OLPC Pakistan

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OLPC Pakistan This is the wiki for the OLPC Pakistan. The mission of this Not for Profit Organization is to create an environment for OLPC, take necessary steps to ensure every child in Pakistan get the laptops and develop the Local Activities for OLPC laptops that could revolutionize how we educate the children. Our goal is to provide every children of Pakistan with new opportunities to explore, experiment, and express themselves.

Contact Us The purpose of this wiki is to both share information about the project and to solicit ideas and feedback. I posted the following (now modified) message on www.Linuxpakistan.net. The purpose was to inform you of the task ahead in deploying OLPC in Pakistan. To achieve this I urgently require the following: • Volunteers 2-5 depending upon the availability of your spare time (between 9am-5pm Monday through Friday) • Two Linux developers FT/PT. • Please remember OLPC Inc is a non profit organization and cannot offer high salaries but we will compensate you for your contribution and help you make a member of the future workforce of OLPC that will be hands of more than a billion children around the globe. OLPC is targeting kids (6-12 years) around the world so it comes in many different languages. The one we’ll be using in Pakistan is bi-lingual – English and Urdu. Apparently the English version is quite comprehensive but we need to put in lots of efforts to make it usable by children with no English back ground. Focus on Urdu is our priority. Please keep in mind that OLPC is not replacement of the current school curriculum. It only supports the way children learn how to learn. Within this context the task ahead includes: • To prepare OLPCs material in Urdu for use in Pakistani environment. This means we need to develop e-books, spoken books, e-toys, and educational materials for children. Since the child will own OLPC and will carry it home - it must have stuff of interest to the child parents. It may include but not limit it to o Family health Hygiene, inoculations and its schedule; Seasonal diseases like Dengue fever and protective measures; Bird Flue; Environment, energy, and clean water etc. o The village folks may want information on plant protection, production crops rotation, plantation, water conservation, fertilizers, storage, and marketing o The community as a whole wants to learn about local government, democratic processes, elections at Union and Tehsil levels etc. • Also we need to develop academic material to meet needs of our teachers for example: professional development of teachers using OLPC with emphasis on pedagogy and constructionists; How to teach – Science, Math, English; and Role of teachers in OLPC laced teaching-learning environment. Please contact me if you have the passion to work for the children of Pakistan, and have the guts to accept this challenge. You can work from any part of the globe as long as you keep in touch with me via Internet. Soon OLPC is opening its office in Islamabad so if you are based in Islamabad/ Rawalpindi that would be wonderful. In September inshAllah a pre deployment project sponsored by the Ministry of IT is ready for launch with 50 OLPCs in remote poor rural schools. The other members in this launch are faculty and scholars of the Departments of Education and Computer Sciences of IIU. The purpose is to learn how well OLPC is received by the children, and how they interact with it. It will help the researchers and OLPC determine how best can we tailor the material to children’s’ need. In this endeavor, the President of IIU has assured all possible professional and intellectual inputs to make it successful. For detailed information please visit these sites: http://www.laptop.org http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Educators Dr.Habib Khan EdD Harvard Director of Education, OLPC Inc Central & South Asia ISLAMABAD, Pakistan Cell: +92 304-201-4184 Email: habib@laptop.org '''REMARKS''' This article is a stub. You can help the OLPC project by expanding it. 2007 status: green green         How can we get a Project started in Pakistan for remote villages where even the government employees (teachers) do not like to work? Can I help to get some project stated on private basis and not going through the government? Yahya Malik Kent, WA yahyamalik19@hotmail.com Pakistan has received 100 B-2 machines and is working on getting them deployed as a pilot project. While it may not be fair to generalize that teachers do not like to work as there certainly are several dedicated teachers both in rural as well as urban areas but working with less than perfect conditions is an accepted challenge for all ICT projects. Hence, part of the project is to identify champions and generate support at the appropriate levels before and during deployment. Tariq Badsha, Member (IT) Minisry of IT, Government of Pakistan, tbadsha@moitt.gov.pk Since I entered the above comments we got another 49 machines from OLPC. Now that we have OLPC presence in Paksitan the laptops have been handed over to them for further deployment. The Ministry of IT and the O-pen Source Resource Center would continue to test the latest builds and the networking features on a mesh of 4 laptops retained for this purpose. Tariq Has anyone sponsored Pakistans objective target of numbers of laptops to be given to children in Pakistan. I heard the UAE government might sponsor the project. The total numbers of laptops are vital to appropiate the areas in Pakistan where this can be launched with adequate success. Yasir Nawaz Raja, IT in Charge UNICEF, Quetta, Balochistan, Pakistan yasir.nawaz@gmail.com This is great news, I would be awaiting how the children would be responding to the pilot project, I hope and wish to be part of this as it would be a life changing event for a lot of children, I wonder how the MESH network would be supported here. Bilal Sarfraz Gichki (UNDP)Area Development Programme Balochistan Khuzdar Region. yahoopakistan@hotmail.com