Belgium

The viewpoints expressed hereunder do not necessarily reflect the opinion of OLPC.
This page was created by a member of the free volunteer community supporting OLPC.

Welkom-Bienvenue-Wilkommen-Welcome

Belgium

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Country Information
ISO Country Code	BE
Wikipedia Article	Wikipedia Link
Government Support	Low and not OLPC Priority
Deployment	Demonstration (under 50 machines)
Languages
Keyboard Layout	AZERTY, several Layouts a@ www.OlpcEU.org Brussels
Written	Flemish/Vlaams (Vl), French/Français (F), German/Deutsch (D)
Spoken	Flemish/Vlaams (Vl), French/Français (F), German/Deutsch (D)
Secondary Written	Flemish/Vlaams (Vl), French/Français (F), German/Deutsch (D)
Secondary Spoken	French (Fr)

... and thanks for visiting the "OLPC" related Wiki-Pages, for the One Laptopschool Per Child Education project for our country. This website is a collaborative website, so create a login and start collaborating, editing and adding the pages. This tool is made available by the One Laptop Per Child not for profit. OLPC is

1. an Open Community-project, similar to the Wikipedia, wikibooks, etc.,
2. an Open Source-project, like Linux, OpenOffice, etc.,
3. an Open Hardware-project, like Arduino, the Open Source Ecology, building farm/community equipment, OpenCoresand many more Open-Hardware projects,

OLPC is working along Agenda 21 and Millennium Development Goal nr.2: Bringing Universal Primary Education.

• 2' video - OLPC Intro part 1
• 2' video - OLPC Intro part 2
• 7' video: Impact on teachers, parents, kids, society.

The aim of this educational project, is on one hand to bring Universal Primary Education by 2015 as - anno year 2000 initiated - United Nations Millennium Development Goal nr.2. On the other hand, OLPC's mission is to manage the open-community -, open-hardware - and open-software -project, Open Robotics-project, to bring forward the best possible laptop combination for education: the XO-XServer combination. For this and above approach, - and also a lot of lobbying by the right persons on the right places and time - the United Nations is a Partner in this Open-Community - project! It is the largest educational project undertaken by Humanity ever, and deemed by many as one of the most inspiring projects out there. 2008, saw the first countries with a 100% roll out to all of their kids aged 5 till 15: Peru, Uruguay. By now, several Island States and Rwanda have a 100% deployment too; several more countries and regions have olpc laboratories and test deployments.

Every XO can load over 1000 eBooks on its memory and has a choice of +86.000 eBooks available, as well as many (educational) games, all education disciplines covered, etc. etc.. things are moving fast indeed.

Although OLPC has not opened any legal OLPC Belgium entity in Belgium, Belgium did host the European Headquarters of OLPC in the magnificent surroundings at the befriended SWIFT company near Brussels.

Our country has a very multi-cultural society with a very diverse diaspora. We hope that this diaspora will work their way to these pages and that our society will benefit from these citizens with one leg in our country and another still in their countries of origin to develop leadership for OLPC, Agenda 21, the MDG's and accelerate bringing the level that our planet can be a nice place for all humans to new and inspiring heights for generations to come.

Plan of Action

1. A budget for lectures and workshops:
2. Who are the leaders in the educational landscape in your Belgium?
3. Some punchy titles for lectures:
   1. Though some European kids may have an iPad class, may they still be missing the boat or are they on the wrong ship? Reading the wikipedia or being part of the wikipedia? That seems sum up both projects.
   2. A programmed to fail device or a laptop-x-tablet made to be repaired: all the same screws, only 1 standard + screwdriver needed?
4. A budget for a labo in every region where the educational landscape can meet the XO-XS, robotics
5. An olpc cell in your organization?
6. How the One Laptop Per Child education project brings programming back into education and how it was among OLPC's first objectives: Uruguay, passed a law that all kids have to learn to program. That’s wonderful. It’s not because they’re going to get jobs as programmers but because programming is thinking about thinking.

" Kevin Maney: One Laptop per Child did a lot to change the conversation about education and technology. What was the genesis of OLPC?

Nicholas Negroponte: It goes back about 40 years to the early work of Seymour Papert, a young professor at MIT. He made a simple observation, that computer programming is the closest approximation to thinking about thinking. If kids could learn to write programs, they would be engaged in an activity that approximated what they were doing themselves.

Particularly in the context of debugging, because whenever you write a program and it doesn’t work, you see what it did, you change it, you try it again, and you converge on a working program. And what kids were doing, not necessarily knowingly, but they were teaching a computer. In a sense they were learning how a computer learns, and it was very similar to how they should learn. We found in the 1970s that kids who wrote computer programs were better spellers.

Maney: Interesting

Negroponte: If you get a spelling test and you get eight out of 10 words right, the last thing you care about are the two words you got wrong because you got a B. Whereas the kids who were practiced at programming where debugging was the fun part and the bugs were the interesting things -- they all started trading words with each other that they got wrong. So suddenly these kids found joy, if you will, in the spelling mistakes, and became better spellers.

In 1980, Sheik Yamani of OPEC funded a center to help children in developing countries and Seymour Papert and I worked in Pakistan, Senegal, and Colombia. While the Media Lab was being built as an entity, physical as well as organizationally, we worked with kids in those countries. They were totally comfortable working in computers and computer programming – in this case, it was Apple IIs. They didn’t need the manuals, they didn’t need anything. So fast forward 20 years. The Media Lab had always had about 25% of its activity with children and learning. And after I directed the Media Lab for 20 years, somebody else came in as director and I said, “It’s my turn to do something.” And that’s when One Laptop per Child, or what was first called the Hundred Dollar Laptop, was born.

But what had happened over the intervening 20 years, it’s quite extraordinary: computer programming fell off the table. Kids, from very good schools, weren’t engaged in it. Maney: I guess that’s true.

Negroponte: Companies like Microsoft and others wrote apps for the kids to use. So you became a user, not a programmer. Everybody was writing apps for kids and kids were consumers. That drift coincided with people being more and more convinced that the way to understand if a child is getting an education is to test what they know. And the truth is, testing what they know doesn’t tell you very much except that they know what you just tested them on. With One Laptop per Child, we concurrently tried to change the conversation about education to be more about the kids making things, particularly computer programs, versus absorbing a body of information that’s being plugged into their heads.

Maney: So with OLPC, the thrust really was about getting the programming into the hands of kids, not so much get a device into the hands of kids?

Negroponte: It wasn’t the only thing. It had to be a little more surreptitious. There had to be stuff on there - books and so on. But programming was very much key. The one country that did every child first, Uruguay, passed a law that all kids have to learn to program. That’s wonderful. It’s not because they’re going to get jobs as programmers but because programming is thinking about thinking. Maney: If you’ve been able to change the conversation in places like Uruguay, about programming being important to education, I don’t have a sense that that’s happened in the U.S. at all.

Negroponte: The U.S. is a much harder problem. The system itself is part of the problem. Last I looked there were 15,000 school districts. How do you deal with 15,000 districts? You can’t really make the kinds of changes we found ourselves able to do in Ethiopia, Rwanda, Uruguay or Peru. So it’s a harder problem, the way it’s organized the way it’s financed." More: http://newsroom.cisco.com/feature/1240339/Network-Trailblazer-A-Conversation-with-Nicholas-Negroponte-Founder-One-Laptop-per-Child?utm_medium=rss

More

Please feel free to create sub-categories or list or start collaborating, teaming up and expanding our and your projects, existing and new ones in one of these sub-categories:

1. BRUSSELS HARBOR GROUP ORDER LIST CANDIDATE BUYERS OF AN XO LAPTOP
2. OLPC Europe
3. OLPC Belgium
4. Belgium
5. FAQ OLPC-Belgium
6. Who's Who Belgium
7. Who's Who OLPC-Belgium
8. OLPC-Belgium Meetings
9. OLPC-Belgium Discussions
10. OLPC-Openings in Europe
11. OLPC-Openings outside Europe
12. OLPC Competing projects in Belgium
13. What every government should ask itself when considering an ebook deployment
    1. Is there room for an open source AND open hardware laptop annex tablet in the EU Educational Landscape?
    2. FAQ and Most Frequent Misconceptions
       1. How much does the laptop cost? Anno 2013: 160 € + 30 € for the PV panel
       2. The deployment pays for itself thanks to the CO2e certificates the deployment generates and the additional tax revenues from an ict literate and equipped population who is more capable in generating additional value and consequently spends on more advanced gsm/satellite etc. on which the gvt. levies taxes.
    3. A computer for poor kids or simply the best educational laptop-x-tablet for any kid, including yours? You don't want to give your kid a 750 € iPad; you want a school reduced so it fits in a sturdy child proof lunch box and chatbots as 1st line teachers. Put 4 wheels on it and you have a robot, put 4 rotors on it and you have a drone.

Suggested Links

1. Manuals, especially a Deployment guide,
2. OLPC FAQ
3. Fundraising

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