[OLPC-Philippines] OLPC Training Program (Quezon City): Invitation

[Carlos Nazareno]

> We met some time after Ondoy (Oct) I shared my project with you and
> Sandeep. I am establishing a IT enriched learning center with the Pasay City
> ALS. www.outofschoollearning.org

Wow Jon! Just wow!

Saw the website and I'm floored by what you guys are doing and what
you've personally done.

Our generation and kids these days as compared to our parents' and
grandparents really take to tech like ducks to water. The hole in the
wall experiment done in India really proved this:
http://www.greenstar.org/butterflies/Hole-in-the-Wall.htm

I've also seen this personally: I've been to internet cafes along
streets and I've seen street kids pooling together money to play games
on the PCs - I've even seen a 5-6 year olds in an internet playing
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Command and Conquer against adults in
these cafes in the evenings! (a little cringe-y, but it just goes to
show that you don't even need to dumb down windows for kids to use
'em).

(to be honest, this really isn't any surprise because windows & other
interfaces is a breeze to use compared to back when all we had was DOS
& the command line on the Apple II and we had to do everything via the
command prompt and memorize arcane commands).

I live near a squatters area and when I take the trike home to our
village, I see at least 4 internet cafes along the way in Luzon
avenue.

This is the information age. If we take the opposite of Moore's law
and instead of making processors faster and faster (and thus more
expensive or staying at the same expensive rate), we keep them at the
same speed and then reduce the cost.

I mean for crying out loud, 10 years ago you could get by on a 166MHz
Pentium MMX with 64MB RAM or less to surf the internet until every
bloody website started using AJAX and pages weigh in at an average of
300-500kb these days.

Sadly, it's just not possible to browse the internet fully on less
than 500Mhz today unless you disable/block javascript & flash.

Enough rant.
---

Jon, Ryan, rest of the folks here: there's a lot of groups/foundations
now with the same goals of getting education to the masses via ICT4D:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ict4d

What needs to be done is for all these groups to collaborate and have
a common hub on the internet and provide the infrastructure for the
groups to coordinate, communicate & hammer out strategies for our
common goals instead of new groups constantly appearing and
reinventing the wheel.

What I hope to happen is either for groups to consolidate, or for more
experienced groups/foundations to provide support, guidance &
mentoring for the newer groups that are emerging, as well as having &
creating content which can be commonly shared across the different
groups.

---
On hardware/software platforms:

For me it's not important.

What's important for me is deploying the education payload to the
kids. Whether you use Linux, OLPC, Sugar, Gnome, Windows, Mac/OSX,
iPhone, Nokia, Android or what have you, what's important is you get
the educational content to kids and they learn, and they learn
practical skills.

That's why I'm contributing via Flash which is cross platform (it's
what I do professionally so that's where I can contribute). I also
highly recommend HTML & Javascript (I'm not good at Javascript though:
I abandoned it for Flash coding because of the stupid browser wars &
the frustrating tedious headache of making content compatible across
browsers) solutions of which you have the entire army of web
professionals and potential volunteers at your disposal.

Aside from PDF, we also need good .RTF, .DOC & .TXT readers because
most freely available ebooks are already in those formats and can be
read cross-platform. Not all celphones can read .PDF, nor are most
suitable for reading PDFs (PDFs are geared for large screens).

Aside from traditional PCs & Laptops, I think mobile devices are the
future of e-learning. A lot of "Masa" on the street have better
celphones than I do, and most Filipinos who own cellphones that are
smartphones to their fullest potential (they're just used for calling,
texting, downloading ringtones/wallpapers & taking pictures/video.
They don't know how to install software, other content & access the
internet).

---
Aside from Python, Scratch, Etoys, etc, it would be also good to
create content which is cross-platform.

Linux users have always been treated like second-class citizens and
most consumer content available to Linux are inferior and not up to
par with professionally-developed content for Mac & Windows.

I hope that by targeting cross-platform technologies, if we create
high-quality content, we will be giving Linux users the same
high-quality stuff Windows and Mac users will be getting.

Hope these thoughts give you ideas that can be viable for our goals.

Have a great weekend!

-Naz

-- 
carlos nazareno
http://twitter.com/object404
http://www.object404.com
--
interactive media specialist
zen graffiti studios
http://www.zengraffiti.com
--
"if you don't like the way the world is running,
then change it instead of just complaining."