[OLPC India] Partnering with OLPC in India

Wed Sep 10 01:10:44 EDT 2008

Dear All,
I am greatly enthused by the discussion on this very important topic. I welcome all the views expressed as participation and discussion foster understanding and lead to closer and effective collaboration. I am thankful to all those who shared their views and cared to share. Some times, we may not agree or we may agree to disagree. In my opinion, the space to express views and concerns is very valuable in a project like this and I request all to continue to honor the space. 
Auroville http://www.auroville.org/ is a unique international city dedicated to human unity. Education in Auroville made several bold experiments, inspired by the teachings of Sri Aurobindo and Mother. It is often called UniverCity as it is based on the ideal of "never ending education". We have 10 schools in the city and bout a dozen other schools in Auroville bioregion. For some details, please see   http://www.auroville.org/education/saiier/saiier.htm . The total number of students in Auroville is 700 and may be about 7000 in the bioregion. 
I have started and have been working on olpAc(A stands for Auroville). The issues (not in any order) are
1. We need content to use XO in the mainstream academics. Obviously this would take time and small pilots are needed to demonstrate the potential benefits of deploying XOs. Such deployment has to be for co-curricular activities. Getting the mindshare of teachers and get them to to put in efforts is a major issue
2.Funding is the next problem as the school budget per child per year is far far below Rs 10,000. Auroville is a non-materialistic collective. Most teachers are full time volunteers or given a fraction of  outside salaries.
3. Only 6 schools use English as medium of instruction. Others use Tamil. So, Tamil localization of the content is important.
4. Many people rise doubts regarding timing. Is this the right time to begin the pilot? When would the content be ready? When will the price comedown to the (promised land) of $100? Who will make it available? If we run the pilot and content is not ready to use XO-1 for all academic activities, we may be acting prematurely?
5. The current stand of Government sort of strengthens the doubting voices.
6. Normal issues of setting up, support etc and local human resources
I suppose that we would face similar issues wherever we want to run the pilot effectively. I invite support and help from all of you to make headway at Auroville. Such headway could help us to scale up to the vast opportunity of making true difference to education in India
Regards,
JV Avadhanulu
+91-9443797563
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Dev Mohanty" <devm at nepalwireless.net>
To: "Satish Jha" <sjha at vsnl.com>; "Joshua N Pritikin" <jpritikin at pobox.com>
Cc: <india at lists.laptop.org>
Sent: Tuesday, September 09, 2008 9:08 PM
Subject: Re: [OLPC India] Partnering with OLPC in India


> Seems like am caught on the wrong foot, but then transparent data is 
> always welcome.. for the ignorant few like me. I volunteer on a couple 
> of OLPC pilots in Nepal as a network/system admin, and am well aware of 
> the headaches involved with a deployment. Its most definitely not the 
> project, but with the strategies being adopted that my concerns are 
> with. That said, I am quite hopeful Satish would keep all concerned 
> posted on updates on various fronts in the forth coming days.
> 
> On-On!
> 
> Here's to education and the future of tomorrow! Jeez.. Bernie the 
> Italian wine sucks!!
> 
> Satish Jha wrote:
>> Thanks, Josh.
>> That's very helpful.
>>
>> On Tue, Sep 9, 2008 at 10:44 AM, Joshua N Pritikin 
>> <jpritikin at pobox.com <mailto:jpritikin at pobox.com>> wrote:
>>
>>     On Tue, Sep 09, 2008 at 07:32:09PM +0545, Dev Mohanty wrote:
>>     > if they've even figured out how to replace broken hardware,
>>
>>     Repair centers are going up around the world. India could be next.
>>     Just
>>     google for data.
>>
>>     > or are they even thinking of tagging XO's anywhere close to the 100
>>     > USD figure sometime in the recent future, which to me sounds awfully
>>     > far-fetched right now.
>>
>>     An Indian G1G1 would make that possible.
>>
>>     > Well, if it's all about the education, then I firmly believe no
>>     number
>>     > should not be small enough for a pilot.
>>
>>     Being the tech contact for the pilot in my school, I can
>>     understand why
>>     we need to get to bigger numbers. The amount of effort required to
>>     manage the laptops is much more for small pilots than for big pilots.
>>
>>     - Child ownership means that the teachers don't have to figure out how
>>     to uncustomize the laptop after the previous child customized it. The
>>     next release 8.2 is going to be much more customizable than 8.1.
>>
>>     - A school server is approximately the same amount of headache to
>>     set up
>>     for 10 laptops as it is for 1000 laptops.
>>
>>     - For hardware failures, we can't afford to deal with them because
>>     they
>>     are so infrequent. If there were 10,000 laptops then we could probably
>>     afford one full-time person for hardware repairs and troubleshooting.
>>
>>     This is just the tip of the iceberg. Big deployments make sense. Small
>>     deployments consume too much effort for the payback.
>>
>>     --
>>     American? Vote on the National Initiative for Democracy,
>>     http://votep2.us <http://votep2.us/>
>>     _______________________________________________
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>>
> 
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