Haugen’s Tech Tips Blog

Starting today (Nov 12-26, 2007), for $400, you can give - and get - one of the most unique laptop computers on the planet.

One learning child. One connected child. One laptop at a time.
The mission of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is to empower the children of developing countries to learn by providing one connected laptop to every school-age child. In order to accomplish our goal, we need people who believe in what we’re doing and want to help make education for the world’s children a priority, not a privilege. Between November 12 and November 26, OLPC is offering a Give One Get One program in the United States and Canada. During this time, you can donate the revolutionary XO laptop to a child in a developing nation, and also receive one for the child in your life in recognition of your contribution.

This is big news. I’ve been dabbling in Nings* for a few months now and my interest is piqued. I’m a part of the Classroom 2.0 and Assistive Tech Nings, which connect me with hundreds or thousands of other educators interested in collaborating and exchanging questions and ideas. The new news is that Ning is now offering ad-free Nings for K-12 educators.

*Knowing what a Ning is might help…

Ning is a social networking web site - like FaceBook or MySpace - with a twist. According to Ning:

Ning is the only online service where you can create, customize, and share your own Social Network for free in seconds.

A Ning combines threaded discussions (or forums) with tagging, blogging, image sharing and more. It’s a bit like a list serve with a face and more organizing options. There are so many features, it’s a bit hard to describe - and to decide how, as a community, to use it well, but the potential is there to bring a dispersed community together for rich discussion and exchange.

Perhaps the best way to decide if a Ning is right for you is to plow in and join a Ning. Try Classroom 2.0 for learning the best way to integrate new internet technologies into the classroom or Assitive Tech for an open network of people interested in assistive technology use in pre-K to grade 12, or explore one of the many educational Nings at Ning.com…

SchoolNetAfrica is a pan-African education portal for practitioners, policymakers and school communities across the continent with resources in English, French, Kiswahili, Portuguese and Arabic.

SchoolNetAfrica is made up of the African Education Knowledge Warehouse:

• SchoolNet Centre, which has tools and resources to support national SchoolNets
• Policy Centre, which provides resources and studies to support policy development on ICT integration in education
• Learner Centre, which houses resources for learners and provides space for networking and collaboration among young people
• African Teachers Centre, the meeting place for the African Teachers Network
• Gender Watch, which houses gender and ICTs related resources and captures voices of women and girls using ICTs for their advancement
• Innovation Watch, which tracks innovations and innovators to inspire learners and educators in using ICTs for Education
• Campaigns, which include their One Million Computers for African Schools campaign.

Their campaigns include:

• One Million Computers for African Schools
• Global Teenager Project
• Researching ICTs for Education in Africa
• Building African SchoolNet Champions
• Supporting National SchoolNets
• African Teachers Network
• ThinkQuest Africa
• From Guns to Computers

On a personal note, I’m delighted to call as a friend Babacar Fall, from Senegal, one of the governing members of SchoolNetAfrica.

Two of my favorite sites for families struggling with learning disabilities are closing. On September 21, Charles and Helen Schwab announced they will no longer maintain operation of their web sites, SchwabLearning.org and Sparktop.org. Instead they will focus on selective grant-making to other organizations.
I am grateful for the wonderful work that the Schwabs have done and their contributions toward greater understanding of and success for students with learning disabilities. I trust their change in focus will continue to allow them to make significant contributions in this arena.
In the meantime, let’s hope that the Schwabs can make good on their efforts to make their significant resources available through other organizations.

I blogged before about One Laptop Per Child’s Give 1 Get 1 program. Kudos to David Pogue of the New York Times for putting the promotion in such a clear light, and for his review of the new laptop’s features, limitations and capabilities.
My son and I were talking today about whether or not this might be what we do for our holiday giving this year: something for our family, something for others. Having traveled in rural parts of West Africa, South America and Indonesia, my eleven-year-old knows more than most about the people these laptops were designed for. We like the idea of making a connection in this way…
So about that laptop…

• A pull-string battery charger will give 10 minutes use for every 1 minute of tugging - or purchase the $12 solar charger. In unelectrified regions, this is a boon! (Never mind that the battery is good for 2,000 charges and only costs $10)
• A novel screen technology runs in either a crisp backlit color, or a super-low consumption black on gray mode that even works in broad daylight
• With its new ‘mesh networking,’ all XO laptops in range of one another can share documents and more, including a single internet connection. Shares are seen as a color-coded ‘map’ of users, who can, at the click of a button, share any project they’re working on. The mesh network also enables sharing software updates and more
• Features? Web browsing, word processing, calculator, pdf reader (for textbooks, etc.), a few games, a few music programs, paint program, chat and more. Not only that, kids can look under the hood right at the programming language involved and tinker with it - with a one-button restore option.

And the most underrated opportunity? The chance to leap-frog right over the limitations and expense of print as the means of obtaining and maintaining access to information in developing areas. $200 may seem ‘expensive’ from the perspective of a rural underresourced school, but when it connects students (in a two-way conversation) with a world of schools, libraries, audio, video and more, it becomes, as the worn out ad says, ‘priceless.’