[Community-news] OLPC News (2008-12-08)

[Jim Gettys]

Community News
A weekly update of One Laptop per Child December 8, 2008

Development

Nicholas with the children of La Macarena

For decades a stronghold of the FARC guerrillas. La Macarena had no TV,
no roads and, until recently, no Internet access. Now, thanks to a
collaborative effort among OLPC, the ministry of defense and the
ministry of telecommunications, there are 700 XOs in the hands of La
Macarena’s school children, and the town is fully connected to the
world. Children who once knew only killings, kidnappings, land mines,
extortion and death can see a ray of hope in their lives. 

Nicholas gave several TV and other media interviews, met with civic
leaders and NGOs and was accompanied by Jason Wishnow from TED, who is
going to produce a video of the visit. 

Europe: The grassroot groups all gathered in Brussels for the weekend to
make plans for G1G1 across the continent. OLPC France has produced a
video featuring the French TV star Gérard Klein to promote the OLPC
project and the G1G1 in France. See it
here:http://www.dailymotion.com/video/k3BzeizM7iZn6ARUiF. They also sent
out a promotional press announcement: http://olpc-france.org/xo.

The Brussels office began this week to contact the 150 largest European
companies with a special offer for G100(0)
http://www.olpceu.org/content/initiatives/g100g1000.html Before the end
of the year, the 500 biggest corporations in Europe will have been
contacted.

Walter gave a talk at the European Commission's Inclusion Days in Vienna
entitled "Lessons in educational
terrorism."http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/events/cf/person.cfm?personid=16051&eventId=einc08

Nirj Deva addressed the parliament in PNG about the XO, and together
with Michael and Barry successfully persuaded the government to make the
XO a priority (Community News, November 30). 

Learning

Brazil: Juliano Bittencourt participated in a São Paulo meeting of the
five Brazilian 1:1 schools. In the spring of last year, the Brazilian
government selected five schools in the country to test different models
of educational laptops donated by three vendors. OLPC donated laptops to
two schools; one in São Paulo and other in Porto Alegre. Intel donated
Classmates to one school in the city of Piraí and another in Palmas. An
Asian vendor, Encore, donated 40 laptops to a single classroom in a
school in Brasilia. 

The three-day meeting included the teachers, principals and students of
the five schools, plus representatives from the ministry of education,
President Lula’s office and several universities involved in the
Brazilian 1:1 initiative. The meeting’s purpose was to promote useful
interaction among teachers and principals of the schools. It also
provided a good opportunity to see how the various deployments were
progressing.

Juliano reports that the schools that used the XO were more advanced
towards building an innovative environment than the other three schools.
This fact can be credited to several variables. However, the powerful
key ideas behind the OLPC philosophy helped these schools move well
beyond a digital literacy initiative to the creation of a new, more
progressive, learning environment, the essence of constructionism.

The XO schools were the only ones among the five where saturation
deployment and child ownership of the machines were strongly advocated.
A shortage of laptops meant that the students in São Paulo had to share
their XOs, four to a machine. However, the teachers from this school
argued most eloquently that each child must have his or her own laptop
and must take it home. The school at Porto Alegre is the only school in
Brazil where this is true.

Juliano found the children’s level of comfort with their XOs
astonishing, as was the way they expressed their opinions about the
project. The children self-organized and defined their presentation
topics, and talked about the things they are doing, and the problems
they are facing with the laptops. They even made demands of the
politicians who were present.

In a private conversation, the São Paulo teachers complained over the
lack of activities on XOs that enable the students to express themselves
and be creative. They explained that some of the machines in their
school's computer lab have a configuration similar to the XO, but offer
more opportunities for the development of projects and to engage
children in creative activities. Simple tasks like basic photo editing,
sound mixing and web page development can't be done on the XO. The
teachers’ criticism was for the most part very constructive and mature.

The government intends to open a new bid for the purchase of laptops for
schools in December. However, many of the issues that compromised the
bid last year still remain.

Perú: Carla Gòmez Monroy spent the week in country. She planned on
working with teachers and students on community-based projects at a
secondary school in Tarapoto City. She also visited schools, met with
teachers, advised the locals on technical issues and helped with the
repair of machines.

As parents in San Pedro de Cumbaza, Perú, held a meeting, 
their children shot video of the proceedings with their XOs.

Paraguay: Vicenta Cano, the pedagogical advisor to Paraguay Educa,
reports that they are putting the teacher training and the pedagogical
vision of the project in sync. The workshops for Caacupé's teachers will
happen during the vacation period; the first from December 9th to the
23rd, and the second from February 9th to the 16th.


Cambridge: Cynthia Solomon, Brian Jordan, Nia Lewis and Julia Reynolds
assembled photos from the laptop countries for tailor-made presentations
to last year’s G1G1 donors. The hope is that the real images and stories
will help inspire people to donate again this year - despite the sour
economic climate - as they see the incredibly positive results already
achieved.

Claudia, Julia, Cynthia, Brian, and Barbara met with David Sengeh to a
discuss a 30-machine deployment in Sierra Leone that will begin in a few
weeks. Literacy is a key issue and they will work on ways for using
laptops to help develop different literacies among the participants.
They brainstormed with David the possibilities for the project in terms
of saturation, target population, high school students/tutors and
possible activities (applications) for the students. They also discussed
what data David needs to gather in order to measure impact.

Technology

Testing:

1. The QA team (Joe Feinstein, Frances Hopkins, Reuben Caron and Mel
Chua) has experimented with different access point setups with so far
inconclusive results due to the currently extremely poor RF environment
at 1CC. 

Mel continues to work with the community testing team on
infrastructure/tools. Ben Knowles set up a Litmus demo and Carl crafted
a next-gen smoke test to be trialed for the G1G1 Activity test sprint.
The team also released a first-draft report of progress toward their
goal of testing all G1G1 Activities by December 25. Special thanks to
Skierpage, Gary C. Martin, Marco Pesenti Gritti, and Caryl Bigenho for
their work onhttp://wiki.laptop.org/go/G1G1_Activity_testing.

2. Reuben worked on upgrading the test bed XS to 0.5 and is continuing
to troubleshoot a bonding issue with both an upgrade install and a fresh
install. He and Greg Smith worked on installing and testing new
libabiword rpms for Arabic Support. Reuben also worked with deployments
in Uruguay, Colombia, Lebanon and Nepal this week. 

Support:

3. Frances Hopkins worked on the new Give Many/Change the World program.
Frances, Darah and the Give Many team have put together a preliminary
wiki to help support pilot
programs:http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Change_the_world

4. Bernie Innocenti of the OLPC Volunteer Infrastructure Group and Henry
Hardy upgraded all wikis to semantic mediawiki 1.13.3. In addition to
security and bug fixes, this included a number of features. They also
added support for the OpenID secure login protocol. For the month of
December thus far, the awstats program reports that the laptop.org
website received 12,482 visits per day to 62,587 pages, yielding an
average of 238,956 hits per day. In the first five days of December
www.laptop.org had visitors from more than 140 top-level domains,
including more than 130 country domains.

5. John Watlington spent the latter part of the week working with the
technical services team in Uruguay to determine the causes of the laptop
failures they are seeing. There has been a return of the RTC battery
holder problem that plagued early production, causing about 1% of
delivered laptops to refuse to activate. They are also seeing what
appears to be an excessive number of SPI flash errors. The SPI flash
holds the firmware. If it fails the laptops will not boot. John is
returning to Cambridge with motherboards for further analysis. While in
Uruguay, he attended Plan Ceibal's year-end celebration (see below), and
was impressed by the spirit and achievements of the students, teachers,
and staff of Plan Ceibal.

Software Development:

6. Eben Eliason researched various forms of media that could be added to
the forthcoming "grassroots" page of laptop.org. He also drafted a
layout for a grassroots flier, matching the form and aesthetic of the
other inserts which ship with the laptops. Additionally, Eben created a
brand new insert for the EU launch, incorporating four languages into
the same four- page folded insert which we've been shipping to U.S.
donors. Paul Fox assisted with OLPC's mail outreach efforts, aimed at
getting the G1G1 message out to our supporters and their friends. He
also helped answer some of the user questions on #OLPC-help on IRC. 

Eben also pulled together a plan for the month of December, and issued a
call for others working on projects in need of design considerations to
notify him in order to amend or append to these plans. In terms of UI
design, he put together a brief set of sketches for a ubiquitous chat
layer in all activities, which was discussed productively at the open
design meeting. Those participating agreed that we'll meet again next
week to discuss a more complete mockup of the feature, incorporating the
feedback given thus far.

7. XO-inspired songs were posted out of Uruguay (by Jorge Drexler) and
Peru (by kids) at http://www.montevideo.com.uy/notvideos_73359_1.htmand
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQiA5F6AJcQ

XO OS Software:

8. 9.1.0 planning proceeds (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0). Just 90
days until release! The focus is on deployment and maintenance. The four
main areas of work are (1) rebasing the release on Fedora 10 and making
it easy to run standard Fedora applications, (2) enhancements in
activation, lease management, image customization and signing, (3)
improved power management for longer battery life, and (4) new
translations and better software support for Nepali, Amharic and
Chinese. 

In addition, the release will include many other bug fixes and features.
To kick off the important power management work, Greg Smith initiated a
planning discussion. Chris Ball prepared a December plan for power
management, and worked with Greg, Paul Fox, Joe Feinstein, Deepak Saxena
and Mitch Bradley to turn it into a set of fifteen 9.1 requirements
(many of which are already satisfied) with Trac bugs and owners. He also
worked on implementing a more efficient mechanism for the kernel to use
when querying the EC for battery parameters, tidied up some kernel
patches which may improve the user experience when the touchpad needs to
recalibrate, attended a discussion surrounding the power feature roadmap
for 9.1, and tried to help answer some of the questions endless user
questions on #olpc-help on IRC.

XS School Server Software:

9. Martin Langhoff reviewed various aspects of the lease and activation
infrastructure, requirements and existing constraints in support of our
9.1 release goals. With help from Michael Stone, he studied the existing
code on the XO and alternatives for the server side.

Sugar / Activity Software:

10. Sayamindu Dasgupta made more progress on SCIM, including testing of
the traditional Nepali layout, as well as completion of the first
version of the Amharic keyboard. He also helped set up Pootle for the
new Hebrew and Hungarian translation teams. Many thanks to Guy Sheffer
and Simon Wood for taking the initiative. He also fixed a number of
errors in the Nepali translations of Calculate activity, and addressed
some issues affecting the ability of translators to effectively
translate Calculate activity via Pootle. While working on this,
Sayamindu also added the Imageviewer activity and Jukebox activity to
Pootle, so that they can be translated by our localization community.
Towards the end of the week, Sayamindu also started working on packaging
the embedded PDF viewer (for Browse) he has been working on for
sometime.

11. Tomeu Vizoso worked this week in the Journal, restoring
functionality to removable devices, though it's still very preliminary
work. Tomeu also started work on sending journal entries across the
network. Morgan Collett continued work on Sugar-presence-service and
collaboration. Collabora has implemented file transfer in the latest
release of Telepathy-Salut, which should make it much easier to send
files around in shared activities. They are working on file transfer and
other enhancements in Telepathy-Gabble. Marco returned from vacation to
investigate some collaboration problems while planning his December
projects.

NAND Blaster:

12. Mitch released a test version of OFW with full NANDblaster
(multicast NAND updater) support. It handles partitioned/unpartitioned
images, signed/unsigned images, cloning/sending-from-files, and
secure/unsecure reception. The performance is excellent in Mitch's quiet
RF environment, and there are preliminary reports that it works
reasonably well even in One Cambridge Center's notorious RF environment.

Future Hardware:

13. Tests of possible storage devices for future hardware are
continuing, with current results available at
http://dev.laptop.org/~wad/nand/

14. So far, three out of eight of the LBA-NAND devices have failed
disastrously (in the field, they would require reformatting, with a
complete loss of user data. Mitch Bradley identified a problem with the
partition layout on the LBA-NAND test setup that likely ontributed to
these failures, and they will be reformatted and restarted next week to
see if they perform better. Naive OS installers are likely to trigger
this problem. UbiFS has now been in testing for over a week, with good
results so far. While occasional transient errors are seen on the SD
cards, their performance is impressive. SD cards from manufacturers
other than Sandisk have been ordered, and will begin testing next week.

Certifications of Conformance:

15. Richard worked with John to verify what safety and EMC certification
marks the XO and its AC power adapters currently have, and what is going
to be required to obtain approval for the rest of them. The goal is to
have the XO approved for all the new areas for which the G1G1 and Give
Many machines are destined, and ultimately every country possible. In
most countries, this is a four-part process. 1) Establish an authorized
agent in the country. 2) Take existing test reports and file for
certification. 3) Add a certification mark and authorized agent
information to the labeling. 4) Finally, identify a power adapter which
conforms with the country’s requirements.

Networking:

16. Marvell released wireless firmware version 5.110.22.p23. It fixes a
boundary condition in the wakeup rules where if a rule's offset exceeded
the frame size the rule was still considered valid. 

17. Javier and Ricardo worked on a problem reported from Australia where
scanning for Access Points causes some mesh frames to be dropped. A
driver workaround was produced. It was found that in recent builds NM is
issuing scan commands for four channels at once, increasing the
probability that an incoming frame will be dropped during the scan
process. 

18. Deepak Saxena worked on understanding where time is spent during the
resume process by using the in-kernel trace tool to get a millisecond
scale function call trace.

>From the Field:

Uruguay: Antonio Battro spent a week in country helping to organize a
working collaboration among Argentina (Province of Santa Fe), Paraguay
and Uruguay.

Ceibal organized a great festival in Montevideo. Some 500 children and
adults participated in several workshops. The media gave blanket
coverage to the occasion. Ceibal has so far deployed more than 170,000
XOs. A similar number will be deployed next year in Montevideo. Several
ministers and important community leaders attended. See and hear all at
www.ceibal.edu.uy. 

Argentina: Elida Rasino, Santa Fe’s minister of education, attended the
festival with David Asteggiano, Santa Fe’s secretary of state for
technology. Miguel Brechner invited them to the Ceibal board meeting at
LATU, where first steps of the OLPC collaboration were discussed. Miguel
Mariatti will go soon to Santa Fe. Rasino confirmed that the Governor
Binner has firmly decided to saturate the province, starting in March. 

Paraguay: Luis Alberto Riart, the Paraguayan vice minister of education,
and Lilia Peña, assistant to the education minister, Horacio Galeano
Perrone, also visited Ceibal for a day. A collaboration agreement
between the Paraguayan Government and Paraguay Educa has been signed to
start the OLPC deployment in the city of Caacupé and the department of
Cordillera. This is very important step for the future of OLPC in
Paraguay. 

Riart and Peña held several meetings with Ceibal experts to discuss
logistics, technological support and education. Antonio, Graciela
Rabajoli, Mónica Baez and Shirley Siri from Ceibal visited also three
schools in Maldonado which received their XOs in the last month. One of
the three was a special school. They also met with Günther Cyranek, the
UNESCO delegate to the Mercosur, who is willing to support a Ceibal
regional conference in 2009, as well as publish a new edition of the
Ceibal book.

In Islamabad, Anwar Hussain Siddiqui, the president of International
Islamic University, invited children from the Atlas School, OLPC
Pakistan’s slum district pilot, to visit the university. Fifteen of the
children, along with three teachers and the principal, were given a tour
of IIU’s central library and the school’s media lab. 


(see PDF for image)
The Atlas kids and officials on their big day at the university.

Later, the children gathered in the media lab to demonstrate their OLPC
skills. President Siddiqui was so impressed with what he saw that he
promised a free IIU education to any of the Atlas School kids who
successfully completes high school. This was an unprecedented gesture,
Habib reports, which will go a long way toward keeping these desperately
poor kids motivated to pursue their education.

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