From svenaerts228 at gmail.com Fri Apr 26 10:45:03 2013 From: svenaerts228 at gmail.com (Sven AERTS) Date: Fri, 26 Apr 2013 16:45:03 +0200 Subject: [Olpc-europe] Collaborate to reach the 100 minimum order for XO-Touchpad Message-ID: Dear All, I've been on the payroll of OLPC for 2 months for a specific job. I'm nor an ICT-person, nor am I functioning in the educational sector. I'm stunned there is so little knowledge about OLPC in the educational community and I'm worried about the iPad school and classroom experiments I read about. In Flanders, there is a not for profit that received money to go to Asia and see if there's an alternative to the 110 ? graphical calculator that is compulsory for 12 year olds. They found something and turned into a spinout little company that's now distributing these in Flanders. I went to the presentation and couldn't believe how some teachers are completely fanatic about iPads and tablets and don't even know about OLPC. I can't stand it anymore. I have a 5 year old and he's going to 1st grade soon and they will have NO XO's or anything worthwhile. We don't even have a sort of OLPC XO-XServer labo/test site where teachers can come, see, feel, experiment with the XO and learn about the OLPC initiative and community. The minimum order for the XO-touchscreen is 100. I've checked with Giulia D'AMICO from OLPC and my former colleague. I've set-up a list where you can put your name : just go to the http://wiki.laptop.org/ and look for the Brussels Harbor Group Order as this is where I live: Brussels / Antwerp. I'm also going to start phoning to all the ministries of education in Europe to ask them if they please want to ask me to prepare a quotation and plan for them to set-up such an OLPC-labo with 10 XO's, 2 XServers, 20 PV panels of 10 W, 3 full time ICT people who collaborate in the OLPC projects and take care of a regional road tour. Lately, some teenagers in Peru/Uruguay mounted some wheels on their XO's and transformed it into a robot. You should have seen the face of the minister when the pre-programmed XO-robot scurried off to the kitchen, a bit later came back and presented him a coffee. And we are supposed to live in the Europe - the Innovation Union (yep that's the latest from Brussels). These kids in Peru, Uruguay and many islands states have these XO's - 100% deployment - since 2008 ! And we are still not sure if we want to give our kids a 740 ? iPad?! Who are we kidding? Looking forward hearing from you all or seeing you at the wiki. Sincerely, skype: SvenAERTS http://www.linkedin.com/in/svenaerts -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: