[sf-lug] OLPC work in Jamaica...

[Sameer Verma]

Hello!

I was on sabbatical leave at the University of the West Indies (UWI)
in Fall 2008. There, I helped start the Center of Excellence (CoE) at
the Mona School of Business at UWI. Through the CoE
(http://coe-msb.org), we started the OLPC Jamaica project on September
5, 2008. Its been three and a half years since then, of an uphill
battle to get the project going to fulfill its goals of early
childhood education, technology in remote and rural places and
community outreach and impact, not to mention supporting IT
infrastructure (server, wireless LAN, content filtering, traffic
management) remotely over a VPN for 5 year olds :-)

Last year, we implemented 115 OLPC XO 1.5 laptops in two schools, and
the results have been amazing. I was on a data collection trip over
the break, and what we are finding through the initial analyses is
impressive. An increase in numeracy by 12% ! The most sought-after
program is TuxMath. Other results will be interesting as well, we
hope.

This is a brief on the project and a video clip (well worth the 12
minutes, I think) of what we have done so far. I think you Linuxers
will enjoy the beginning :-)

http://myspot.mona.uwi.edu/msb/news/olpc-jamaica-evolving-story

These are *my* children :-)

cheers,
Sameer
--
Sameer Verma, Ph.D.
Professor, Information Systems
San Francisco State University
http://verma.sfsu.edu/
http://commons.sfsu.edu/
http://olpcsf.org/
http://olpcjamaica.org.jm/