[Research] OLPCs for education/health research

[Sameer Verma]

Jennifer DeBoer wrote:
> Dear OLPC-Research list,
>
> I am happy to address myself to this list and I hope that many
> interesting and useful discussions will ensue!
>
> I am a doctoral student at Vanderbilt University in the International
> Education program.  My advisor and I are designing a research project
> that would involve a large randomized field trial.  The treatment
> group would receive XOs with HIV/AIDS education software, and the
> control group would receive the standard machines.  We are talking
> about the possibility of executing this research project in Mozambique.
>
> I wanted to begin to tap into the knowledge base of people who are
> interested in relevant issues with the XOs and similar
> technologies/learning models.
>
> Specifically, I would like to know from the many and varied resources
> on this list:
>
> - what kind of other research projects have been planned or are in the
> planning process?
> - what interesting results have come up from research done through
> pilot studies?
> - has anyone looked into this issue or research on the educational
> model provided by the XO?
> - who might be interested in this kind of data?
>
> I would welcome any other comments/suggestions, and I would love to
> get any sort of dialogue going here.
>
> Best regards to all,
>
> Jennifer DeBoer
>
> -------------------------------------
> Doctoral Student
> International Education Policy and Management
> Vanderbilt University
>
> S.B. Mechanical Engineering
> S.B. Foreign Languages and Literatures
> M.I.T. 2005
>
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>
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>   

Hi Jennifer,

We did some work on using mesh networks in cars (mobile mesh) a few
years ago. Back then the mesh stuff wasn't as good, so the experiments
were cumbersome (here's a link
http://xpress.sfsu.edu/archives/tech/000236.html). We hope to replicate
the experiment with XO laptops. I'll probably post on the networking
list once I figure out a few things with the XO setup.

Your use case for XOs sounds interesting. Should make for a great case
study. My "information systems" interest in OLPC is with respect to
sustainability of the information system as a whole. Its impressive that
the setup requires such low amounts of power for laptops, repeaters and
possibly even the school servers.

I am sure many exciting projects will crop up around the technologies
emerging from OLPC. Keep us posted!

cheers,
Sameer

-- 
Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Information Systems
San Francisco State University
San Francisco CA 94132 USA
http://verma.sfsu.edu/
http://opensource.sfsu.edu/