[Community-news] OLPC News (2008-09-02)

[Jim Gettys]

Community News
A weekly update of One Laptop per Child August 31, 2008


Learning

Birmingham: The XO eXpO was held on Saturday, August 23, at the McWane
Science Center. The capabilities and functionality of the XO laptop were
presented to 154 business and civic leaders, educators, and educational
administrators. Guests came from around the city, the state, and as far
away as Panama.

In addition to OLPC President Chuck Kane, the numerous speakers included
Michael Wilson, principal at Glen Iris Elementary, our pilot school,
Prothaniel Harris, a 5th grade teacher from Glen Iris, the Birmingham
City schools director of instructional technology, a Birmingham city
councilman, a professor from the computer and information sciences
department of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, the president of
the board of education and two representatives from Mayor Larry
Langford’s office. 

Nine Glen Iris students who created campaigns using Scratch to teach
their communities about health care issues showed eXpO participants
their projects and taught general use of the laptop. Another highlight
of the Expo was a robot controlled via the XO laptop and the Wiimote
from Nintendo's Wii Gaming System, created by Tyler Williams, an MIT
student and a member of the OLPC team to Mongolia.

Both children and adults came away excited about the XO laptop’s
potential. "It looks like a glorified toy,” said Mr. Harris, “but they
are not toys. Children need to be doing things that are hands-on. It
kind of takes away a lot of the negative behaviors they otherwise would
have because they are engaged." 

In an added program feature, Magic Seth, former Media Lab student and
impressive technological magician, utilized the laptop for 2 magic
shows.

Through the XO eXpO, Birmingham - the Magic City - has been exposed to
the magic that is possible through the combination of the XO and a
community coming together to make a difference.

The event was covered by local Fox, ABC, and NBC affiliates, and both
theBirmingham News andBirmingham Times. Links:

Birmingham News Fox News ABC News 

University of Alabama Birmingham

Rwanda: This week the 11th Rwanda International Trade Fair was held in
Kigali. The Rwanda Information and Technology Agency – RITA – set up a
booth and highlighted the OLPC project as one of its main initiatives.
Carine Umutesi, RITA’s long-time liaison to OLPC, brought one teacher
and some students from the project pilot school in the Rwamagana
district to demonstrate the XOs. 

Rwandan President Paul Kagame opened the fair and spent considerable
time in the RITA space interacting with the students and watching them
present what they have learned so far. The laptops were running the
alpha versions of Sugar 8.2 localized to the local language,
Kinyarwanda.

President Kagame and Théoneste Mutsindashyaka (left), the minister of
education, visited the RITA table for a first-hand look at XOs in
action.

The preparation for the OLPC launch on September 5this moving quickly.
Many challenges such as the electricity infrastructure in the schools,
translation of software to the local language, and digitization of text
books are being solved so that the project can begin properly.
Coordinator Richard Niyonkuru is now working full-time dedicated only to
the OLPC initiative. Besides helping with preparations for the
deployment, Niyonkuru is also visiting many governmental agencies and
stakeholders in the country to promote awareness of, and coordination
with, the project.

As a result of Richard's initiative, the team began working both in a
medium-term planning for the next year, as well as a five-year vision
for the project. The plan for rollout is shifting to begin in the
poorest areas of the country. Using this strategy, it will be possible
to take advantage of other governmental initiatives to cut such costs as
infrastructure. The idea is also to promote the project not just as a
ministry of education initiative, but as a broad-based governmental
program. 

In order to achieve this objective, the government will use the OLPC
Regional Workshop, to be held from Sept. 28 to Oct. 1st, as a vehicle to
promote awareness inside the country and to attract international
donors. 

Mongolia:A functioning government at last should be in place by the end
of next week. Cabinet members, including the minister of education, are
expected to be changed.

On September 18th, OLPC will co-host a round table discussion about its
role in Mongolian education among government officials, funders, NGOs,
countryside representatives and the media.

Haiti: This week has been interrupted by Hurricane Gustav. Everyone on
the team is fine and our building stood up firmly against the rain and
the wind. But Gustav did delay recruitment of the EFACAP staff, which is
now expected to occur toward the end of next week.

Emmanuel has gathered information on the various schools that will be
part of the initial rollout. We are now working on making this
information editable/accessible through an online dynamic page. We hope
to feed the database with geographical information, using
geolocalization services like OpenStreetMap or Google Maps.

Medly and Beatrice have been working on several educational projects.
One focuses on birds for 10-year-olds. Another is about discovering
plants. While jotting down ideas for these two projects, we discussed
the appropriate level of details required for instructions. We agreed
that we should have various levels, from step-by-step guides to general
and suggestive directions. The idea is to have a sufficient variety of
materials to reflect the various teaching needs, the various teachers'
profiles, and to encourage initiative. Since these materials will be
online on the wiki, any activity is apt to evolve (and perhaps fork) in
any direction.

We tried to put some activities online and refined the forms for doing
so. This is not yet perfect and will be fixed over the weekend. We also
started to work on the technical training. The first XO dissection will
happen on Monday, and we will try to film this. 

Reading the reports from Mongolia, we realized how important it could be
to have a Linux User Group in Haiti. People on the team were encouraged
to be the proud initiators of such a LUG. They liked the idea, so this
might eventually happen. It is hoped that such a group would serve as an
effective proxy for gathering volunteers around OLPC Haiti. 

Wanda is working with the tech team as they gear up to test the solar
panels received from OLPC. We are discussing electricity and
connectivity with Green-Wifi and Engineers Without Borders. Also talks
with the tech team this week were really informative in efforts to
develop a better idea of how to address the technical needs in Haiti.
The project coordinator has just signed an agreement with a publisher,
which will bring a considerable amount of educational content to the XO.
We will have four or five people dedicated to adapting this content to
the XO. They will come and work here in the building at Rue 2. 

We will upgrade 4 XOs to the latest version of Sugar and activities,
switch this to the latest available translations, and send the prepared
XOs to linguists for review. We will integrate their corrections during
September. Two big milestones for September: the teacher/tech training,
and visiting the schools to fix as many electricity/connectivity issues
as possible (and make a plan for fixing those we cannot afford to fix
right now.) On the political side, Haiti has a new government and a new
minister of education. The impact on the project is not predictable but
things look fine so far!

Cambridge: Members of the Learning, Technical and International teams
participated in a comprehensive telephone review of ongoing deployments,
with specific attention to Mongolia, Rwanda, Haiti, and Birmingham. For
each of these discussions the Cambridge team was joined by on-site
OLPC-ers. Emphasis was placed on technical performance and immediate
needs. One recurring demand was for improved networking and
collaboration performance, particularly in large schools, as well as
power, both management and solutions to lack of infrastructure. The
knowledge and idea transfers that occurred during these calls is leading
to more persistent feedback and support loops, particularly as the
number of deployments continues to grow.

Technology

Connectivity:


1. Collabora worked on bug fixes, activities and debugging tools this
week. Ejabberd continues to give us problems. Replacing it with Gadget
is still not possible. At least Joe's latest testing shows significantly
improved (albeit still very buggy) behavior of the collaboration stack.
Guillaume Desmottes spent lot of time testing different versions of
ejabberd and our shared poster patches. He came to the conclusion that
most of our issues are due to ejabberd upstream bugs and so are not
related to our modifications. Bugs have been reported upstream. He also
started to test Gadget using hyperactivity and found/fixed some bugs.

2. Mitch Bradley finished coding the Linux driver for the LBA-NAND FLASH
part and is starting to debug and test it. We hope to be able to start
"endurance" testing of the LBA-NAND flash very soon. Passing that test
will allow us to use a standard Linux filesystem on the XO, something
that will make future development a lot more straightforward. Mitch also
helped Gerardo

Richardo port "SqueakNOS" (a version of Squeak that runs without an
underlying operating system) to the XO.


Touchpad:

3. Samples of the new touchpads arrived at 1CC this week, and John
Watlington installed them in two laptops for testing. They worked well
with our 8.2.0 release candidate, including "tap to click"
functionality.

Perú Laptop Problems:

4. Peru saw an increased failure rate on the fifteen thousand machines
they just received from Quanta. About 0.3% of the laptops had display
problems on arrival, and 0.24% arrived with motherboard problems (bad
WLAN or NAND Flash). OLPC has requested samples of the failing laptops,
and will try to get Quanta and CMO to perform failure analysis as well.
The good news is that for a cost of five minutes per laptop they can fix
half of these using the displays from otherwise dead machines.

Firmware:

5. Richard Smith fixed an EC regression (Trac 8143) that was introduced
in q2d13 but not discovered until q2e14. Now q2e15 has been released
with this fix. It also includes an OFW fix for Trac 8216 which Mitch
Bradley and John Watlington found late Thursday night.

Software Development:

6. The entire software team remains focused on finding and fixing the
blocking bugs for Release 8.2, now targeted for the end of September. We
have an alpha release candidate, 8.2-757 and are well on our way to
closing down this release!

7. Marco Presenti Gritti, Eben Eliason and Simon Schampijer worked on
the final launcher patch, which addresses many confusing UI behaviors.
Marco also spent a lot of time reviewing patches, many of them submitted
by our wonderful community. Bug triaging has been particularly
challenging this week, given the great amount of test we are getting.
Marco, Tomeu, and Riccardo have begun to investigate the memory usage
increase.

Marco Pesenti Gritti worked on fixing the remaining blockers in time for
the 8.2.0 feature freeze and to release them in Sucrose 0.82.1. He fixed
a low level issue in Browse which was the cause of several critical bugs
reported in trac, including not working downloads and crashes when
closing dialogs. He worked with Eben and Simon on the final launcher
patch, which addresses many confusing UI behaviors. As usual he spent a
lot of time reviewing patches, many of them submitted by our wonderful
community. Bugs triaging has been particularly challenging this week,
given the great amount of test we are getting.


8.Chris Ball built and signed a Peru image for Erik Garrison, helped
outwith bug triage, and landed one of his last OHM features for 8.2 in
Joyride: we now disable the wireless radio when entering "sleep"
mode(via lid close or power button) if the mesh isn't active at the
time.This saves a lot of power; there's no reason to keep the radio up
during"sleep" if you're connected to an access point, because we don't
wake up from sleep mode due to incoming wireless packets. We leave the
radio on if you're entering idle suspend mode instead of sleep mode, or
if the mesh device is active.

Remaining bugs for 8.2: #8062 (blocker), #8104 (high) and some polish
bugs.


9. Jeremy Katz, Sebastian Dziallas and Jim Gettys have now succeeded at
building a Fedora spin that will boot on the OLPC, capitalizing on
Daniel Drake and Bobby Powers’s work of last week. Jeremy fixed a number
of issues this effort exposed with the Fedora-Live-CD tools. Much work
remains to pull together a trim installation, however. Details can be
found in the following thread:
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-olpc-list/2008-August/msg00078.html

10. Sayamindu Dasgupta spent most of the week manually cleaning up files
for some of the languages before they went into the latest release. In
the process he fixed a number of plural forms related bugs in the
translations. He also worked with the deployment people at Ethiopia,
helping them test the Amharic keyboard layout. Sayamindu also released
Terminal 16, with translation updates, and provided a patch in Sugar
control panel, which lets users switch the user interface to Kreyol,
Dari or Pashto. This should all make the 8.2 upcoming release.

11. Sjoerd and Daffyd Harries spent most of this week developing a tool
for checking for inconsistency in the mesh presence information, to help
us track down bugs like #6884 and #7893. Using this tool, we were able
to produce symptoms similar to those described in #7893. We haven't
pinpointed the cause yet, but since the information found in Avahi seems
to be correct, our primary suspect at this point is the presence
service.

12. Daniel Drake continued attacking 8.2 blocking bugs. He diagnosed
several connectivity problems and solved a graphical rendering issue
that was affecting eToys. Daniel's current open blockers:

#6929 sugar GPL licensing: committed, ready for next sugar release #7452
#7609 #7887: Record issues, Daniel finished reverting gstreamer in
joyride and plan to release a new Record activity today (fixing all
these bugs) Next week Daniel plans to investigate why one of Kim's
laptops cannot rotate the screen (maybe a key mapping issue, since
command-line xrandr works) and work on more blockers.. suggestions
appreciated, Daniel may start with #8022 (X crashes when you go to the
wiki hardware page).

Some interesting bugs for people to ponder over (currently not
blockers): #8206 - os.fork() fails!?! #8104 - we are losing D-Bus
messages, causing connectivity failures. Maybe we are also losing them
in other places, negatively impacting (e.g.) collaboration? 

13.Erik Garrison spent the week working in Lima with the Peruvian
deployment team. He assisted with their questions as they assembled and
tested changes in their activity set, and worked to improve future
communication between the Ministry of Education and our home office. He
is currently in Montevideo. He will attend the first session of the
Ceibal Jam tomorrow.


School Server (XS):

14. Martin Langhoff and Douglas Bagnall released XS-0.4, with better
DS-backup support (XO backup to XS), OS upgrade services (for the XOs)
and better upgrades across versions of the XS. This version is now
recommended as it is easy to upgrade to the next new release (ie, XS-0.5
when it comes out).

15. Douglas has been working on an "initial activation server" is ready
to be released as an additional package to XS-0.4 and will be announced
soon. An "activities installation/upgrade server" is also in the works
and will probably work as an optional package for XS-0.4.

16. Work on a Fedora9-based XS is fairly advanced -- 'feature' packages
install and work. and the main system configuration is working well. The
main challenge is in the networking setup. Martin Langhoff has been
working on this with invaluable help from Jerry Vonau, and things are
fairly advanced. It is very likely that xs-0.5 will be based on Fedora
9.

Support:

17. Reuben Caron worked with the deployments in Rwanda, Ethiopia and
Mongolia. He continued testing new builds, working with customization
keys and language packs, and troubleshooting Amharic Keyboard issues. He
installed and began testing with the new XS.4 build and will be trying
the primary/auxiliary configurations in the near future.

18. Henry Hardy reports that volunteers from the community have been
actively participating in administering services such as the RT ticket
tracker, Trac and git, and in consulting on network and software
configuration for some of our public facing servers. The Volunteer
Infrastructure Group wiki page is found at
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC:Volunteer_Infrastructure_Group.

19. Adam Holt and Brian Jordan worked in Austin all week on the
FLOSS/OLPC/Sugar Book Sprint, creating documentation to help improve
this year's give 1Get 1 experience. Thanks to a dozen people who
contributed intensively this week from Austin. We published a majordraft
early on the evening of August 29: http://en.flossmanuals.net/XO.
http://en.flossmanuals.net/Sugar. Please help further revise with the
beginning learner in mind. Photos and critical explanations will provide
both the Give1Get1 recipients and the general Sugar audiences with the
8.2 release!

20.This week, Brian continued organizing the Physics Jam, 
Info-

Jam update blog: http://physicsjam.blogspot.com/
Wiki with jam info and schedule: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Physics_Jam
Live and auto-recorded video: http://www.justin.tv/physicsjam


Coverage-

Slashdot:
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/18/2258228&from=rss
Kotaku: http://kotaku.com/5039115/olpc-physics-game-jam
Bullet 3D Physics Engine
blog:http://www.bulletphysics.com/Bullet/wordpress/uncategorized/olpc-physics-game-jam

OLPCNews:
http://www.olpcnews.com/content/games/olpc_physics_games_jam_wants_you.html

Brian also went to the doc sprint in Austin, TX and edited, screen
shotted/diagrammed and documented his XO until it was too tired to
continue (or maybe that was just it running out of battery).


Testing:


21. Joe Feinstein and Frances Hopkins focused test efforts on builds
8.2-754 and 8.2-757. The latest has shown to become our real alpha
release candidate. Thirty plus laptops connected to a school server
shared activities peacefully over many hours. A ten-laptop test bed
shared activities over the simple mesh. Joe and Michael Stone are
working on approaches to organizing "community testing" of XOs. 

22. Walter Bender's sugar digests can be found at:
http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-August/007950.html and
http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-September/008068.html


>From the Field

Landlocked Mali is vast – nearly twice the size of Texas – remote and
impoverished. Half the West African country’s 12 million citizens are
under 16 years of age, and illiteracy estimates run as high as 70
percent. Mali, in short, is ideal for an XO deployment. 

In mid-July, 30 machines donated by Laptopmagazine arrived in the little
Mali village of N’tentou, which is within the larger city of
Ouéléssébougou, about 25 miles south of the capital, Bamako. There,
Salimata Fandjalen Bangoura, a former Laptopemployee, took charge. Her
report:

“The eight-week program began with the teacher and volunteer training.
They had no previous experience or knowledge in computer use, so it was
necessary to familiarize them with the XO and computer technology before
they took on the students. This was very important to help the teachers
feel more comfortable teaching the students and answering their many
questions.

A group of girls strolls home with their machines.

“The first few days there was no electricity in the school, so the XOs
died pretty early in the day. When the electricity was finally
installed, the XOs were charged in the classroom. So far, the most
popular activities are Chat, Write, Record, Calculate and Memorize. The
students are learning very fast, and are very appreciative of the
opportunity. They even want to have sessions on the weekends. They share
what they learn and know with their families, and the demand for an
adult program is very high. Students who are not in the program flock to
the school courtyard and windows every day. They are eager for their
chance to come and learn how to use a computer.”

OLPC so far is not widely known in Mali, a situation Salimata and the
OLPC team hope to remedy later this year with a demonstration tour of
the country. They are hoping to find financial support for a
second-stage deployment, 1600 laptops – with Internet - in two local
schools. 

For more, go to
http://blog.laptopmag.com/olpc-mali-village-teachers-learn-to-use-the-xo

These boys came to school early to get extra time with their laptops.

“We want to inform and educate people on the potential of the XO,” she
writes, “and what it could mean for the educational system in Mali. I
believe this would be important in raising awareness and gaining support
within the country.”

Nigeria: Michael Tempel and Jacqueline Karaaslanian of Schlumberger
Excellence in Educational Development (SEED, seed.slb.com) visited 1CC
to meet with David Cavallo, Robert Fadel, and many members of the OLPC
learning, technical and international teams. The gathering followed on a
launch call to plan the deployment of the 6600 XOs being donated to
Nigeria by Rusal (Weekend, August 17, 2008). SEED supports hundreds of
schools worldwide – including nearly a dozen in Nigeria - by leveraging
in-country staff. The plan is for SEED to be the deployment team in
Nigeria. Planning and school selection will be done in concert with OLPC
Nigeria. 

Pakistan:At the invitation of the ministry of education, Habib Khan and
his team organized a one-day workshop for a select group of 25 school
principals and district education officers who run primary schools in
the public sector. Habib opened the workshop with a discussion of the
problems with basic education in Pakistan. These begin with issues of
access and the quality of education itself, including the lack of
curricula to keep pupils excited and involved in their learning,
teachers motivated, and parents satisfied with their children’s
progress. 

He also explained constructionism versus instructionism, and what OLPC
is and how it triggers learning. Videos on OLPC deployment and the
Pakistani pilot greatly motivated the participants. 

Salman and Waqas then provided hands-on experience to the participants,
who were deeply pleased with the Urdu XO. They browsed through different
activities, such as School Bag and Learn English, and shared activities
via the mesh.  The day ended with pledges from the participants to do
whatever possible for deployment of OLPC in schools. 

Software development: The Tarana Activity was created at the request of
the children and teachers, who wanted a true Pakistani children’s
laptop. This activity contains the National Anthem of Pakistan in
addition to popular other patriotic songs.

While designing this activity we had guidelines provided by teachers
that Tam Tam provides a best platform for children make different tunes
based on these songs.” 

http://wiki.laptop.org/images/f/f2/Trana-1.xo

Learn English Update (Content Bundle):

Iffat, a volunteer, added three more units to the Learn English Content
Bundle, which is quickly reaching completion. 

New units in the bundle include:

      * Countable nouns
      * Directions and their usage in sentences
      * Travel and Transportation

Learn English Content Bundle Ver 2 can be downloaded from:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Image:LearnEnglish_Ver_2.xol

Pakistan’s first pilot project, Atlas Public School, will reopen in a
rented building as an afternoon school for slum-area Afghan children
under make-shift arrangement with Karakoram Public School, which is a
morning shift school.

Habib writes: “It is pleasing to note that the school management decided
to give each child a school uniform. With this new outlook, their self
esteem has greatly improved. The classrooms are better furnished. The
children think that OLPC has brought them good luck in the form of new
school building and school uniforms and they are very excited. 

We are going to set up an OLPC lab at this school so that children of
both schools can benefit from the XO laptops. An Internet connection
even is possible, because the building has a telephone line. 

“The principal has asked us to hold a teacher preparation workshop so
when the instructors repatriate to Afghanistan they can carry with them
constructivist learning techniques to be employed in their homeland
schools.” 

Habib also recently presented an XO demonstration to Plan Pakistan, an
NGO working for the development of child education and health in
Pakistan, including the tribal areas and earthquake-damaged regions 

“The team included their educational advisor, learning advisor and IT
manager,” Habib writes. “They were very excited to hold an XO in their
hands as they have already seen the picture of XO in the Internet. We
gave them a demonstration from the educational perspective to the more
technical specification of the laptop, particularly its rugged design
that is most suitable for the areas which they are active and running
schools. 

“The discussion concluded with an agreement for Plan Pakistan to visit
our pilot sites to observe firsthand the impact the machines are having
on the students’ progress. We are hopeful that Plan Pakistan will place
orders.” 



-- 
Jim Gettys <jg at laptop.org>
One Laptop Per Child
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