Laptops for kids

The Rise of 4P Computing Solutions for the Developing World

2008-04-23T11:44:00.002+08:00

The often critical Wayan Vota of OLPC News is defining the new wave of small solutions in terms of Power, Performance, Portability, Price

network speed monitoring for school sysops under GILAS project

2008-03-12T10:51:00.003+08:00

The Compostela NHS system showcases how to set up a network for a campus of 2000 high school kids. There are 207 high schools in the provincial division alone, and hopefull all of them will be connected to the Internet by the GILAS initiative. The quality of the connection is something that should be monitored, I recommend that GILAS organize all member schools to measure the quality of their network on a monthly or weekly basis. This could be done using the tools at Broadband Reports (http://www.dslreports.com/), they even have a mashup application of Google Maps, so decision makers can monitor the progress in each region.

used PC's for public schools

2008-03-12T10:45:00.002+08:00

I visited Compostela National High School again, and they are in the process of setting up 80 PC's they acquired through a Peace Corps project, sourcing them through World Computer Exchange. They have some Pentium 1's that they have set up as terminals with LTSP, I saw 8 in the library working with two Pentium 4 servers. The performance using a browser and a spreadsheet was quite good, not noticeably slower that a typical new desktop, and they only had 64 k main memory. The shipment brought in another 250 units for the Cebu Provincial Schools Division, and there are another two containers with 800 units that are waiting to ship.

Tom Coates, on reviewing the OLPC

2008-03-03T13:12:00.001+08:00

He wrote a review for design magazine Icon, now he publishes his reflections and an unedited versioin.

YouTube - Awesome Tech Podcast!!! OLPC $100 Laptop Episode 2

2007-08-08T00:51:00.000+08:00

YouTube - OLPC $100 Laptop Episode 2 The XO uses "activities" rather than "applications", the emphasis is on sharing and interaction.

YouTube - OLPC $100 Laptop

2007-08-08T00:40:00.000+08:00

YouTube - OLPC $100 Laptop Published May 20, this video gives a face to some of the people behind OLPC.

Exclusive: Negroponte on his Intel triumph - Jul. 27, 2007

2007-07-29T17:40:00.000+08:00

Exclusive: Negroponte on his Intel triumph - Jul. 27, 2007 As I predicted to Intel personnel here in the Philippines, the rift with OLPC didn't last. This is a significant development, which solves with a single stroke a dilemma I have about one-to-one computing. The XO design is attractive for a number of things, such as its low power and innovative screen, but the barriers are entry are still too high: an initial order of 250,000 units from a government department. The Classmate PC can be introduced more incrementally, and it is possible to start with private schools, which in the Philippines often have greater flexibility, innovation capability and leadership. Now we don't have to choose one option or the other, in the future it should be possible to make orders combining both machines. Also, I think the more conventional Classmate PC may be better in the near term for the high school level, while the XO seems to be targetted more for grades 1-6.

constructivism and problem solving

2006-11-20T21:40:00.000+08:00

I gave a talk at a conference on ICT and Education. I met Walter Fust, from the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, and we discussed a project to do a pre-feasibility study to increase access to computers in Philippine education.

e-Skwela for non-formal education

2006-09-11T13:12:00.000+08:00

I attended a meeting here in Cebu called by CICT (Commission on ICT) on developing community e-Centers for non-formal education. Specifically, they are in the process of converting 85 modules that provide training for high school equivalency. These are to be piloted in community e-Centers, including one at the Telof (Telecommunications Office, now part of CICT) premises in Cebu. One of the motivations is to provide content for the e-Centers. However, the educational goals are quite important as well. Apparently, there are 1.84 million children ages 6-11, and 3.94 million people ages 12-15 who are not in school. The Bureau of Alternative Learning Systems (BALS, which is mandated to lead non-formal education) is focused on addressing the needs of those aged 15 and above who did not complete high school, and I am sure there are tens of millions of them. The modules are focused on earning the participants a high school equivalency certificate. More jargon here: this approach is called A&E (accreditation and equivalency, the program is also called AEP) through the PEPT (Philippine Educational Placement Test). Roy Zapata of CITE (Center for Industrial Technology and Enterprise, one of the best Technical-Vocational schools in the region) also attended the meeting. CITE has been doing work on assisting schools in systems administration, I hope to tap their expertise (and training materials) to do some training for the Cebu Provincial Schools Division, incorporating material on LTSP developed by Neal Bierbaum (one of two Peach Corps volunteers who I hope will be collaborating with UP Cebu to assist public high schools in integrating ICT). There were also two representatives from the Cebu City division, Joy Young, a former City Councillor who is the cities consultant on basic education. He has worked with UP Cebu before on Literacy and Numeracy training. He has a reputation for not putting a high priority of ICT, but I think he can be won over to support practical uses of ICT to support educational objectives. Woodrow Denuyo, the recently appointed ASDS (Assistant Schools Division Superintendent) for secondary education in Cebu City. I met Woodrow when he was still a principal with the Lapu-lapu City division, and he is quite knowledgeable and capable about ICT. He was a scholar who earned a Masters of IT Education, so I believe he is a good person for leading the integration of ICT in Cebu City.

ICTs in Basic Education, 2nd National Congress

2006-09-11T12:57:00.001+08:00

FIT-ED organized another national congress for educators. It was held here in Cebu (again) last week, and Pres. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo gave a speech (which I missed). It helps that her daughter runs FIT-ED. However, politics aside, I was able to establish some useful contacts during the congress. Specifically, I set up a breakfast meeting for the day after the congress between NISMED (the National Institute for Science and Mathematics Education Development, a University of the Philippines research and extension unit, located at the main campus in Diliman) staff and the Dean of UP Cebu College. I expect they will be able to bring to Cebu programs based on Intel's Teach to the Future modules here to Cebu. These modules are 80 hours worth of training on Integrating Technology into Teaching and Learning (computer literacy is a pre-requisite, and is not covered). This has been given at least 8 times in the Philippines, both for INSET (in-service training) trainers and for faculty at Teacher Education Institutes (TEI's, in the DepEd/CHED jargon) for pre-service education. I hope that UP Cebu will be able to integrate the material into their post-graduate Masters of Education program, as well as undertake a program of research and extension activities that involves sevearl departments of the college. Later, I will post a conference report on some of the sessions I attended.

Division Level Information Technology Planning

2006-08-26T15:07:00.000+08:00

The public school system in the Philippines has divisions, which cover either

all the municipalities (but not the chartered cities) of a province, or
one city

In Cebu, there are 7 divisions, while in Region VII as a whole (which also includes three neighboring provinces on other islands) there are 17 divisions. I have been working with the Cebu Provincial Schools division, which is one of the largest in the country. I understand there are 14,000 employees, mostly teachers, and 300,000 students. I am focused on helping the 207 high schools of that division. Eventually, I hope the experiences we gain can provide a model for deploying IT in basic education all over the country. I hope we can learn what will be needed to successfully roll-out a very large number of OLPC laptops in 2008 or 2009. One thing that needs to be developed is a plan. Divisions already make an annual Division Improvement Plan, just like schools make a School Improvement Plan. At both levels, I am pretty sure there is usually no mention of IT. What would a Division IT Plan, part of a larger Division Improvement Plan, look like?

Part I. Policy and Strategy
A. (review of national policies, which are
   already supportive of integrating ICT)
B. (relate IT to the division Vision and Mission)
C. Strategy, a 4-part agenda
Hardware and Networking - connect 125 schools,
ensure that each school has at least 10 PC's.
Change Management
School heads need to provide leadership
Sustainability, including resource
mobilization with PTCA and local government
Teacher Training
Formal education
Graduate programs, including distance
education
DOST-SEI e-learning for science
and math teachers
Linkage with Teacher Education Institutes
on Pre-Service Training
In-Service Training
ICT Seminars
model of School-Based Training Program
Integrating into Curriculum and Teaching-Learning
PracticesPart II. Capability Building
A. Institutional Level: Schools, Division
B. Personnel availability
C. Competency Standards
D. Human Capital Development plans

Part III. Quality Assurance
A. Performance Indicators
B. Data collection activities
C. Feedback on quality, external assessments
D. Process Improvement

Part IV. Execution and Monitoring
A. Organizational structures and responsibilities
B. Monitoring the deployment and use of computers
   and network services
C. Development and monitoring of School Improvement Plans

Part V. Resources
A. Budget
B. Additional resource mobilization efforts
B. Sustainability Plan

I have no idea whether this kind of outline is appropriate for the information technology component of a division improvement plan. Perhaps I can work with Supt. Borgonia to come up with a more specific plan suitable for the Cebu Provincial Schools Division. With such a draft, I would propose a ICT Division Planning workshop, with the superintendents, assistant superintendents and IT coordinators of the 7 school divisions in Cebu. The workshop could critique the draft of the provincial schools division, and participants from other divisions could start drafting their own plans. If such a workshop is successful, the DepEd regional office may also want to plan another similar workshop for the other divisions (and staff of the Cebu divisions who missed the first one). Before finalizing the plan for the Provincial Schools Division, there should be some consultations with the high school heads, similar to the one conducted last July. Participatory planning is useful, especially since the school heads have to incorporate IT into their school improvement plans to make things happen.

PH Daily Inquirer covers OLPC and blogs

2006-08-03T01:17:00.000+08:00

It seems OLPC is starting to creep into the local media. Maybe it is a good time to start a media campaign to bring it into the popular consciousness, and the minds of political leaders.

Sunstar Cebu covers OLPC laptop

2006-08-03T01:14:00.000+08:00

There is also a mention of the Task Force for Basic Education of the Cebu Provincial ICT Council.

Teacher Fluency with IT for ACTIVE Learning

2006-07-28T17:48:00.000+08:00

I've been developing the outline of a Trainer's Training Course that combines Fluency with IT (using Lawrence Snyder's 2nd Edition, and the BeneFIT site at UWash) with constructivist approaches to Educational Technology (using Grabe & Grabe, I only have the 2nd Edition, a 4th Edition is out), both adapted to the local situation in Cebu. Actually, it will only cover half of Snyder's book on FIT, up to spreadsheets and security. I am dividing it into four modules, I'll post details later when they are more stable. I have also met two Peace Corps volunteers, who I think can be very helpful in developing and rolling out the course. Neal and Rene Bierbaum are based in Compostela HS, but Neal comes into Cebu City two times a week to assist in one of five IT training centers that have been set up by the Provincial Schools Division. These centers have 30 teachers assigned to them to work as trainers for other teachers. I initially target them to be the guinea pigs for the (IT Trainor's version of the) course. Later, some of them will be able to help teach it I hope. I envision two other versions, one for Communications and certain Makabayan teachers (Music, Values Education, PE ... this will be less technical, and not teach Javascript programming but focus on presentation and Web skills) and another for Math and Science teachers (and selected Makabayan teachers, advanced Araling Panlipunan /Social Studies teachers, and some Technology and Livelihood Education teachers who are not prepared for the IT Trainers version, this will involve advanced spreadsheet skills and some programming for Databases and Javascript). All versions will incorporate principles of pedagogy for children, while the IT Trainer's version will incorporate principles for training and assessing adults. The textbooks I mentioned are too expensive to import in quantity, I hope Pearson and Houghton Mifflin might be willing to print local editions for the Philippines. Whether or not that happens, I am planning to author (preferably co-author) shorter texts for the 8 modules I am planning (four for the first course, and another more advanced course). Those module texts would be more suitable for in-service training, while the full textbooks would be better for graduate and undergraduate courses in Education.

Training for school heads in Cebu

2006-07-15T17:28:00.000+08:00

Cebu province has set up a Provincial ICT Council, and established a task force on bridging the digital divide through basic education. The immediate priority is to improve the availability of ICT and the capability of teachers to integrate them into the teaching-learning process. I have been working with the provincial Schools Division Superintendent for Cebu, Recaredo Borgonio, and other staff of the division. We are trying to put together a planning framework for the next seven months, for the following year, and for the next five years. I hope that we can bring in 10,000 OLPC devices in 2008, and perhaps 50,000 in 2009.

One of the first steps is to update the inventory of data on computers in the schools. We have collected some general data, that show that about 80 percent of high schools have some computers, about 20 on the average. We are hoping the the governor will bew funding a major procurement soon, I have heard maybe 1000 units or maybe 7000 units.

Rather than have central office staff visit each school to get more detailed profiles, SDS Borgonia has decided to call a one-day workshop of about 300 school heads, where they can submit the data and get briefed on some of the emerging strategies. They can give inputs to ensure that the plans are responsive to their local conditions. We will meet on the 18th, at Ecotech in Lahug.

I am putting together a couple of presentations for the school heads, on on Management of Educational Technology, where I have been using an Indian book by S.M. Zaidi, Modern Teaching of Educational Technology, which I picked up in Hyderabad last year. I will also talk about Fluency with IT, just an overview contrasting the approach with more traditional computer literacy. Renante Manlunas, who teaches at UP Cebu High School, will also be talking about experiences with incorporating ICT into the curriculum at UP. Renante will be leaving end of this month, on a fellowship in Virginia, so I am trying to tap his expertise while he is still around.

Negroponte More Positive on Teacher Training

2006-04-11T23:49:00.000+08:00

“One Laptop Per Child is key, making learning more seamless with living, play and family life, versus being limited to school. Teacher preparation is important, in parallel with peer-to-peer and self-education,” I never thought Negroponte was seriously ignoring teacher training. Many people I have spoken to in the Philippines react to OLPC with skepticism, and suggest that it might be better to stick with the lab-based shared-user computing model currently being rolled out slowly. However, I think there is a big difference between getting 1-3 hours lab access a week, compared to access to computing and dynamic global knowledge sources 16 hours a day. Personal-mobile computing is a completely different thing from shared-use computer labs.

Transforming the roles of teachers

2006-04-11T00:20:00.000+08:00

Negroponte has minimized the importance of teacher training:

'Once children have the laptops, they'll teach themselves, he predicted, making teacher training beside the point. "Teachers teach the kids? Give me a break," he said. "Give any kid an electronic game and the first thing they do is throw away the manual and the second thing they do is use it." ' = ZDNet

Certainly for some of the brightest students, perhaps all the teachers need to do is get out of the way. However, even for that, many teachers will require training to change their approach to teaching and not become obstacles. However, for many students, especially the majority who have almost no family exposure to reading or English, I think a certain kind of training is essential.

At the least, I think teachers need to be trained for a transformation of their role. I believe they will need to go through a process of rethinking what it means for them to be a teacher, and if they can be simultaneously get assistance in acquiring competencies to play their new roles.

There are at least three important dimensions to such a role transformation that I have been thinking about. Many teachers stop growing intellectually after they graduate from university, and at least in some schools (and many public schools) have never learned to innovate in their knowledge or skills. Transformation 1): Teacher as Life-Long Learner. Of course there has been a lot of talk about continuing professional education for teachers, and for public schools there is always some in-service training programs. However, a connected digital robots gives them a tool to take personal responsibility for their continuing intellectual growth. I fear that many will not take advantage of those tools without at least some training, and some effort to build teacher networks.

I have read a number of articles that express skepticism about OLPC meeting the needs of the developing world. I think one reason that it is an exciting and important prospect is that it make possible Transformation 2): Teacher as Knowledge Worker. Many professionals of all sorts (marketing, journalist, researcher, practically any field) have seen the nature of work transformed with the surge of the World Wide Web around 1995. In many cases, the work has become more knowledge intensive, building on the infrastructure of global networks. Many traditional jobs are turning increasingly knowledge worker jobs. Many professionals, and increasingly non-professionals, have acquired first a desktop then a laptop, and the availability of those tools has expanded and transformed their daily work in many ways. Those people, many of them with kids in school, know instinctively that the teachers job also needs to go through such a transformation into modern knowledge work. Unfortunately, in most schools in the Philippines, such a transformation is barely beginning, and needs to be given a jumpstart to prevent it from stalling completely.

The third transformation is related to the OLPC educational philosophy of constructivism. This approach is also promoted in the Basic Education Curriculum recently instituted by the Philippine Department of Education, but not yet very successfully I hear. Transformation 3): Teacher as Facilitator. Unfortunately, a lot of teaching in Philippine schools is a narrow, even authoritarian, role of presenting content without ensuring there is a meaningful learning experience for all kids in the class. I suspect some of this teaching style is linked to language and communication difficulties. Once connected digital notebooks are in the hands of many students, and also their teachers, the opportunities for independent learning expands enormously. Many kids will learn no matter what the teachers do, but I fear that many will get left behind. Specifically, those kids who are already disadvantaged and have inadequate language and reading skills will suffer more than kids of the wealthier families. An OLPC roll-out will undoubtedly have a big effect on any digital divide, but I don't think it will automatically bridge the gap between the marginalized classes and those from "knowledge-rich" families. Many, probably the majority, of students in Philippine public schools will need some adult facilitation, to point the in a good direction, help define appropriate goals, to give them encouragement and feedback. To some extent, help can come from contacts over the network, but the role of an adult in the classroom, where they can actually observe how the kids respond to various learning experiences, will remain very important.

Spoke with heads of teacher training schools

2006-03-05T10:12:00.000+08:00

I spoke briefly about OLPC at a meeting organized by DOST-SEI.

Six constraints on ICT for development

2006-01-26T20:10:00.000+08:00

A group called Aidworld works on ways to spread the internet. From field research, they have identified the following constraints as limiting access to communications and information:

Power
Communication Infrastructure
Skills
Reliable and Maintainable Hardware
Appropriate Applications and Content
Affordability

OLPC is directly addressing 4 and 6, and part of 5. A big responsibility for 5 must be with the developing countries, to create localized content. 1 and 2 are infrastructure problems. The basics are there in most parts of the Philippines, but somebody I spoke to at DepEd's Bureau of Secondary Education said that 20% of public high schools have no electricity. And even if communication infrastructure is in most places (cell sites, for sure) that doesn't mean that an Internet connection is available in local schools. When it comes to having servers and connected classrooms, most public schools are near zero. These need to be budgeted into any OLPC plan for the Philippines. Issue 3 on "skills" is an area where I think careful intervention can make a lot of difference. There are actually a fair number of classroom teachers with relevant skills, but it is probably much easier to organize initiatives in private schools. I am starting to think that we should target that in the first few years half of OLPC laptops coming into the Philippines should be delivered to private schools, which will be asked to adopt a public school or two, to show them the way in terms of skills and curriculum. Decision-making in the public school system might get bogged down a lot on basic issues like accessing money and authorizing teacher's time. The list of 6 constraints was provided by hamis AT aidworld.org, originally in a comment at Quim Gil's blog post asking three questions about OLPC.

malleable platform against cultural imperialism

2006-01-26T19:16:00.000+08:00

Some of the criticism of OLPC is suspicious about something originating in a country dominating the status quo. Benjamin Mako Hill points out that cell phones are already widespread in the developing world and are not programmable by end-user countries or interested communities.

Certainly cell phones are already widespread in the Philippines. I hope that once OLPC and other low-cost educational computers, local groups in the Philippines will be ready to program them and develop courseware. I don't think it will happen spontaneously, some promotion and orchestration may be of significant value.

copyrighteous

2006-01-05T11:22:00.000+08:00

copyrighteous Benjamin Mako Hill is working on the OLPC team, and tells of a class they are organizing at MIT on how to get involved. I wish I could attend, maybe they will have a video cast, or a web seminar.

Hardware specification - MLPedia

2006-01-05T01:05:00.000+08:00

Hardware specification - MLPedia

Andy Carvin's Waste of Bandwidth: The $100 Laptop: An Up-Close Look

2006-01-03T22:58:00.000+08:00

Andy Carvin's Interview of OLPC CTO Mary Lou Jepsen: The $100 Laptop: An Up-Close Look

She gives some detail of the screen technology, and describes four pillars of the design:

$100 cost
low power, targeting 2-3 watts
looks great
it must be an e-book

This interview is worth transcribing, I'll try to get around to it.

Socioeconomic Development Perspective: The $100 laptop: A well intentioned waste of time? - ZDNet UK Insight

2005-12-18T00:29:00.000+08:00

The $100 laptop: A well intentioned waste of time? - ZDNet UK Insight. This is a long and thorough analysis, which interviews several experienced workers in Third World development projects. The warnings they raise suggest that good preparation and support on the ground are very important.

Curriculum Online, one third of materials are free

2005-12-17T13:57:00.000+08:00

Curriculum Online is the British scheme where every school is granted eLearning credits that they can spend on multimedia materials. Perhaps the Philippines can have a similar scheme, with teacher-authored materials adding to the account of the authors, which at a certain point can be cashed in.

Will OLPC deployment need call center support?

2005-12-17T11:00:00.000+08:00

I think the challenge of rolling out one laptop per child will include at least four major areas of concern:

The hardware, which OLPC will solve on the client-side.
The software, which OLPC will also substantially solve on the client, although there is still much to do in terms of localized courseware.
The supporting infrastructure and services. This include networks and maintenance.
Teacher training and curriculum.

I am starting to think about what kinds of services will be needed to support a successful roll out. In developed countries, large-scale PC deployments are always accompanied with help desk support. The help desk is often a major part of the Total Cost of Ownership, At Intel, end-user support was about 55% of TCO in 1995, although they got that down to about 30% by 2003. I don't know how much f that was by telephone and network in 1995, but most of it was from two consolidated global call centers by 2003. Absorbing a million laptops into the education system of a developing country like the Philippines will be very stressful on the teachers who will be asked to provide classroom leadership. I think some high-quality in-service training for teachers will be needed, but I don't think that will be enough. There are so many things that can go wrong, and some desktop support can make a giant difference. Fortunately, the Philippines has a large and growing tech support industry, part of a broader call center (and non-voice customer care) segment of IT-Enabled Services. I hope the budget planning can set aside some money so that

The local system administrators can keep the servers running and connected.
The teachers can get unstuck in time for tomorrow's class
Mystified students have somebody to turn to, since their teachers won't possibly be able to answer all their questions.

The load for 1. is the smallest, I hope their can be professional tech support for that. There is a much bigger load for 2., but maybe peer teachers and their trainors in the in-service programs can field frontline queries by e-mail, then escalate the ones they can't handle. The volume of student queries could be enormous, but so is the opportunity to intervene at a "teaching moment". Perhaps college IT students could be tapped to provide support here. Some of them will work for peanuts, especially if it is a way for them to get their own laptop eventually. I hope that the laptop comes with a VoIP application, then voice call support will be much easier.

OpenBusiness : Blog Archive : Cory Doctorow and Creative Distribution

2005-12-17T10:57:00.000+08:00

Cory Doctorow is a successful young science fiction writer who makes all his books freely downloadable. He is a spokesperson of the open access movement that is starting to influence scientific publishing, the music business, and perhaps even literature. This is relevant to my previous post about a business model for textbook authors and the publisher-distributor companies who either own them or partner with them. I think that partnering is increasingly the only sane option as the costs of book reproduction go down, and as the opportunities for network services in support of textbooks rise. Authors have the option of self-publishing, but to be a success they will have to make an effort at marketing-distribution and network after-sales support, when they might rather be doing something else, like writing more books. I like his idea that a book is not an object, but a practice. So an "author" can be reconceptualized as a creator of a learning text/media practitioner, who partners with teachers and students to achieve jointly desired educational outcomes. So how do we develop and implement a copyright environment that encourages more successful learning module practitioners or CAI developers? In the Philippines, the market for this kind of service/practice is currently very small or minuscule. If OLPC laptops suddenly flood the country, things could change very rapidly. The change will not necessarily result in a massive increase in quality textbook/learning-module practitioners, but the is a tantalizing opportunity that it could. Maybe small policy choices in implementing the roll out of OLPC could make a big difference.

7 countries negotiating 1st round delivery, PH could join 2nd round

2005-12-16T20:39:00.000+08:00

MIT Media Lab: $100 Laptop FAQ reports that "Initial discussions have been held with China, India, Brazil, Argentina, Egypt, Nigeria, and Thailand. An additional, modest allocation of machines will be used to seed developer communities in a number of other countries." I don't actually think it is good for the Philippines to try to join the first round, the preparations will be hectic enough if the main delivery is 2008. However, I hope their "modest allocation" to other countries could accommodate 50,000 units for a field trial in the Philippines. The field trial could focus on Cebu (with CEDF-IT providing teacher training) and NCR-Southern Tagalog (with DLSU providing the teacher training).

Open Standards; and thoughts on copyright

2005-12-16T14:43:00.000+08:00

CETIS-Patents, Open Standards and Open Source It seems that the European Union has came up with a definition of Open Standards in 2002. Since OLPC will be deploying Open Source at an unprecedented large scale, and will seek to use open standards where they are available, that definition might come in handy later.

One issue I have been thinking about is copyright of learning materials such as Computer-Aided Instruction learning modules (or what the IEEE standards call "learning objects"). I just sat-in on the last two days of a DepEd workshop to produce Math and Science CAI modules for the Bridge Program. It tapped the teachers and administrators who completed the Masters of IT Education (granted by PNU and UA&P), I think as part of a NEAP project.

The participants seem to have made a lot of progress, and were confident that they could have materials ready by the summer. One of the issues that they raised was about copyright, and the DepEd officials clearly stated that the copyright would belong to DepEd.However, there is still the issue of how the copyrights would be licensed out. I suggested that they look into the Creative Commons licenses. Perhaps the materials should be licensed out on a Attribution- NonCommercial- ShareAlike license (there is a draft Philippine version of this license prepared by Arellano University's e-Law Center). They could also offer an alternative license (with a small royalty) to commercial products that might want to bundle their materials, to encourage the emergence of commercial providers.

I plan to come back to this issue of copyright and licensing in a later post. Comments will encourage me to hurry up.

Basically I think DepEd should commission at least two text books for each subject area where not just the final form but even the source code (e.g. XML content and stylesheets) are licensed under different Creative Commons licenses. Then it should allocate the budget to purchase (at a locally reasonable price) related content (CAI modules, enrichment materials, reference books) in softcopy, both from self-published authors and from commercial publishing houses. Later, upgraded textbooks can be purchased from the commercial market, and DepEd may want to get out of the business of owning textbook copyrights.

Or it may want to own one or two versions of a textbook for each subject, so that it can license them for free to the poorest school districts in the country, and define a floor in terms of content and quality that every author-publisher will have to exceed if the want to sell their products to the majority of schools and school districts that have the budget to buy them.

I think the economics of publishing is changing drastically because of the radically different production economies of softcopy delivery. If we want to genuinely encourage creative intellectual output, as copyright law was intended to do, rather than just protect the rentier income of powerful commercial publishers at the expense of creative authors and the buying public, we should look to seeing the bulk of income from the price of the book going to the authors, and not the publishers. There will be a certain amount of disintermediation, but I think commercial publishing and distribution will have a continuing role. The publishers-distributors have the opportunity to earn income from support services (website advertising, with premium subscription fees optionally bundled with the softcopy materials, and call-center support).

Quanta Computer wins One Laptop per Child bid

2005-12-15T17:41:00.000+08:00

Taipei Times - archives: The OLPC device is getting closer to reality.

Wired News: Handhelds Go to School

2005-12-14T00:30:00.000+08:00

Mobile clients are already gradually spreading in countries that can afford computers. Perhaps the time has come that they are a breakthrough solution for countries that can't afford desktops. OLPC may not become the dominant design, but it can help catalyze the transition.

Best site so far: WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: One Laptop Per Child - a Preview of the Hundred Dollar Laptop

2005-11-30T20:12:00.000+08:00

Detailed analysis, critical but encouraging, based on a visit to Negroponte's lab a few weeks before the UN Summit demo. Large number of comments too, some quite perceptive, but I haven't finished reading them all.

The Fonly Institute: Problems with the $100 laptop

2005-11-30T17:32:00.000+08:00

The Fonly Institute: Problems with the $100 laptop follow-up Some critical comments from the Jhai Foundation, where they have real world experience deploying low-cost PC's in developing countries.

collision detection: Does Africa really need the $100 laptop?

2005-11-30T17:29:00.000+08:00

collision detection: Does Africa really need the $100 laptop? Here is some thoughtful discussion of cons and pros. I plan to annotate links, including naysayers (about technology, management, social preparation, etc.).

TIER: Technology and Infrastructure for Emerging Regions

2005-11-22T15:16:00.000+08:00

TIER: Technology and Infrastructure for Emerging Regions has an interesting concept of Device/Infrastructure Co-Design. It isn't enough to just deliver devices, you need secure and reliable data centers, and importantly you need proxies (or base stations) that are only intermittently connected. In thinking about how to deploy OLPC to many of the smaller islands of the Philippines, or even some of the upland communities, we may need a serious proxy tier. For example data could be intermittently uploaded by a regularly passing banca (outrigger boat). One dimension that needs to be addressed is the human capital to support device-proxy-infrastructure.

content of Fluency with IT for Teachers

2005-11-22T13:50:00.000+08:00

I have always been unhappy with the concept of computer literacy, which in my part of the world is identified with certain narrow skills in manipulating certain standard software packages. Those skills are likely to be obsolete pretty quickly, and don't come close to capturing what the average citizen needs to deal the IT and put it to work for themselves and their communities. So I was happy to discover this framework of Fluency with IT. There is even a free online course about it at U of Washington. Apparently, a committee of the US National Science Foundation was charged to look at raising standards for computer literacy, and they decided that the concept of literacy was inadequate and suggested a broader concept of Fluency with IT or FITness. They identified 30 elements organized into Fundamental Concepts, Contemporary Skills (i.e., ephemeral, in danger of being superseded soon) and Intellectual Capabilities (the IT version of certain long-term soft skills, that need to be learned independently in the context of IT). At Cebu Educational Development Foundation for IT (CEDF-IT) we have been using this framework in some of our trainings. I think it could be adapted to meet the needs of teachers who would need to lead the change of introducting One Laptop per Child. The content of the target curriculum that I have in mind is something like this: 1. Introduction to the coming information society 2. Fundamental concepts for knowledge workers 3. Contemporary skills for life-long learners 4. Intellectual capabilities for facilitators 5. Teaching simple fluency for children 6. Leading for transformation I believe that it could be covered in a staggered schedule of 5-7 full days, with additional out-of-class work (supervised over the Internet and cell phones) in between sessions. The target participants are HS teachers in all subjects, who will be responsible for introducing IT across the curriculum. This training is separate from, and preparatory to, discipline-specific training modules which address curriculum development and teaching-learning methods. I have started to work with CEDF-IT and DOST SEIto put together some curriculum development and teacher's training for this. Dr. Gregg Gabison, Dean at University of San Jose-Recoletos (USJ-R), who also heads the multi-institution IT Teacher's Academy that CEDF-IT established in Cebu City, has indicated he is willing to take the lead in this effort. If we can train 30 trainors this summer, and add a hundred more next summer, we are in a position to train 4,000 HS teachers who would be guiding 50,000 laptop-carrying students in a June 2007 pilot. Then we could scale to a million students over the next two years. I am planning to tap college IT faculty to be the trainors, CEDF-IT has been working with a pool of 70 (including industry-based resource speakers). Although some of them are more used to teaching programming and software development, some college IT faculty could be the best people to bring Fluency with IT to teachers and their classrooms. I plan to discuss details of the trainors training in a separate post (I will hurry is somebody leaves a comment asking for it).

Fluency with IT Training at schools with DSL

2005-11-22T13:00:00.000+08:00

CEDF-IT had a meeting with Angeli Badelles of Globe Telecom, a leading mobile carrier in the Philippines, and Aimee Tejano, of Innove, a sister company involved in providing landlines and core networks. It seems they have an ongoing project to supply Internet connectivity to 300 schools, using DSL where it is available and dial-up elsewhere. I suggested that we organize teachers training in Fluency with IT for, initially, those Cebu schools with DSL connections, and they seemed receptive to the idea. Perhaps they will sponsor the training. Bringing new technologies to schools is great but insufficient. It gives them a fishing rod, but doesn't teach them to fish. The human factor is really important -- how do we prepare teachers and administrators to undertake the fundamental and far-reaching transformations that need to take place for their schools and students to take their rightful place in a digitally interconnected world? CEDF-IT and Globe will be starting an IT Trends series of technical talks. The first one is scheduled on December 8 with Dennis Posadas, venture capitalist and author of Rice Bowls and Chips, as a speaker (with a panel, that may include me). Globe still has to identify another speaker to talk on "creating an innovation ecosystem" or something.

Funding strategies with Department of Education

2005-11-20T14:37:00.000+08:00

I have started corresponding with our Department of Education (DepEd). Unfortunately, the Secretary who first had contact with the One Laptop Per Child initiative resigned last July (Butch Abad, only a few months on the job at DepEd, was part of the Hyatt 10 who resigned in protest of Pres. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo's handling of accusations of electoral fraud). The officer-in-charge is Undersecretary Fe Hidalgo. I know her bercause we both sit on the Board of Trustees of the Philippine Science High School system, although she usually delegates attendance to her regular representative.

Some of the points I have raised for discussion are about funding a pilot in 2007, and a full deployment of 1 million laptops in the following two years.

An initial purchase of about 50,000 units (plus support and training) could be funded through projects already in the budgeting pipeline. Specifically, the Japan Non-Project Grant Assistance has about 400 million pesos already earmarked for the program of the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), PC's for Public Schools. I believe that a representative of the One Laptop Per Child foundation can participate in the bidding during Feb-June 2006, and deliver 50,000 laptops in the first half of 2007 in time for teacher training during the summer (April-May here in the Philippines, the peak of the dry season before the monsoon rains) and enrollment in June.

That leaves 950,000 units to reach the minimum order. I hope the OLPC foundation is amenable to spreading out the delivery over two years, 350,000 units for delivery in 2008 and 600,000 in 2009. We may need a number of innovative mechanisms to fund this. One strategy that is being adopted by Brazil is to allocate funds for new and replacement textbooks to delivering laptops with softcopy textbooks.

The website of the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) seems to be down, so I can't get at details of the DepEd budget, but a government statistics page gives their FY 2004 budget as 107.5 Billion pesos. A million laptops would need an additional 5% to that budget. According to page 198 of the Medium-Term Philippine Development Plan 2004-2010 (251k PDF), the textbook budget for FY 2004 is 555 Million pesos, only one fifth of the cost of 1 million laptops.

I am also concerned that the private schools have opportunities for full participation. Between 20-30% of high school students are in private schools. One idea is to for the government to provide the laptops on a matching grant basis. DepEd will grant a school 100 units if they agree to pay for the costs of an additional 100 units at the government-only price of $100 each (the commercial price is expected to be $225, if available at all). This will stretch out the government budget to provide twice as many units. I believe private university-attached high schools will easily be able to raise those funds, and this approach could be piloted in Cebu City where the Cebu Educational Development Foundation for IT (CEDF-IT), an NGO that I have been collaborating with for the past 4 years, would be able to implement a pilot involving at least 5 universities. It would be nice to also pilot it in Banatayan Island, in the North of Cebu province, where there is a major experiment in deploying wireless broadband.

For smaller private schools, DepEd may want to work on the basis of an expanded "voucher" scheme. Since the public school system can't build classrooms fast enough to meet the growing demand, it provides vouchers for some students to study in private schools. But instead of paying the schools their tuition in cash, the schools may agree to accept 50 students and 100 laptops, and pay for the laptops in "kind" through services of educating the publicly-sponsored students for free for a certain length of time. Essentially, this is an exchange deal (or counter-trade) where DepEd's budget for education vouchers for private schools is channeled towards providing laptops for those private schools, while still achieving the purpose of the educational vouchers. The private schools end up paying for the laptops they receive, but they pay for it in services so this does not create as much difficulty in terms of cash flow. Of course the private schools still have to adjust their administration to accommodate 50 more students with no additional tuition, but it is their way of investing in 100 laptops for their school. If they can raise more cash, then they will be eligible to buy more laptops at the government-only price.

In addition to national government and private sector contributions, I am certain that certain local government units with sufficient cash flow, such as Makati City and certain LGU's in Cebu, would be interested in purchasing laptops for students in their jurisdiction.

I still have no clear idea what volumes would be covered by these different concepts, but with the assistance of DepEd, I hope we can do some pencil pushing and come up with a practical and feasible model for participating in the OLPC scheme.

Bringing information tools to kids on the islands

2005-11-20T11:23:00.000+08:00

The One Laptop Per Child initiative led by Nicholas Negroponte of MIT Media Lab fits right in with a lot of things that I have wanted to see happen for a long time. I hope that a million of these laptops will soon be in the hands of students all over the Philippines, including my home island of Cebu.

When Commissioner Dondi Mapa, the brilliant and tireless guy in charge of business development for the Commission on Information and Communications Technology (CICT), visited Cebu on November 17 I had a chance to discuss some strategies for our government to fund an order -- one million units is the minimum.

Topics to come:

funding strategies with DepEd (see this entry)
annotated links
the screen and e-book reader use
fluency with IT for teachers, a training module