--- /dev/null
+== June 2010 ==
+
+=== Sat, Jun 5 - Report from the Realness Summit ===
+
+I'm just back from a very productive vaca^W meeting in the Caribbeans,
+where I met plenty of interesting people from various deployments and some old
+OLPC friends.
+
+
+==== Uruguay ====
+
+{{ http://realness.org/content/people/full/CarlosRabassa.jpg | Carlos Rabassa | class=thumbright }}
+
+Uruguay confirmed some of the things we knew already from Paraguay: the nation is
+completely transformed by the project, you see children everywhere in
+the streets using their laptops to do everything from school work to
+videogames. Many children arrive to school earlier in the morning to get
+Internet access, but when school starts batteries are already low.
+Parents are extremely supportive of the project, to the point that the
+new government elected last year was basically forced to continue what
+was started by their opposition. Plan Ceibal has often been criticized
+for not doing enough on the teacher training front, but apparently the
+short-term goal is global connectivity and hopefully triggering the
+"generation inversion" phenomenon in which children help their families
+learn about technology. A generation of teachers with strong ITC skills
+will come along as a byproduct of this revolution.
+
+
+==== Afghanistan ====
+
+{{ http://realness.org/content/people/full/mikeDawson.jpg | Mike Dawson | class=thumbright }}
+
+Like Paraguay, [[(http://www.olpc.af/ | OLPC Afghanistan]] is also running
+a pilot with 5000 laptops. Before expanding the program further, the
+ministry of education wants to see factual evidence proving that children
+who have been learning with the XO are doing substantially better than a
+control group on which the same $250 per student has been spent on traditional
+school infrastructure: libraries, video projectors, extra curricular
+activities, and so on.
+
+This approach made a number of eyebrows raise among the most
+constructivist participants. After some discussion, we reached the
+agreement that some scientific data would be nice to have even though
+the "drug study" methodology may not apply well to radically different
+teaching paradigms. Afghanistan does not seem like a nation obsessed
+with assessment, as students get the first standardized tests of their
+lives when they apply to university.
+
+Mike Dawson of OLPC Afghanistan proposed that a fair comparison does not
+necessarily have to focus on traditional curriculum. If we're looking
+for increased critical thinking, problem-solving ability and creativity,
+we could challenge students with puzzles designed to measure these
+skills.
+
+==== eXe ====
+
+Mike Dawson also introduced [[http://www.paiwastoon.af/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=50&Itemid=23&lang=en | eXe]],
+a free and open source authoring tool capable of crearing simple interactive
+learning games. Its strength is that it can be used by curriculum experts
+with absolutely no computer programming skills.
+
+Mike is looking to form an inter-deployment coalition to develop
+the basis for a library of reusable blocks which could be used to build
+a national curricula, in the style of [[http://www.ck12.org | CK12]] or
+[[http://www.curriki.org | Curriki]]. These projects already provide very
+high-quality static content in PDF and HTML formats, while we're looking
+to create is media-rich and interactive activities.
+
+Mike will be meeting this week with representatives of the Sugar
+community in Boston to propose eXe as an official Sugar Labs project.
+There's a lot of technological and pedagogical similarity beween eXe and
+the [[http://karma.sugarlabs.org/ | Karma project]] sponsored by OLE Nepal
+and Activity Central. Perhaps the two projects will cooperate rather
+than compete in this area.
+
+
+==== OLPC ====
+
+{{ http://realness.org/content/people/full/adamHolt.jpg | Adam Holt | class=thumbright }}
+
+Richard Smith, very skilled firmware engineer from OLPC, helped
+Waveplace to resurrect a pile of "bricked" laptops donated by former G1G1
+donors. Richard gave me a serial cable and taught me how to carry on the
+procedure. Hopefully we'll be able to replicate this in Paraguay to recover
+some of the broken laptops at no cost.
+
+Adam Holt came with a bunch of very interesting books, from "Disrupting
+Class" to "Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology". I couldn't
+finish any of them during the meeting, but the first chapters
+anticipated very interesting conclusions.
+
+Because of his Sugar/OLPC duality and technical/educational balance,
+Adam was able to recruit and organize a huge army with diverse
+backgrounds, interests and nationality. Many of us see him as a central
+reference point for a wider community which includes both Sugar and OLPC.
+
+
+==== Haiti ====
+
+{{ http://realness.org/content/people/full/timFalconer.jpg | Tim Falconer | class=thumbright }}
+{{ http://realness.org/content/people/full/bethSantos3.jpg | Beth Santos | class=thumbright }}
+
+
+The non-profit organization [[http://waveplace.com/ | Waveplace]] has
+been running pilot projects in Haiti with orphans and other unprivileged
+children. Since the earthquake, they redoubled their efforts with the help
+of other international aid organizations.
+
+The team of educators and technologists led by Tim Falconer developed a
+set of comprehensive lesson plans for grades 3-6 based entirely on
+[[http://www.squeakland.org/ | eToys]].
+
+
+==== US Virgin Islands ====
+
+{{ http://realness.org/content/people/full/christineMurakami.jpg | Christine Murakami | class=thumbright }}
+{{ http://realness.org/content/people/full/billStelzer2.jpg | Bill Stelzer | class=thumbright }}
+
+In parallel with the Realness Summit, a group of high-school students
+from the [[www.columbusschoolforgirls.org/ | Columbus School for Girls]], Ohio,
+organized an after-school program for all the three schools of the tiny
+St. John island. The program was also sponsored by Waveplace and adopted the
+same eToys teaching materials developed for Haiti.
+
+Even though I already knew eToys, it was surprising to see how flexible
+and powerful it can become in the hands of skilled teachers. At the end
+of the two-weeks program, children were able to create complex stories
+by making objects move around and interact with each other.
+
+
+==== Austria ====
+
+{{http://realness.org/content/people/full/Christophd.jpg | Christoph Derndorfer | class=thumbright }}
+
+Christoph Derndorfer, one of the [[http://olpcnews.com | OLPC News]] editors,
+reported about the status of pilots projects organized by OLPC Austria.
+Like the St. John pilot, this is also an after-school program tailored at
+augmenting traditional school rather than restructuring it.
+The Austrian Ministry of Education would also like to see some hard numbers
+proving the effectiveness of ICT in education before putting their full weight
+into the project.
+
+Christoph summarized the status of the general OLPC/Sugar community.
+Like me, he would like to see much more academic participation. On the positive side,
+[[http://www.uni-graz.at/E/ | Graz University of Technology]] is working on
+[[http://www.ist.tugraz.at/projects/isac/rp/ | RekonPrimer]], a Sugar activity
+tailored at improving skills on the four basic arithmetic operations.
+
+
+==== Real conclusions ====
+
+By the end of the summit, a strong binding was formed among all the
+participants, regardless of our widely different professions and
+approaches to world-wide education.
+
+Many of us asked to follow up by creating some kind of
+super-organization embracing volunteers from all camps: OLPC (hardware),
+Sugar Labs (software), educators and deployments.
+
+As a representative of Sugar Labs, I'd be more than happy to embrace
+this idea. We've been traditionally been very weak on the education
+front and loosely connected with deployments. We've been trying to solve
+the problem by attracting people with those interests into our
+organization, but our overly technocratic community managed to repel them.
+
+By starting off with a balanced blend of educators and technologists, we
+might be able to achieve what our individual organizations couldn't.
+Rather than trying to focus everyone on one particular aspect of education
+technology, it would endorse a wide spectrum of skilled professionals
+involved in solving the same fundamental problem of radically improving
+education world-wide through technology, constructionism, interactive
+curriculum, free software, rugged laptops, teachers without borders and
+the organized enthusiasm of thousands volunteers.
+
+
+=== Tue, Jun 1 - Realness Summit ===
+
+This week a bunch of hard-core OLPCers and representatives from several deployments gathered
+on a tiny island of the Caribbean sea for the first [[http://realness.org | OLPC Realness Summit]]
+organized by [[http://waveplace.com/ | Waveplace]].
+
+I also gave three short talks:
+
+ * [[http://people.sugarlabs.org/bernie/sugar/slides/realness-leading-sugar.odp | Leading Sugar Development ]]
+ * [[http://people.sugarlabs.org/bernie/sugar/slides/realness-sugar-roadmap.odp | Sugar's Roadmap ]]
+ * [[http://people.sugarlabs.org/bernie/sugar/slides/realness-paraguay.odp | Report from Paraguay ]]
+
+We all had a great time together. Besides seeing again my old OLPC colleagues,
+it was great to meet plenty of new friends who played different roles towards
+our common goal to provide free and open basic education to all the children
+of the world.
+
+{{Pictures/conf/Realness_2010/IMG_0813.JPG | maxwidth=800 | Maho Bay, where the summit took place }}
+{{Pictures/conf/Realness_2010/IMG_0823.JPG | maxwidth=800 | Children of one of the Waveplace pilot schools }}
+
+See [[Pictures/conf/Realness_2010 | all the photos]] from the event.
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