsquartier in Wien in October. Apart from the normal socializing component this time ‘round we have organized a series of presentations that will look at the OLPC project from a global perspective and present the current state of affairs in various countries.

For that purpose presentations about the projects in Nepal (October 3), Peru (November 7) and Graz (December 5) will take place as part of our public meetings each first Saturday in the month, always starting at 3PM at Museumsquartier Quartier 21, Room D.

I’ll of course report on these meetups as we go along and might even try to set up some live streaming of the presentations. But most importantly I hope to see you there in this thing called meatspace! :-)

Technology Review's article about OLPC in Peru

There's an interesting article about what's happening with OLPC in Peru in the current edition of Technology Review. While it doesn't contain any radically new information about the deployment and mostly focuses on the general environment and the experiences made at the pilot in Arahuay it's quite a nice read. My favourite quote comes up towards the end where it says:

"The success of OLPC can no longer be judged against ­Negroponte's early predictions and plans, nor by the technical merits of the laptop itself. Peru is what matters now."

...and Nepal, Uruguay and every other country where deployments and pilots are happening these days.

Regardless of all the bad press (no links necessary) and the occassional feel-good what really keeps me going is thinking of the potentially large impact that OLPC and similar initiatives and programs can have on people around the word.

And looking at this video (from the Technology Review article) I realize that I have to find a way to get back to Peru as soon as possible. I really want to visit some of these schools to gain a better understanding of what actually happens when you introduce ICT into educational settings and come up with ways to better disseminate that feedback to developers, the larger interested community and policy makers. Now that mission should certainly keep me busy over the next few years.

P.S. The second video that accompanies the article is also worth looking at!

Weekend Review

I honestly can't recall the last weekend which I enjoyed this much. As previously mentioned it all started off the way any weekend in a new city should, by going out and grabbing a couple of beers. As mentioned on Friday I feel they were well deserved after a relatively long first week at work. So me and some other interns met up at Dupont Circle which we had been told was a good area to go out. And we certainly weren't disappointed as the first place we went to, 'Cafe Citron' which someone had recommended us, ended up being quite a good spot. The minute I looked at the menu (pictured below) and saw the phrase "Dancing on the bar is not only allowed its encouraged" I knew we were going to have a good night. (BTW, this also brings back fond memories of good nights back at my student residence in Vienna, but let's not go there...;-)

Now after having a good laugh at that phrase and basically inhaling the first beer I had ordered I spent some more quality time with the menu. Imagine how thrilled I was to see that they also stocked Cerveza Crystal, one of my favourite beers in Peru. Now they could have only topped that by also offering Arequipeña but I guess that would have been too much to ask.

So while I was happily sipping my Crystal and pondering the question of whether I should get some Ceviche, another Peruvian speciality that I haven't had since 2005, I was suddenly very much reminded of some good times back during my exchange-year to Peru. The beer, the ridiculously loud half latino / half techno music, the highly motivated dancers next to the bar and our table, the Margarita pitchers, the fresh mint that was being prepared for the Mojitos,... it was all there. Good times, good times indeed... During one of my later visits to the bar, when I was shocked to learn that they had run out of Crystal I went back to look at the menu and much to my delight the also offered Paceña , a Bolivian beer that I had found to be quite good during my time in La Paz in 2005.

The other weird thing was that I was actually quite motivated to dance that evening. I mean seriously, when does that ever happen? I guess I just hit up the perfect mixture of beer, mojito, lack of dinner (I had decided that I should really have Ceviche the way it's meant to be eaten, after a long night to cure a hangover) and memories of South America. On my way home I also met three of the guys living in the house next door who were chillin' out on their terrace. It was decided to try and get together some sort of movie-night next week, which should definitely be fun. All in all, it was certainly a very good night.

Saturday was also off to a good start as I slept in until ~11.30 a.m., oh my God how happy I was to wake up around 10-ish, briefly glance at the watch and then go back to sleep. Afterwards our new Hungarian housemate and I went for brunch-turned-into-lunch at a nice café relatively close to our house. They had some excellent food there and the coffee plus cheesecake was also excellent. The fact that the weather was outstanding, it was nice and sunny and warm, also put us into a good mood. In the afternoon I went off to see one of the most absurd sport-events I've ever seen, a Roller Derby with the DC Rollergirls. I had only heard about it via my collegue at the internship and I all knew was that girls on rollerblades were involved. Needless to say I was intrigued. I really didn't know what to expect but turns out that Roller Derby is actually quite a good way to spend a Saturday afternoon. Especially if accompanied by a few cold ones.

I'm not going to go into the details of the game itself because it's really not all that important. What I liked was the general atmosphere of the event. It of course starts off with the various teams sporting names such as Cherry Blossom Bombshells, DC DemonCats, Secretaries of Hate and (my personal favourite) Scare Force One. The player's names go along the lines of Guantanamo Babe, Trampon, Whiskey Tango (with the number "1 too many" printed on her back), Condoleezza Slice, Free Radical and Speedy Gonbraless. One of the team's mascot was this guy wearing an inflatable airplane, you can just about make him about in the photo above. Plus the two announcers were really having a good time and it was extremely busying to listen to some of their comments and whatnot. In general the whole event had some kind of 'underground' and 'alternative' touch to it, two notions that I've been decidedly missing around here in suit'n'tie-afterhour-happy-hour-lounge-bureaucrat-heavy Washington, DC (of course I'm also guilty except for the bureaucrat thing).

Born on April, 6th, 1987? Too bad...

Afterwards we briefly went to the so-called waterfront to catch the last moments of the fireworks for the National Cherry Blossom Festival. Then we again met up with two other fellow interns to look for a nice pub for the evening. We ended up going to this Irish pub near George Washington University were I enjoyed a great burger and beer. However the real highlight of the evening was watching some people who were very much into a semi-final game of some collegue-legue basketball game which was shown on the screens. Especially the one guy who got so annoyingly loud every time something even remotely interesting was happening in the game provoked a coordinated counter-attack by 5 or 6 supporters for the second team was interesting to observe. Especially how quiet he got towards the end of the game when it became obvious that his team was going to lose. Good stuff!

Today again I only got up at 12-something and then we all met up at a shopping mall close to the Pentagon. I wasn't too thrilled by the place and unless there's some really good reason I don't think that I'll be going back there. There's just something that I don't really like about shopping malls. Of course it might be convenient to have a million shops in once place. And yes, I even bought two shirts which I probably wouldn't have gotten that cheaply anywhere else. And yes, a visit to the Apple store was long overdue, and oh my God I love the size and (lack of weight) of the MacBook Air. And yes, the visit to the Johny Rockets dinner (pictured below) was fun. But still, one visit should be enough.

The evening was spent at a barbecue to which Wayan had invited me. It was a good place to be, with excellent food, great discussions about politics and cable-management (I'm not kidding!) and a generally very nice and relaxed atmosphere. The perfect end to the perfect weekend!

By the way, 6 hours from now I'm going to regret having spent all this time writing the blog entry instead of going to bed and grabbing some sleep. This should be another very interesting week, maybe not work-wise (things there will probably only pick up the week after this one) but other that the outlook is pretty good. Especially tomorrow evening's Saul Williams concert to which I'll probably head should be good. Plus I've got a couple of other interesting meetings coming up over the next few days.

Anyway, take care everyone and I hope you have a good start into the week!

A blast from the past

I actually wanted to go and grab some sleep now when I got a notification that someone had tagged a photo of me on *INSERT SOCIAL NETWORK OF YOUR CHOICE*. Looking at the photo I just had to laugh because it's a real blast from the past: It was taken back in 2001 in Chiclayo, Peru while I was visiting my friends Gion, Carlos (both on the photo below) and Juan (the guy who took the picture) over the weekend.

Those were the days my friend... :-)