Please note that the content of many of the pages of this wiki are editable by everybody. This provides great opportunities for people around the world to participate in the project and the project has the benefit of a supply of ideas and comments. This will hopefully be beneficial in many ways. However, please be aware that much of the content of this wiki may not be indicative of the current formally agreed views of the management team of the One Laptop per Child project. For example, journalists need to check please with the project management before publishing any comment in this wiki as if it had the provenance of being management policy.

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Rollout and Community Building

Pedagogy of the Oppressed I believe that the deployment of the $100 laptops will engender a social movement that will dwarf the vision, technological achievements, and business acumen that went into its creation. This is going to be big ~

And yet, deployment will not be without hurdles. I have been pondering some of those hurdles and would like to make a suggestion to facilitate the use of the $100 laptops.

I would like to suggest that Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs), and people working in other development agencies, be used as intermediaries for the initial deployment of the laptops.

My idea is neither that PCVs be used to distribute computers nor to stand in the front of classrooms and teach children ways to use them, but rather that they be tapped as local resources when questions arise.

Why Peace Corps Volunteers?

• They already espouse, at the core of their beings, the ideal of equity. They will not have to be convinced that the value of the $100 laptop is actually infinite. Many will have read all'Pedagogy of the Oppressed' and will see the potential encased within the laptops for a shift in the balance of power. • They have all been trained to function as facilitators rather than as providers of knowledge. • There are 7,800 PCVs in the field today, serving in 75 developing nations. As a group they are highly educated, highly motivated, accessible and free.

As a former Peace Corps Volunteer I can attest to the fact that people in developing nations know what they’re missing; they desire the gadgets of the developed world. But I also witnessed a young man putting a handheld television to his ear thinking it was a phone. And, more significantly, the people with whom I worked defined leadership as dictatorship. They looked to their teachers, their employers, and their presidents to tell them what to do and to do for them. The people with whom I worked had very little experience in relying on themselves as sources of information or power, which could create a bump in the road when deploying the $100 laptops.

This is where Peace Corps Volunteers can be of use to the OLPC foundation. They can mentor. They can demonstrate use. They can make suggestions and offer guidance when questions arise. PCVs will have come of age with the egalitarian nature of Linux and open-source software and they can promote that sort of self-reliance to others who have little exposure, even conceptually, to a level playing field.

Peace Corps Volunteers work where local communities have asked for their assistance. Many work in education-related fields but all function as informal educators. Certainly a PCV in either a healthcare or agriculture related position could sit with neighborhood children and help them learn to connect to a server so that they have access to the WWW.

It is my belief that with a minimal exposure to the technical capabilities of the $100 laptops as well as to the philosophy/education methodology of constructivism, Peace Corps Volunteers could be a useful implementation tool to the OLPC foundation.

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