OLPC Project to distribute 100,000 more laptops

Kagugu Primary School boys try to take photographs with one of the Lap tops given to them. The New Times / File.

OLPC:Five schools per district covered

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project is set to receive 100,000 more laptops in a bid to ensure that all 416 administrative sectors in the country have an OLPC-enabled school.

The project that was launched in 2008 by President Paul Kagame has seen about 80,000 laptops distributed in 145 schools countrywide.

“We will receive an additional 100,000 laptops in May 2012,” Nkubito Bakuramutsa, the OLPC Coordinator in the Ministry of Education told The New Times in an interview yesterday.

He explained that the first phase that covered five schools per district was soon coming to an end.

“We are targeting to complete the first phase by the end of March. Now that all districts are covered, we are moving to sectors. We want to ensure that all 416 sectors countrywide have an OLPC enabled school,” he asserted.

Commenting on the rollout of electricity in schools where there is no power, Bakuramutsa said they had an approach that varied depending on the location of the school.

“For schools that are far from the grid, we are working closely with the project in charge of electricity rollout in the Ministry of Infrastructure to install solar energy. Closer to the grid, we are working with district officers and Energy, Water and Sanitation Authority (EWSA) to complete the connection of schools to the national grid,” he explained.

“This is an ongoing process, but for the current phase, we should have all selected OLPC schools connected to power by June 2012. The sector level deployment will see schools connected faster given the experience we developed in the first phase.

Nkubito pointed out that the use of laptops on a daily basis in all schools was going to drastically increase with the current deployment of servers in schools. They will enable all lessons to be covered through digital courses.

OLPC Project has also trained 1,500 teachers and head of schools and is targeting a second round of training which will cover another 1,200.

Whereas government-supported schools are given the custom-made computers free of charge, there is also another arrangement where private schools buy them at a subsidised price of $200 (approx. 120,000).

Speaking to The New Times, Jeanne d’Arc Twambajemariya, the Director of Etoile Rubengera in Karongi District, Western Province, said OLPC had enabled students to learn with ease.

“Our school is not government owned and thus not among the beneficiaries. In partnership with parents, we have purchased 31 laptops,” she said.

“The laptops have improved our pupils’ knowledge in the use of ICT tools, but they are very few compared to the number of children we have. We have written to the OLPC project requesting them to assist us with more laptops if possible.”

According to Theogene Sibomana, the Director of Camp Kigali School, children have learnt how to use various applications using laptops.

“They are interested in the use of laptops and this has led us to double the time kids spend on them in school,” he noted.

 

Geographical distribution of OLPC laptops countrywide

Since 2009, Rwandan Government through its  One Laptop Per Child program is deploying countrywide the learning laptops to primary aged students, the target is to reach each Rwandan student in grade four of primary school. This distribution is only free to public schools. The deployment is being done following equitable geographical distribution, both rural and urban. At least five primary schools in each district received laptops to each child from grade four to six (P4,P5 & P6). At the end of 2011, more than 141 schools countrywide were benefiting this program, among them 12 private schools mostly located in three districts of Kigali city privately bought laptops through ministry of education. On this Google map, you find the exact location of schools with laptops, each yellow icon represents a school and shows  their respective number of laptops.

This deployment follows or quickly being followed by  deployment of basic infrastructure like electricity or solar energy, internet connectivity, school server for content and anti-theft protection. For capacity building ,a stream of teacher trainings on how to use these laptops in teaching have been carried out by a special team trained for this purpose.

Learning theories: Origin of Constructionism as OLPC learning theory.

Part I. Jean Piaget And Constructivism ” theory of knowing”

Who is Jean Piaget?Jean Piaget, (9 August 1896 – 16 September 1980) was a French-speaking Swiss developmental psychologist and philosopher known for his epistemological studies with children. His theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together called “genetic epistemology”.

Piaget placed great importance on the education of children. As the Director of the International Bureau of Education, he declared in 1934 that “only education is capable of saving our societies from possible collapse, whether violent, or gradual.

Piaget created the International Center for Genetic Epistemology in Geneva in 1955 and directed it until 1980. According to Ernst Von Glasersfeld, Jean Piaget is “the great pioneer of the constructivism theory of knowing.

Piaget and Constructivism

Piaget’s theory provides a solid framework for understanding children’s ways of doing and thinking at different levels of their development. It gives us a precious window into what children are generally interested in and capable of at different ages.

To Piaget, what’s more, children not only have own views of the world (which differ from those of adults), but these views are extremely coherent and robust. They are stubborn, if you wish, not easy to shake. Children in this sense are not incomplete adults. Their ways of doing and thinking have an integrity, a “logic” of its own, that is mostly well suited to their current needs and possibilities. This is not to say that children’s views of the world, as well as of themselves, do not change through contact with others and with things.

The viewsare continually evolving. Yet, knowledge, Piaget tells us, expands and plateaus from within, and according to complex laws of self-organisation. To conclude, for a child—or an adult—to abandon a current working theory, or believe system, requires more than being exposed to a better theory. Conceptual changes in children, like theory changes in scientists, emerge as a result of people’s action- in-the-world, or experience, in conjunction with a host of ‘hidden’ processes at play to equilibrate, or viably compensate, for surface perturbations

The implications of such a view for education are trifold:

1. Teaching is always indirect. Kids don’t just take in what’s being said. Instead, they interpret what they hear in the light of their own knowledge and experience. They transform the input.

2 The transmission model, or conduit metaphor, of human communication won’t do. To Piaget, knowledge is not information to be delivered at one end, and encoded, memorized, retrieved, and applied at the other end. Instead, knowledge is experience that is acquired through interaction with the
world, people and things.

3. A theory of learning that ignores resistances to learning misses the point. Piaget shows that indeed kids have good reasons not to abandon their views in the light of external perturbations. Conceptual change has almost a life of its own.
While capturing what is common in children’s thinking at different developmental stages—and describing how this commonality evolves over time— Piaget’s theory tends to overlook the role of context, uses, and media, as well as the importance of individual preferences or styles, in human learning and development . That’s where Papert’s “constructionism” comes in handy… To be continued later.

Seymour Papert and Constuctionism learn by doing theory 

Seymour Papert of Massachusetts Imnstitute of Technologies developed a heory of learning based upon Piaget’s constructivism. Note that Papert worked with Piaget in Geneva in the late 1950’ies and early 1960’ies. In his own words: “Constructionism—the N word as opposed to the V word— shares contructivism’s view of learning as “building knowledge structures”through progressive internalization of actions… It then adds the idea that this happens especially felicitously in a context where the learner is consciously engaged in constructing a public entity, whether it’s a sand castle on the beach or a theory of the universe ( Papert, 1991, p.1) Because of its greater focus on learning through making rather than overall cognitive potentials, Papert’s approach helps us understand how ideas get formed

and transformed when expressed through different media, when actualized in particular contexts, when worked out by individual minds. The emphasis shifts from universals to individual learners’ conversation with their own favorite representations, artifacts, or objects-to-think with.

To Papert, projecting out our inner feelings and ideas is a key to learning.

Expressing ideas makes them tangible and shareable which, in turn, informs, i.e., shapes and sharpens these ideas, and helps us communicate with others through our expressions. The cycle of self-directed learning is an iterative process by which learners invent for themselves the tools and mediations that best support the exploration of what they most care about. Learners, young and old, are “word-

makers,” in Nelson Goodman’s sense.

Stressing the importance of externalizations as a means to augment the unaided mind is not new. Vygotsky has spent his entire life studying the role of cultural artifacts—tools, language, people—as a resource for drawing the best out of every person’s cognitive potential. So have many other researchers in the socio- constructivist tradition. The difference, as I see it, lays in 3 things:

1. In the role such external aids are meant to play at higher levels of a person’s development,
2. In the types of external aids, or media, studied (Papert focuses on digital media and computer-based technologies) and more important, 3. In the type of initiative the learner takes in the design of her own “objects to think with”.

To Papert, knowledge, even in adult experts, remains essentially grounded in contexts, and shaped by uses, and the use of external supports and mediation remains, in his mind, essential to expand the potentials of the human mind—at any level of their development. Papert’s constructionism, in other words, is both more situated more pragmatic than Piaget’s constructivism.

What are then the differences between both theories ( Constructivism Vesus Constructionism)?

To conclusion: Piaget & Papert: Similar Goals, Different Means Piaget and Papert are both constructivists in that they view children as the builders of their own cognitive tools, as well as of their external realities. For
them, knowledge and the world are both constructed and constantly reconstructed through personal experience. Each gains existence and form through the construction of the other. Knowledge is not merely a commodity to be transmitted, encoded, retained, and re-applied, but a personal experience to beconstructed.

Similarily, the world is not just sitting out there waiting to be to be uncovered, but gets progressively shaped and transformed through the child’s, or the scientist’s, personal experience. Piaget and Papert are also both developmentalists in that they share an incremental view of knowledge construction. The common objective is to highlight the processes by which people outgrow their current views of the world, and construct deeper understandings about themselves and their environment. In their empirical investigations, Piaget and Papert both study the conditions under which learners are likely to maintain or change their theories of a given
phenomenon through interacting with it during a significant period of time. Despite these important convergences, the approaches of the two thinkers nonetheless differ. Understanding these differences requires a clarification of what each thinker means by intelligence, and of how he chooses to study it.
In appearance, both Piaget and Papert define intelligence as adaptation, or the ability to maintain a balance between stability and change, closure and 7 openess, continuity and diversity, or, in Piaget’s words, between assimilation and accommodation.

And both see psychological theories as attempts to model how people handle such difficult balances. At a deeper level, however, the difference is that Piaget’s interest was mainly in the construction of internal stability (la conservation et la reorganisation des acquis), whereas Papert is more interested in the dynamics of change (la decouverte de nouveaute). Allow me to elaborate: Piaget’s theory relates how children become progressively detached from the world of concrete objects and local contingencies, gradually becoming able to
mentally manipulate symbolic objects within a realm of hypothetical worlds. He studied children’s increasing ability to extract rules from empirical regularities and to build cognitive invariants. He emphasized the importance of such cognitive invariants as means of interpreting and organizing the world. One could say that
Piaget’s interest was in the assimilation pole. His theory emphasizes all those things needed to maintain the internal structure and organization of the cognitive system. And what Piaget describes particularly well is precisely this internal structure and organization of knowledge at different levels of development.
Papert’s emphasis lies almost at the opposite pole. His contribution is to remind us that intelligence should be defined and studied in-situ; alas, that being intelligent means being situated, connected, and sensitive to variations in the environment. In contrast to Piaget, Papert draws our attention to the fact that
“diving into” situations rather than looking at them from a distance, that connectedness rather than separation, are powerful means of gaining understanding. Becoming one with the phenomenon under study is, in his view, a key to learning. It’s main function is to put empathy at the service of intelligence.
To conclude, Papert’s research focuses on how knowledge is formed and transformed within specific contexts, shaped and expressed through different media, and processed in different people’s minds. While Piaget liked to describe the genesis of internal mental stability in terms of successive plateaus of equilibrium, Papert is interested in the dynamics of change. He stresses the fragility of thought during transitional periods. He is concerned with how different people think once their convictions break down, once alternative views
sink in, once adjusting, stretching, and expanding their current view of the world becomes necessary. Papert always points toward this fragility, contextuality, and flexibility of knowledge under construction.

Last but not least, the type of “children” that Piaget and Papert depict in their theories are different and much in tune with the researchers’ personal styles and scientific interests. Note that all researchers ‘construct” their own idealized child. Piaget’s “child,” often referred to as an epistemic subject, is a representative of
the most common way of thinking at a given level of development. And the “common way of thinking” that Piaget captures in his descriptions is that of a young scientist whose purpose is to impose stability and order over an ever changing physical world. I like to think of Piaget’s child as a young Robinson
Crusoe in the conquest of an unpopulated yet naturally rich island. Robinson’s conquest is solitary yet extremely exciting since the explorer himself is an inner-driven, very curious, and independent character. The ultimate goal of his adventure is not the exploration as such, but the joy of stepping back and being
able to build maps and other useful tools in order to better master and control the territory under exploration.
Papert’s “child,” on the other hand, is more relational and likes to get in tune with others and with situations. S/he resembles what Sherry Turkle describes as a “soft” master (Turkle, 1984). Like Piaget’s Robinson, s/he enjoys discovering novelties, yet unlike him, s/he likes to remain in touch with situations (people and
things) for the very sake of feeling at one with them.3 Like Robinson, s/he learns from personal experience rather than from being told. Unlike him, s/he enjoys gaining understanding from singular cases, rather than extracting and applying general rules. S/he likes to be engaged in situations and not step back from them.
S/he might be better at pointing at what s/he understands while still in context, than at telling what s/he experienced in retrospect.

 

A program that goes beyond the classroom

By 2017, Rwanda intends to distribute half a million laptops to primary school students across the country through the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program. However, as Nkubito Bakuramutsa, Rwanda’s OLPC coordinator explains to The Independent’s Matthew Stein, the program is expected to revolutionise a lot more than the country’s education system.

 

 

What progress has the OLPC program made to date?

In 2008-09 our pilot project started with the distribution of 10,000 laptops. We followed that up with a contact of 100,000 laptops. In 2010 we distributed 65,000 of these to P4, P5 and P6 students in 128 schools. And since this past June, we have been in the midst of distributing the remaining 35,000 laptops in an additional 70 schools.

What is your ultimate goal?

We want to reach all one million students between P4 and P6. We have now placed an order for another 60,000 laptops and with the distribution of these we will have reached about 17 percent of the P4-P6 population by June 2012. However, we are currently doing a lot of research on how we can increase these numbers drastically to reach our goal by 2017.

What’s the process of importing OLPC into the schools?

The first step is to wire all these schools to ensure that they have power plugs in the classroom, and we also add light in the classroom at the same time. So this program is also about improving the infrastructure of the schools. If they’re too far from the electricity grid we are using solar panels. The second phase is connecting them to our servers and local area networks, which they can connect to through a wireless local area network that we install as well. Once students access the server, they can download the Rwandan curriculum in its digital form as well as books and other learning material to improve their skills

How do the students learn to use the computers and its programs?

The teachers have to be at the centre of this transformation. First we selected 150 schools and asked that the headmaster and a teacher of their choice come to Kigali for one week of training. The first  two days is spent on how to use the laptops and the other three days on the methodology of teaching the material with a computer. Then they go back and teach other teachers in the school. We then visit each school individually. We spend five days working with the teachers and students and we spare one day of training for the community so that it can understand why we’re putting these laptops in the school, the impact it should have on the students and why it’s important for Rwanda. We’re trying to deploy ICT in such a way that it participate not only in the enhancement of learning but it also contributes to the development of the country.

Have you encountered any challenges?

There have been some natural consequences: for the student it’s a new approach to learn, to access knowledge; for a teacher, teaching with the laptops and digital software becomes more challenging because they are no longer providing the students with content to memorise. Instead, they are trying to enhance the understanding of concepts, so more than memorizing the children focus on innovation and creativity. Inserting technology in school is a fundamental change to classic education. It’s not just enabling books to be in a digital format—it’s a really new way of learning. We don’t want them to repeat just what’s on the board. We want them to demonstrate that they’ve really understood the concept. It’s called constructionism—learning by doing.

Do the laptops belong to the students?

No, it’s school property. The students can take the laptops home with them but before we distribute them we add a security feature that allows our server to do a roll call every three weeks to check if the computers are inside the school. If they are not there, the laptops are disabled. Once the students graduate from P6, they leave the laptops behind for the next batch of students.

The government is now spending more than $200 on each computer. Is this expense really justified given the amount of challenges Rwanda, as a developing country, face?

In Rwanda we are using more and more ICT in our hospitals, airports, for all kinds of infrastructure projects to develop every part of our country. Who are the people that are going to man this infrastructure?  Who are the people that are going to integrate or customise this infrastructure to our environment?

These are the people we are training today. We need them to help us reduce the level of ICT consultancy we require with the outside world. Rwanda can invest in other sectors too, but through OLPC we are increasing our independence from all these external dependencies, which are extremely expensive. We are investing in the future, not in the present. We need all these skills to be brought into Rwanda and primary school is really the foundation. If you are well-trained in primary school then it will be easier to succeed. We want all children in Rwanda to have the same level of understanding and knowledge as a kid from Singapore, Finland or California.

http://www.independent.co.ug/rwanda-ed/rwanda/4556-a-program-that-goes-beyond-the-classroom

VSO workshop on Curriculum development

OLPC Rwanda Team Member, benefited a lesson (curriculum) development workshop with their colleagues on the learning team of MINEDUC.
This past Friday we had a guest workshop from three volunteers from Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO). They were each involved in the revision of the English & Social Study curriculum of Rwandan secondary schools.
They showed us the differences between the new and the old curriculum through learner-centered activities. The main difference between the two was the level of detail. In the old currciulum there was basically a list of subjects, but in the new one there is more description on how the lesson can be carried out through learning-centred methods, information on what the students and teacher should be doing and what are the expected outcomes. They also made sure to relate these concepts to Rwandan life. For example, approach early mathematics by introducing a market and the need to buy a certain number of vegetables and fruits, etc.

An interesting challenge they noted to their work was that even though there is a new curriculum there is no awareness about this to schools and teachers and the process to get a curriculum involves either downloading it through the internet (you can imagine the challenges there) or the teacher has to physically go the warehouse were they are stored and request one.
The group is doing a great job distributing to all the schools they can. We concluded the workshop with some basics on creating a lesson plan using the new curriculum. It was very useful and has given our team many ideas and strategies to spread the word about the new curriculum and how the laptop can further enhance its effectiveness.

XO security feature activated on july 1

In an effort to ensure that laptops provided to students in schools are not stolen, the Ministry of Education through the OLPC project has enabled a security feature forcing all laptops that are not in schools to shut down. Today 124 schools and a little over 61,000 children are enjoying the usage of the laptops all around the country. More schools are being targeted as the government has now received an additional 35,000 laptops of which 32,000 are of the latest version the XO Revision 1.5. According to the OLPC project this should correspond to about an additional 70 schools that should be enabled with the program. This effectively place Rwanda as the largest deployment out of South America.

OLPC team checking inventory of laptop and updating the security key at Ruli Primary schools

The security feature has been added to the laptops during a re-flash process where all 65,000 laptops had been updated with the latest software and additional educational activities to ensure that the laptops are used in a more effective manner. This was to provide a solution to the lack of use of laptops noticed in some schools, during the pilot phase, where these courses had not been loaded. However according to Nkubito Bakuramutsa, the National OLPC coordinator, the project is rethinking its approach to private schools and those who have purchased laptops will be enabled with digital content from primary 4 to primary 6 on SD cards.

The security feature has triggered a current exercise of visiting schools, checking on the count of laptops, recapturing serial numbers as well as repairing the failing ones, according to Patrick Mugabo, the officer in charge of logistics. Any laptops which will not be enabled by the OLPC engineers, will remain in a failing state until they are brought back to the schools or to the Ministry.

The activation process of laptops, which began last week in the southern province, will continue until the entire country is covered. While today this process is being done manually, servers being installed at schools will take over and automate this process by the end of the year.

With the OLPC project, primary students in Rwanda are being exposed not only to ICTs but also to a new way of learning by doing. Already over 1000 teachers have been trained to the new methodology of teaching using laptops. The Ministry of Education is committed to enhance the quality of education through the integration of technology as one of the strategy of meeting its National Kivu retreat goals.

To get a sense of the change this project is bringing in schools, the community is invited to join the National OLPC Scratch activity, which will happen in September 2011.

Welcome to OLPC Rwanda official blog!

One Laptop per Child Rwanda (OLPC-Rwanda) is a key project that aims to the enhancement of education through the introduction of technology in primary schools. It also allows primary school students early access to computer skills and computer science understanding while expanding their knowledge on specific subjects like science, mathematics, languages and social sciences through online research or content hosted on servers.

This is a fundamental step towards the building of a knowledge-based economy. In this regards, Rwanda launched the One Laptop Per Child program (OLPC) in June 2008 and the current proposed target is to provide all students from P4 to P6 access to laptops.