[OLPC New Zealand] Quick write-up of 2020 Headlight series talk in Wellington June 7 2012

[Nicholas]

I piggybacked Tabitha's invite to Barry Vercoe's 2020 Headlight series
talk in Wellington. Here is a bullet-pointed list from memory (I
didn't make notes as I didn't think I'd be doing any sort of write-up
of the talk)

*Free buffet & coffee!
*2020 Headlight series first talk

*Barry Vercoe is introduced.
 - educator (MIT)
 - composer (classical)
 - OLPC Australia rollout instigator
Nowhere is it mentioned he invented CSound!

*An outline is given of the educating method at MIT media lab,
Barriers to learning are highlighted. Mentioned are things like:
middle management (in general hinders learning), walls (people need to
be able to talk to each other, meet, collaborate), funding streams
(work on this thing here, not that thing over there). Collaboration is
mentioned several times during the talk as an essential aspect of the
OLPC project.
*Overview of the OLPC Australia project. Looking at education from the
point of view of young people at a disadvantage due to lack of access
to adequate education resources. 50,000 Australian children are either
found to be living in remote or very remote locations. Up to 50% of
these remotely living kids don't go to school.
*Teacher-centric approach to an OLPC roll-out. An excellent overview
of the process by which teachers can encourage or inhibit the process
of a rollout of OLPCs. A process of concentrating on and working
directly with the teachers who are actively enthusiastic in using the
OLPCs is arrived at. OLPC teachers in Oz who qualify can count hours
training towards their professional development. Flow diagrams showing
how a slow uptake from the principles to the teachers flows down to
the slow uptake of the children. A kind of negative feedback loop.
*Pilot of South Pacific nations, the remotest of the remote in Papua
New-Guinea. Great video of kids using the computers straight from
nothing. Outside using computers, girls showing the way forward. No
problems there--presuming no Internet.
*The best photo of all is a group of kids taking apart broken OLPCs to
make working units from broken ones. Bootstrapped approach--the whole
system is taken as a learning opportunity.
*New charging station! Eliminates wires, elegant design--gang-able to
suit class size..
*Proposed NZ roll-out--5000 laptops. Barry & Alan travel to the East
Coast with OLPCs in hand. Photographs. NZ demographic make-up
discussion. People have some resources available, there is agreement
further discussion is needed in this area.

The 2020 Headlight Barry Vercoe talk seemed to be mainly attended by
education professionals, an example might be those working with
Computers in Homes. I didn't see any other geeks I could easily
discern and was therefore severely under-dressed for the occasion.

It was an excellent talk, gave a really good overview of the project
as a whole. I enjoyed meeting Barry and the many other people who were
there. It was evident all who attended were passionate about
education.