[OLPC-Philippines] OLPC in the Philippines

[Mel Chua]

Ms. Medado,

I'm not sure if anyone responded to your email from last month - if not, 
I apologize for the long delay. Both Bernie and myself are currently 
unable to travel to the Philippines without travel and housing support, 
though we're happy to assist remotely as we can, and of course this 
mailing list has great people already in the Philippines that might be 
might be able to offer slightly more local help.

A few thoughts, building on the ideas you presented:

>    1. One of our strategic learning methodologies is Project-based
>       learning (PBL).  Our students engage in live projects in software
>       development and networking.  The program is undertaken during one
>       Academic Year across different subjects in a trimester schedule. 
>       I am thinking that our students might benefit a lot in developing
>       applications for projects for OLPC.

This is a great idea, and one of the best first projects for a 
university club (if there are students interested in forming such a 
group). Jerome and I have been working on putting up instructions and 
examples of how to do an Activity Development Sprint 
(http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activity development sprint), and other 
groups have been working on Activities to directly address sets of state 
curricular objectives (http://sugarlabs.org/go/User:Gdk/4th_Grade_Maths) 
- it might be an interesting project to have a class of students see if 
they can collectively create software to support the teaching of a 
similar list from DepEd.

It's not just limited to software development, though - if there are 
classes looking for QA/testing projects, marketing and outreach 
projects, curriculum development assignments, and other ways to make 
their work benefit the educations of real kids in (hopefully local!) 
schools, we can find something for them to do as well.

>    2. Secondly, the Center offers consulting to academic institutions on
>       education technology.  It is our way of helping basic education
>       become attuned to teaching and learning with technology especially
>       at this time when we would like to enjoin these schools to use
>       open source systems.

This is great, and reminds me of the deployment model being used in 
Oceania right now - one of their pilots started at a specialist 
education center so that this center could serve as an example and an 
outreach point to other deployment schools, and also create curricular 
materials to inspire those schools to adapt them and create their own.

I think the first step here would be for the Center to work on its own 
first small deployment to get firsthand experience on how Sugar (and 
XOs, if you choose to pursue getting OLPC laptops)* can be used in 
Filipino schools. It would be a great public example of the use of open 
source systems in education and be a key place to visit for academic 
institutions interested in implementing similar technologies in their 
schools.

I'd also love to hear the thoughts (and projects!) of others on this 
list - we've been a bit quiet here lately and I *know* that things have 
been going on...

--Mel

*OLPC XO laptops are currently difficult to obtain in small quantities, 
which is why I'd personally suggest a first pilot using donated old 
computers, netbooks, or bootable USB sticks - they can run exactly the 
same software.

Cheers,

--Mel Chua