Project update

(Disponible también la versión en castellano.)

After three months here in Peru, we're beginning to have a better picture of our work and its place in the whole. This far we've prioritised the dialogue with our local contacts, but we've also had to present our work and ourselves so many times it's time to publish a version here as well.

Objectives of our work

Both of us have a history of voluntary work and a strong sense of solidarity. To do something more important than before, we chose the Latin America, where we're concerned about the great post-colonial class inequalities. Our general objective is to apply our skills to preventing via better education the marginalization of the rural children who come from the lower social classes or from the indigenous populations.

Sharing this objective, the Peruvian OLPC deployment project of the Ministry of Education as one of the first in the world has bought the OLPC XO-1 laptops (One Laptop Per Child, the “green laptop”) for some 177 000 pupils and teachers in the rural one-teacher primary schools. The ministry has also organized one-week trainings for these teachers.

However, the ability of technology to transform education remains internationally unproven, let alone that of one-to-one laptops, and much more needs to be done to reach the potential of the laptops. We as a two-person team don't have much resources to help the children and their teachers directly, but we collaborate with the local ministry and NGOs as well as with other international and local volunteers.

We've identified opportunities in supporting the local volunteer community, training of teacher supporters, advising culture NGOs in participation, developing educational applications and games, and improving training materials.

Work realised this far

Too big part of the first three months has gone to administrative work, coordination and planning. Fortunately, we've also accomplished something:

• Got to know people of the ministry's project as well as of the local NGO Escuelab and the volunteer communities around it.
• Assisted in a teacher training week of the Ministry of Education in the city of Satipo in the region of Junín.
• Asked for laptops from the ministry to the school Comunidad Shipiba in Cantagallo (a shanty town of native Shipibos in Lima).
• Trained the primary and kindergarten teachers of the strategically important Comunidad Shipiba. (View a report in Spanish)
• Offered technical and pedagogical support to three schools in the district of Yarinacocha (outside the city of Pucallpa in the region of Ucayali).
• Organized two workshops of collaborative learning for the interested teachers in Yarinacocha.
• Organized a three-day training for the teacher's pedagogical supporters of the provinces of Coronel Portillo, Atalaya and Padre Abad, Ucayali.
• Initiated a list of existing training material in Spanish.
• Got in contact regarding future collaboration with the Embassy of Finland, the NGO Warmayllu, a student from Germany, UNICEF, and a nascent American NGO.

Kaisa Haverinen

• Teacher with the specialisation of Master of Special Education
• Studies for Master of Psychology in the University of Jyväskylä, Finland
• Studies for PhD in Special Education in the University of Eastern Finland (research topic: the relationship between learning difficulties and depression in the adolescents)

Most of her teaching experience is from supporting pupils who have learning difficulties or emotional and behavioural problems in lower-secondary schools. Her interests in general include learning, motivation, and emotion, especially in the adolescence. She wants to implement the global human right to education for all, adapted to individual strengths and weaknesses.

Tuukka Hastrup

• Free software developer
• Studies for Master of Computer Science in the University of Jyväskylä
• Experience of academic research in the University of Jyväskylä and in the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), National University of Ireland, Galway

Most of his experience is in developing novel free software on Linux. His interests in general include programming languages, user interface concepts, technology marketing, and their integration on Internet scale. He wants to adapt information technology for better usability all around the world, to advance the global human development.

OLPC/Sugar in New York

We had the lucky chance to meet with some OLPC/Sugar people in New York last week. (It was cheapest for us to fly first from Finland to New York and then from New York to Peru.) After packing our home into storage boxes a few days before our departure, the worst anxiety vanished, we realised we are *really* going, and started to plan the two days we'd have in New York between the flights. Even on such a short notice, the people that Walter Bender of Sugar Labs suggested we should contact were able to invite us to visit them.

Thus on Thursday, we headed from our hostel Jazz on the Park to the Grand Central Terminal and boarded a Metro North train towards Westchester County, which lies on the map right above New York City. The middle school in the town of Croton on Hudson is running a pilot deployment of the OLPC XO-1 laptops on their fifth grade classes, one for each of the about 150 pupils as it is meant to be.

We were warmly welcomed by Gerald Ardito, who is a science teacher, a graduate student and the father of this pilot. The teachers were mostly busy running the classes, but we still had the opportunity to have good chats with Gerald, some pupils, the vice principal, and the teacher who uses the laptops most, as well as follow a geography class with some Memorize and Browse in use. Everyone we met was open to discussions, and at the end of the day we got several offers from the parents and the personnel for a lift back to the train station. (The traffic sign announcing the one-way street wasn't there when I took the photo - honestly!)

Teaching Matters

The next day, we walked a few blocks uptown from the hostel and towards the river to meet Jane Condliffe and John Clemente of Teaching Matters. The NGO works with many of the schools in the city, and has participated in the implementation of multiple OLPC pilot programs. However, the city School Board is not able to start any new pilots in the current situation. Teaching Matters has the experience though and has been helping another deployment elsewhere meanwhile. Currently, they are running other projects such as advancing the use of web-based material in the classroom. Regarding the OLPCs, we discussed basically the same hardware and teacher training issues as in Croton, as well as some ideas for developing new software.

Jane and John had a good point in having to pick one's battles: you might be eager to concentrate your efforts on convincing the less interested teachers of the virtues of OLPC and Sugar. Meanwhile, the individually interested teachers need support too, and their success or failure will set a precedent in the eyes of all teachers. While this doesn't directly translate to the situation in Peru, where most schools have a single teacher, I think it generalises to the efforts on the national and global scale: OLPC and Sugar need well-studied and widely published success stories. Even if a teacher has prejudice against technology in education, showing a video of eager XO pupils and their satisfied teachers can turn the tide.

Jane and John were very helpful and promised to send us some of their written material and try to answer any questions that might arise during our stay in Peru.

About this blog in English

Welcome! In this blog, we're going to write about our travels in Peru in the spring 2010. We're going to write in three languages: Spanish, English and Finnish. However, not all the posts will be in all three languages but we try to choose every time the language that we think matches the audience and topic best.

In addition to publishing full posts, we send shorter messages via Twitter, which will appear on this page too (in the right column under the title "Breaking News" :-). If you feel like it, we'd love you to leave any comment regarding our project or travels. You can write comments below each post.