Report on 2012 OLPC San Francisco Summit

Last month, I attended the 2012 OLPC-San Francisco Summit (October 19-21) and Sugar Camp (October 22-23). I met lots of wonderful, talented people who are deeply dedicated to helping children in the developing world. But, as someone looking for ways to make our ongoing deployment more effective, I found the conference sessions a bit disappointing.

There wasn't much concrete information available in the sessions I attended at the Summit, and I came away without the working network servers or educational materials I had hoped to acquire there. However, I was able to arrange for a volunteer willing to travel to Lesotho to provide technical assistance, hopefully setting up the servers for us. I also met people who have since provided some excellent educational materials for use with the XO laptop.  And, I made contact with someone with connections that might lead to future funding for L2L. So, while the sessions were not as helpful as I had hoped, attending the conference definitely provided benefits to L2L.

 

SESSION SUMMARIES

The following are summaries of sessions I attended at the conference.

Server Based Learning Systems
Part 1: Tony Anderson is working on a very promising system to provide a wealth of educational materials to teachers and students at schools without internet access, called the Karma Learning System (http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Learn). The interface is simple to use, which will make it very useful for the Lesotho teachers. Hopefully, Tony will have this completed soon.  (Caryl Bigenho and others are helping him with this as part of an online class project.)

Part 2: Sameer Verma discussed the Moodle Learning System, which is used by many high schools and universities. This is an excellent learning system, but the interface is complex, which would discourage the primary school teachers in Lesotho from using it, especially the newest computer learners. Currently, it requires internet access, which greatly restricts its usefulness for projects like ours without internet. There was talk of modifying this for use by deployments without internet access, but I don't know how far along this is.

 

International Curriculum and Teacher Training: Caryl Bigenho led a discussion about why teachers aren't using XO laptops in many of the OLPC deployments. One conclusion was that there is not enough curriculum-based materials readily available for them to use. Actually, there is a lot of material "out there," but it is not "readily available" because it is widely scattered and hard to find. Currently, it requires good internet access and a lot of time to find and download. There was discussion about the need for a curator to compile all this material in one place and make it easily available, possible on a flash drive or disk for sites without internet. However, as far as I'm aware, this was not addressed further during the Summit, and no action was taken.

 

Etoys:  Mike Lee discussed some excellent work he’s been doing using the Etoys activity with street children in Zambia.  My major take-away, though, was it took a lot of hard work by a large, dedicated group of volunteers and $30,000 to organize and translate the materials.  That’s a lot of money and obviously not something we could currently afford to replicate in Lesotho.  The Zambian group has received $300,000 to do more of this work.    My hope is that they will eventually produce materials that can be used outside of Zambia.

 

Community XS – an update on the School Server: Tony Anderson planned to show how to build a server but was unable to because he had the wrong type of memory. Tony also talked a bit about his Karma Learning System and about network servers.  George Hunt gave a presentation of the XS server software he and others are developing, which has a simplified interface, but it is not yet complete.  Daniel Drake presented a wonderful system called Puppet for keeping servers at multiple deployments up-to-date.
 

Challenges in Difficult Deployments:  I missed the first part of this session, but what I did attend was a litany of failures at the Birmingham, Alabama, USA, deployment.  Unfortunately, there were no insights, suggestions, or discussion of how future deployments could avoid these problems.

 

GOOD NEWS for L2L

I gave a short presentation about Laptops to Lesotho, and a lot of people at the conference were impressed with the work we are doing. I made contact with several people who want to help us.

Tony Anderson  has experience with OLPC deployments in Nepal and Rwanda and is an expert at setting up school network servers for XO laptops.  Tony has offered to come to Lesotho after Christmas and stay into February. He will install network servers at Nohana and Kokobe and hopefully copy lots of appropriate educational software onto the servers, install his learning management system (if it's done) and help us teach the teachers and students how to use the server and learning systems.   I am very excited about this development and see it as an opportunity to vastly improve the educational value of the laptops already in Lesotho.

I got a chance to spend a lot of time talking to Rod Weiss, a man who acquires funding for very large projects. He shared some of my concerns about the OLPC organization and was impressed by our alternative approach in Lesotho. We discussed ways to make the work OLPC does more efficient, including coordinating their efforts with other organizations that have more experience delivering aid in developing nations. He’s interested in getting funding to hire people to do this, including someone to organize and curate all the free educational materials already available online. He’s also interested in things like making internet available country-wide rather than doing it piecemeal at individual sites.

Rod’s got a financial backer who may fund some or all of this if he likes what Rod proposes. While this wouldn’t immediately help us, we might eventually see some benefit. Of more immediate interest to L2L is that Rod has connections with the southern California Rotary Clubs. If he will put in a good word for us, we might be able to get funding from them. I will be contacting Rod soon to follow up on that.

- Janissa

p.s. L2L incurred virtually no expenses for this conference because I was able to stay with friends, cost of gas was minimal (thanks to my new Kia Rio!), and I paid for all my meals.

 

Mary Dewar Honored with $1200 in Donations to L2L

Mary Dewar, my aunt, traveled with me to the village of Mafikeng, Lesotho, last year to see the Laptops to Lesotho project.  She's truly an amazing woman who has devoted her life to public health work, especially in developing nations.  She is one of the people who inspired me to do volunteer service in Lesotho.

Mary recently celebrated her 90th birthday.  In lieu of gifts, she asked her friends and family to make donations to L2L.  So far, we've received about $1200 in donations honoring Mary. 

We are very, very fortunate to have Mary's support and that Mary has such loving and generous friends and family.  Thank you, Mary, and thank you to all who have made donations in her honor.

- Janissa

Schedule for 2013 Lesotho Trip

It's official.  I've purchased my plane ticket for Lesotho.  I arrive in Maseru the morning of Saturday 29 December 2012 and leave the afternoon of Saturday 9 February 2013.  Here's a rough schedule for that time period. 

29 Dec - 4 Jan:  I meet Volunteers Mamatsepe Sejanamane, Tony Anderson (?29 December),  Kathy Plath (31 December), Craig Balcomb (4 January), and possibly Lindsey Roy in Maseru.  Buy supplies.  Meet with supporters, funders, and contractors.

5 Jan: Volunteers and I travel to village of Mafikeng in Ketane.

6-19 Jan: Volunteers and I work at Nohana Primary School in Mafikeng.  Volunteer Fortunate Gunzo meets us in the village on 6 January.  Volunteers Sherrie Howey and Jennifer Selden join us in the village on 10 or 11 January.  Kathy Plath departs 14 January.  

20 Jan: Volunteers and I travel to village of Kokobe in Ketane.

21-31 Jan: Volunteers and I work at Kokobe Primary School.  Sherrie Howey and Jennifer Selden depart ?23 January.  Craig Balcomb departs 28 January.  Fortunate Gunzo departs sometime during this period.

1-8 Feb:  Mamatsepe Sejanamane, Tony Anderson, and I work in Kokobe, Mafikeng and/or Maseru as needed.

9 Feb:  Tony Anderson and I depart Lesotho.

Dates for volunteers' arrival and departure may vary slightly. Lindsey Roy has not yet confirmed her availability.

-  Janissa
 

L2L Celebration Dance Videos Available Online

NOTE: I apologize that some of the links in the original of this blog post didn't work.  Hopefully I've got all the YouTube links corrected now.  Unfortunately, GameFront has deleted all of the files for downloading because they were inactive for 60 days.  I won't be able to keep them available indefinitely for downloading.  However, if you would like to download a copy, leave a comment here, tell me which dance(s) you want, and I'll upload the file(s) temporarily to GameFront.  You will have 60 days to download the video(s).    - Janissa, Oct 28
_______________________________

Videos of six dances from the ceremony celebrating graduation and the arrival of laptops at Nohana Primary School are now available online for viewing on YouTube (see links below).

These are uncut, unedited videos.  The performances are done indoors in a church because of foul weather. 

All videos were taken for L2L by Craig Balcomb and are licensed for public use under Creative Commons - Attribution.  You may use them, but you must give attribution to "Laptops to Lesotho Inc., www.laptopstolessotho.org"

The dance names used here are not the official Basotho names.  I made these names up merely as a way to describe the dances.

**********************************************

LESOTHO DANCE VIDEOS

Girls' Kneeling Switch & Fur Hat Dance

View: http://youtu.be/7ZdzTdqEL-k
3:53 minutes, 171 MB

Girls and their teacher, 'Me Mahlafane, perform a dance at their school graduation to celebrate the arrival of laptops at their school, donated by Laptops to Lesotho. The performance is done indoors in a church because of foul weather. The girls perform kneeling with white switches, wearing fur hats and facial markings.

Boys' Stomp Dance

View: http://youtu.be/uQuTbqcYi8E
2:33 minutes, 112 MB

Young boys from Nohana Primary School along with the principal of Nohana Secondary School, 'Ntate Kaphe, perform a stomping dance wearing strings of beads with skirts and leggings made from World Food Program grain bags.  The performance is done indoors in a church because of foul weather.

Girls' Slap Hide-Apron Circle Dance

View: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aC2BsiBdjg
5:50 minutes, 256 MB

Nohana Primary School girls perform a traditional dance with words they wrote.  The song they sing is to thank Laptops to Lesotho President Janissa Balcomb for bringing 86 XO laptop computers to their school. It's in Sesotho, but if you listen carefully, you will hear the word "computer," "Janissa" (pronounced more like chu-NEE-sah), the school's name "Ha Nohana," and "Rea leboha" meaning "We thank you."  The dance is performed wearing aprons made of stiff animal skins that are slapped in time with the song.  The performance is done indoors in a church because of foul weather.
 

Girls' Flip-up Skirt & Rattles Dance

View: http://youtu.be/mQwSLiHwbmM

5:04 minutes, 223 MB

This dance features young girls from Nohana Primary School wearing fluffy white skirts made from World Food Program grain bags and metal bottle-top rattles.  To perform the dance, the girls flip the skirts up in the back.  The performance is done indoors in a church because of foul weather.

Girls' Stick & Stomp Circle Dance  

 

View: http://youtu.be/652qKf3upTM
4:38 minutes, 204 MB

This girls’ dance features sticks, fluffy white skirts made from World Food Program grain bags, and metal bottle-top rattles tied around their ankles.  The girls from Nohana Primary School dance in a circle, turning to stomp in the middle.  The performance is done indoors in a church because of foul weather.

Women's Kneeling & Shaking Dance

View: http://youtu.be/FVMPeejCFVk
4:01 minutes

Basotho women from the small village of Mafikeng, Lesotho, and the surrounding Ketane community celebrate primary school graduation and the arrival of computers from Laptops to Lesotho with a traditional dance.  The women kneel on the floor and shake their upper body while a drum beats in the background.  The performance is done indoors in a church because of foul weather.  (My knees hurt just watching them kneel on that cement floor!)

 - Janissa

 

Directions for Repairing Bricked XO-1 Laptops

Directions for Repairing Bricked XO-1 Laptops using an Automated Python Script and a Second XO Laptop

Janissa's Version

Before I start, here's the link to the official OLPC directions for using the automated python script to repair a bricked laptop: Using the automated repair script. You will run into some geek-speak in these directions ... What the heck is an "upstream git repository"? ... but you can ignore that part.

If you're like me and you'd prefer a little more detail than those directions provide, you can use my version below, which includes links to more detailed directions for most steps.
[Disclaimer: I don't know that this will work for everyone in all situations, but it's what worked for me.]

I used a working XO-1.5 laptop to connect to the bricked XO-1 laptop that won't boot. (If you don't have a second XO laptop, you may have to install Python on your computer and then you will need to be able to start Python to run the automated script. I do not cover how to do that in my directions,so see the OLPC directions.)

1. Make sure the working laptop is connected to the internet (Connecting an XO laptop to the Internet)

2. Start the Terminal Activity. (Terminal Activity, Using Terminal Activity)

If you don't see the Terminal icon on the Home View (Using the Home View), change from Circle View to List View, then scroll down until you find Terminal.

3. In Terminal, install "pyserial" by typing at the $ prompt:
sudo yum install -y pyserial
Press Enter
Wait for the installation process to complete.  I have moderately slow internet, and this took 7 minutes.  Several times it looked briefly like it was not doing anything, so be patient.   When it's done, a bunch of stuff will scroll down the screen, ending with "Complete!" and a new $ prompt.

4. Download and install the automated repair script "d6.py" by typing at the $ prompt:
wget --timestamping http://dev.laptop.org/~rsmith/d6.py
Press Enter
This is quick.  Stuff scrolls down the screen, ending with "d6.py saved."

5. Disassemble the top of the XO laptop to expose the motherboard.  OLPC has very good directions for this step, so rather than duplicating what they've done here, just go to Disassemble XO laptop to reach motherboard and follow their instructions.

6. Connect the serial adapter to the bricked XO and the working computer.  Again, use the very good OLPC directions at  Hooking up and using the serial adapter.

7. On the working computer, type at the $ prompt:
python d6.py
Press Enter

8. When the screen on the working laptop prompts you, turn on the bricked XO.

9. When it's done, the bricked XO will boot and the script will prompt you to press ctrl-c on the original working XO to disengage the two laptops.

10. Disconnect the serial adapter from the previously bricked XO.

11. If you've got more than one bricked XO laptop, leave the serial adapter connected to the working laptop and start over at Step 5 with the next bricked XO.

- Janissa

 

Problems Repairing Non-booting XO-1 Laptops

I spent a couple days this month repairing the last of the XO-1 laptops that will go to Kokobe Primary School in January 2013.

Of the 50 XO laptops I had purchased on eBay.com for Kokobe, eight were not working.  Most of those were ones that became bricked during storage or shipping from the seller.  The remainder were advertised and sold as "non-working."  I bought the non-working XOs for fairly low prices, with the hopes that they were just bricked,** a problem that is usually reparable.  I figured any that were beyond my capacity to repair could be used for parts. 

**bricked = problem booting due to a failure of the internal cell battery which triggers a software glitch that prevents the laptop from booting properly

I'm not a computer technician by any stretch of the imagination, but I like to tinker and love a good challenge.  I had fixed a couple bricked XO laptops last year without any problems, so I was feeling pretty confident.   As it turned out, working on the bricked XO laptops this year turned out to be much more frustrating than I had expected.  I'm still not sure why.

The fix involves using a serial adapter, known  in layman's terms as a doohickey - a thing with wires attached to a little electronic board and plug gizmo about the size of a flash drive.  This gets hooked up between the non-working XO laptop and a working computer.  Thanks to very detailed directions on the OLPC wiki, I was able to dismantle the non-working laptop and hook the doohickey up to the motherboard without any trouble.



Serial adapter for fixing bricked XO laptops

[links to the directions I used: 
Disassemble XO laptop to reach motherboard,
Hooking up and using the serial adapter]

Running the software that lets the two computers communicate through the serial adapter doohickey is where I ran into problems this time around.  The OLPC directions were a bit vague here. (Sometimes OLPC directions are great, but other times they assume the reader has a degree of computer technical skills that I don't possess, and then the directions start reading like Greek to me.)

[link to directions: Running the serial adapter software]

I tried both HyperTerminal and Screen for Linux, software recommended in the directions.  Neither automatically linked to the serial adapter as the directions implied.  After a lot of trial and error, I got Screen to work and got one non-working XO laptop to boot, even though I never got the Page Fault message that the directions say should appear at the start. 

I thought I had it all figured out after that first laptop was fixed.  But every time after that, when I tried to run Screen, I would get an error message, even though I was following the exact same steps as the first time. (I had made detailed step-by-step notes of everything as I went through it the first time so this wouldn't happen, obviously to no avail.) 

After what seemed like hours of trying this and that, nothing worked.  I was extremely frustrated and about to give up, when I decided to try one last suggestion in the directions.  It involved an Automated Python Script that Repair Center volunteers had written.  ("Automated Python Script" means it's programming code written in Python language that can be run to fix a problem without input from you.)    I had shied away from this because I didn't know anything about Python, and I was afraid it would require programming skills I don't have. 

As it turned out, the Python script was much easier to use than Screen.  And it worked every time.  In a matter of minutes, I had all but one of the non-working laptops up and running.  (The remaining laptop needed a new motherboard, so I stripped it for parts.) 

Now all I have to do is test each laptop's hardware, adjust the settings, and load our activities, then the last XOs will be ready to go.

See the next blog post for my more detailed version of directions to repair bricked XO laptops using a second XO laptop and the automated python script.

- Janissa


 

Public Radio Story on Results of Massive Peru Laptop Project

Below is the text from a National Public Radio report about the results of the large One Laptop Per Child program in Peru.  The report was published at: http://www.npr.org/2012/10/13/162719126/one-child-one-laptop-and-mixed-results-in-peru.

When you read this report, compare the OLPC Peru approach and results to what Laptops to Lesotho has done.  Granted, they have a massive program and we are tiny by comparison, but both programs faced some of the same obstacles.  How we dealt with those obstacles, and the outcome, is very different.

- Janissa

____________________________________________

Five years ago, Peru plunked down $200 million on more than 800,000 low-cost laptops to distribute to schoolchildren. The purchase was part of the global One Laptop Per Child initiative that aimed to end poverty with computers.

But now there are a lot of questions about how successful Peru's effort has been, especially in rural areas like the village of Lacachi.

Getting to Lacachi means first taking a country bus two hours from the nearest town, away from the shores of Lake Titicaca, then hiking a few miles through cold, windy hills. Lacachi is a cluster of mudbrick homes, pens filled with cows and pigs, dusty footpaths and a small elementary school painted pistachio green.

The school has about two-dozen kids. They wear sweatpants or long skirts to class, and sandals made of recycled tires. Each morning they line up outside in front of the mountains to sing the national anthem.

In many ways, Lacachi feels lost in time. Electricity arrived just a few years ago, and it goes out a lot. About half of the houses still don't have power. Potable water is supposed to arrive next year. There's no cellphone signal.

But because of Peru's efforts to bring technology to schools, all of the kids here have laptops — sort of.



Annie Murphy for NPR

A young Peruvian student in the southern village of Lacachi village in southern Peru uses a laptop computer provided through a nationwide program. However, benefits have been limited so far. In some cases, proper software is lacking, Internet access is not available and some teachers have a limited understanding of how to use the computers.

Their teacher, Eleazar Pacho, hands out the computers. He walks around asking kids to connect the machines, wiping dirt off their keyboards. But many are broken or need software updates. Several laptops have disappeared.

So Pacho often puts the kids in groups on the computers that are still working. Because they can't go online, they use a program to draw shapes.

A Challenge For Students And Teachers
Pacho is young — 28 — and he makes a big effort to stay up to date with technology. He is familiar with the laptops, but he says many Peruvian teachers aren't.

"The laptops have become, above all, as much of a challenge for the teachers as the students. A lot of teachers aren't able to use them," Pacho says.

And even if a teacher is comfortable with computers, that doesn't fix a lot of issues, like the problem one student ran into about 10 minutes into class.

"The screen has a line down the middle, and on one side it's just black. On the other side it's fine, but on one side you can't see anything," the student says.

A few years ago, Jeff Patzer, a software engineer in San Francisco, was hired to repair laptops in remote parts of Peru. The biggest challenge, he says, was the lack of Internet.

Because you couldn't go online, everything had to be done in person. Patzer spent most of his time busing and hiking from village to village, often just to reinstall software with a USB drive.

"Imagine you have hundreds of these little villages that take two or three days to travel to. I mean, the logistical nightmare of the whole thing is just bonkers," Patzer says.

But Oscar Becerra, who used to run the laptop program at the Education Ministry, says it's still an improvement.

"If you bring a computer to a kid who's living in the 15th century, you're bringing him to the mid-20th century," Becerra says.

Some Signs Of Progress
About a year ago, Sandro Marcone took over the program. He says there's been some success: A study by the Inter-American Development Bank found Peruvian kids with laptops were six months ahead of their peers in reasoning and verbal ability.

But that study also failed to find any improvement in key areas like math and language, classroom instruction and reading habits.

Marcone says that's because, until recently, the program didn't actively involve local communities.

"The computers are there, and they should get used. I wouldn't have done things the way the last government did," Marcone says. "We need to be more sensitive to the realities of each region, empower local government in those places so that in the future this project is really theirs."

Marcone's job now is to come up with a plan to make that happen. He says the government will finish handing out the laptops and that it's also working on better training for teachers, and on getting Internet to more rural schools.

Until then, Pacho and other rural teachers are doing the best they can. In Lacachi, that means bringing students to the city once or twice a year, to use the Internet for an hour.

Some of the kids in Pacho's class are already planning what they'll do with that hour. Student Roger Aykachicondori says he wants to use Google Earth.

"I'd like to find out what the planet Earth is like, see what it looks like," he says. "They say that on the Internet, you can see the whole planet."