OLPC for the Dutch?

We Dutch also want our OLPC laptop! While everybody in the world who is slightly involved with e-Learning in a professional way, is playing around with their 100$ laptop, I'm still waiting for mine.



Potential
Also in The Netherlands there is a huge potential for the famous laptop. It ships with a robust OS, a lot of educational content and unique and refreshing networking capabilities. In Dutch schools the penetration of computers in classrooms (especially within primary education) is still not that impressive. In primary and secondary schools, there is one computer for every seven pupils. See a report (867 kB, PDF) about the Dutch IT-situation within primary education.

Goal
And I wrote before about the great initiative to buy two computers: one for yourself and one unknown kid. Simple and efficient system.

But…
Although we ordered 3 (or six as you like) OLPC's back in 2007, we are still waiting. First they messed up with the credit card transaction (to many laptops on the bill). Later it turned out that we didn't order them. After that we received an e-mail that our computers were shipped in December and since that moment we keep trying to contact the organization in various ways, without success.

So if anybody knows how to order them in a successful way: please tell me so we can start creating powerful learning experience, both for our and for other children. As an e-Learning consultant I cannot wait use the OLPC and to develop content for it!

WBTs on e-Learning for free!

During the European project Fe-ConE, we developed 6 WBTs about e-Learning. This was not the goal of the project but a way to do research. The 6-week course on e-Learning Fundamentals hold a lot of didactical activities and one of them was a kind of old fashioned WBT.

I host 3 of the 6 WBTs (in English) on my own Dutch Blog, please feel free to look at them. These are not the best I could do (due to extreme time constraints) but maybe you will find it useful.

BTW: all the learning materials are published under Creative Commons licenses so let me know if you want to re-use it. I have the files in native eXe format.

> WBT “e-Learning Basics”

> WBT “e-Learning Tools”

> WBT “e-Learning Trends”

Enjoy!

176 $ laptop will boost education world wide?

'One laptop per child' is a non-profit organization founded by Nicholas Negroponte. They were planning to give the world an easy to use, 100$ laptop.

Their goal:

To provide children around the world with new opportunities to explore, experiment and express themselves. The further say that the laptop is a potent learning tool created expressly for the world's poorest children, living in its most remote environments.

The machine is using open source software (e.g. it is using elements of Red Hat's Fedora Core 6 version of the Linux operating system) and is promising a very user-friendly experience. The laptop creates its own mesh network out of the box. Each machine is a full-time wireless router. Children in the most remote regions of the globe—as well as their teachers and families—will be connected both to one another and to the Internet.

This week Negroponte was speaking at a Harvard University conference and he talked about the groups of children in Nigeria, Thailand and Uruguay who are using the laptop already. At the end of the year the plan is that 1.000.000 laptops are produced every month. The price has to reach the famous 100$ level in 2009 again.

Love this initiative and I hope this will bring a lot of joy and learning to kids all over the world.

Please visit the website or the wiki to see if you or your organization can support the project in any way.

See http://www.laptop.org/
or the wiki: http://wiki.laptop.org/

In the wiki you can also help the project by creating content!

Open content!

Open source is hot. You cannot start a conversation about e-Learning without the magic word. But what about Open content? It is definitely not really 'the new kid on the block'. In educational settings Open content could be the thing we are missing the most. There are to many learning environments without good and challenging content. Open content could be the break thru for e-Learning.

When we look for a definition Wikipedia tells us: "Open content, coined by analogy with "open source", describes any kind of creative work (including articles, pictures, audio, and video) or engineering work (i.e. open machine design) that is published in a format that explicitly allows the copying and the modifying of the information by anyone; not exclusively by a closed organization, firm or individual." Most of the time the Creative Commons licenses are used.

Under the Creative Commons license you can chose different options. MIT for example defines that you cannot modify the materials. MIT started the OpenCourseWare initiative in 2001 already. In 2007 MIT will offer all their 1800 courses online. Sometimes it is just a summary of a book or a PowerPoint presentation, sometimes it is multi media material. Another recent initiative is from the Open University in The Netherlands. They are offering extended online courses with some great quality. The number of courses are limited but growing every month. Visit their website and enjoy the courses.


Open content is not the same as free content. Free content can be closed in a way that it is not possible to modify it. But also free content can be interesting. MERLOT is probably the first repository for educational content (at least the one I know). It started in 1997 and contains more then 16,000 materials for higher education. But MERLOT owns the material. You can use it. There is some really good material and because of the peer reviews and ranking it is easy to get your hands on the right stuff.

Also on a national and local level, all kind of initiatives to share free (and sometimes open) content are started. Sometimes from universities, sometimes from branch organisations.

One of the most positive initiatives is the "e-Learning for Kids". This foundation from Nick van Dam wants to offer good quality e-Learning courses for kids, for free. There are various materials, from various developers with various quality.


So if you feel like learning or like creating and sharing; make Open content the best performing and nicest kid of the block! The best friend of learning people.