OLPC Learning Club DC member Mike Cariaso popped up on my Google Talk last night to tell me he had arrived at the Elaine & Nicholas Negropnte School in Reaksmy, Cambodia. This is the school featured in the May 2007 60 Minutes report on OLPC. He made the eight-hour drive north with Elaine from Phnom Penh the day before in great weather. After settling in, Mike was naturally eager to document his surroundings to post online. The school has a satellite uplink and generators, so I was chatting with Mike as he uploaded some fantastic photos to Flickr. He even ran back outside to get a better picture of the kids using the laptops in sunlight. Cambodia is exactly 12 hours offset from Washington, D.C. So while I was yawning in my easychair, it was the height of the day’s learning for the kids in the school. Mike’s first observations (as a technologist) were that the kids were still having lots of problems with the XO trackpad and none of the machines were currently accessing the satellite internet due to technical problems. Those sound like great first challenges to which Mike can apply his considerable skills as he begins his several-month stay as a volunteer. We’re looking forward to many more dispatches from the learning fields.

Here’s a nice video of our February meeting produced by the students involved with Nortel’s LearnIT project. LearnIT has started a page about us on their learning resources web site.

And if you didn’t catch it on OLPC News, Wayan shot a sweet clip of 6-year-old meeting regular Marayd demonstrating XO Speak.

Hello. My name is Mike Lee. The photo is of me with my 4-year-old daughter mugging for the built-in camera of a prototype XO laptop.

Wayan has asked me to take over running this blog and the OLPC Learning Club – DC. Wayan’s not going anywhere, but as you might imagine with the surge of interest in One Laptop Per Child because of the Give One Get One program, Wayan has been close to maxed out maintaining OLPC News.

I became personally involved with OLPC because as part of my day job as one of the directors of a large non-profit web site, I have been my company’s sponsorship liaison to the MIT Media Lab for the last four years. It’s a profound privilege to be able to visit the lab 4-6 times a year. When OLPC spun off from MIT, several people I knew from the Media Lab went over to join Nicholas and I was able to drop in periodically to see their progress over the last 14 months.

Since August, I’ve had two of the B-test-4 laptops. Experiencing them has brought me to the realization that they are truly a breakthrough in so many ways not apparent to the press or casual viewer. Probably for the first time in the history of digital computers, a computing machine, the XO-1, has been developed from scratch to serve a purely humanitarian need. Beyond being an educational platform for small children in developing countries, the open source nature of the software and hardware encourages all who come in contact with the XO to set their minds free and think about bold new applications.

I’m not involved here because I work with the Media Lab or because I happened to have one of the prototype XOs because of contacts at OLPC. I truly love the ideas behind OLPC, and would certainly have become involved regardless. I’m volunteering some of my free time to the cause.

So, I look forward to getting to know you all. Please join OLPC Learning Club – DC and set your mind free to the possibilities!

Mike

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