OLPCorps UIUC Kenya Anderson
Team
Eric Anderson (UIUC) – Project Lead
Ben Dobbins (UIUC) – Pedagological Lead
Leslie Cornell (UIUC) – Technical Lead
Meghan Higgenbotham (San Diego) Cultural, Financial, and Logistics Lead
Matthew O'Rourke (Wisconsin) – Fundraising and Sustainability Lead
MODEL-ITU Youth Organization Overview
By equipping youths with useful ICT skills, we hope to enable "children and youths to exploit their potentials, learn from one another, and promote positive cultural diversity and global understanding."
Founded in 2008 "for and by young people," we chose MODEL-ITU (http://projects.tigweb.org/MODEL-ITU -- all quotes taken from this site) from a dozen contenders because we believe our project using the XO laptops will have a powerful, realized, and sustainable impact on MODEL-ITU's budding ICT infrastructure and ideology.
Through Kenyatta University's MODEL-ITU Youth Organization, we will work to upstart the ICT School of Cyber Peace and Internet Safety at Nyangoma Primary School in Western Kenya. Our main local contact is Michael Owino (alex.owino@gmail.com). In addition to bolstering MODEL-ITUs current goals, we will introduce the XOlympics to the ICT School.
The ICT School's mission parallels OLPC's goal and our project's focus of making children agents of change.
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Site Overview
The school has 600 pupils aged 6-12 with reliable electricity and good security. We will store the laptops in the school. It has the space, security, and power supply to support the project.
The children will be in school from May until August. They speak English. Current plans indicate that students partaking in the ICT School will gather in the school hall for three hours after class on weekdays and six hours on weekends. For the first two weeks, we will help the students yearn basic ICT skills with the laptops. Leslie will set up the server and troubleshoot technical aspects. Meghan and Ben will devise activities, contests, and games that acquaint the students with the laptops. Eric will oversee the implementation of the XOlympics. Matthew will ensure students own the process, acting as partners rather than knowledge consumers.
The next seven weeks we will implement our project on this foundation.
The XOlympics
We are confident our project, the XOlympics, will succeed because of its collaborative methodology that focuses on empowering the Kenyan children through an initiative that interweaves the fundamental ideas of OLPC, the Six Pillars of MODEL-ITU, and our own diverse strengths and interests.
In addition to bolstering the students' innovation and employment prospective, the project will work towards Kenya's Vision 2030 goals (LINK).
In conjunction with the ICT School, our project will focus on four objectives:
1. To foster basic ICT skills and build ICT compliant children in the target age.
2. To expose children to ICT based tools for positive living through interactive video plays, social networking using the XO, and student-centered research of critical community and global issues.
3. To create a platform for value-based interaction between our team, the Kenyan children, and US elementary school students.
4. To initiate a process that promotes the contributions of the children and control of their own day to day life activities.
We do best and enjoy life when we follow our childhood dreams. By exposing the children to blogging, video journalism, gaming, and personal care for the laptops, we will help them develop New Media narrative skills that will link them with their passions, their peers, their communities, and eventually, the world. The XOlympics will challenge children to use all aspects of the laptops to work in teams, engage their local community, and pursue what's personally fulfilling to them. Students will learn entrepreneurial and education skills. We will reward creativity and risk to help students become "active problem solvers in their communities and country at large."
Students will develop personal blogs. Blogs will blend introspection with peer-to-peer communication. They will collaborate with peers on various journalistic assignments, from blogging about a football match to interviewing each other. These blogs will intersect with lessons on internet safety and cyber responsibility.
We will hold an ongoing competition titled the XOlympics. A weekly mini-project competition in areas such as movie-making, essay-writing, blogging and video-blogging, radio shows, and creative artistic projects will employ the full-range of the XO. Students will work with a variety of peer groups. Friendly competition will ensure engagement and encourage innovation with the laptops.
Students will work in teams on a longer project, too, overseen by one of our team members. These projects will range from devising a multimedia presentation on green initiatives in Kenya, to doing "A Day in the Life of" stories, to collaborative oral histories of their communities. Students will produce something they are proud of, that uses the range of the XO's abilities. Students will work towards presenting these projects at the bi-annual peace camp.
Our project will conclude in an XOlympics awards ceremony where we will recognize students for exemplary work using the XO. Students will present projects in front of peers and the community.
Social networking opportunities will blend individual passions with like passions allow self-exploration of interests. Children will use the laptops to discover their interests and pursue them alongside their peers' passions.
Self-introspection and networking, innovation and collaboration – we will use the XO's to instill these values to ensure dreams no longer remain dreams.
Sustainability
We will sustain the project in three ways:
1. We are currently forming partnerships with US middle schools to sustain virtual pen pals. The program will be mutually beneficial, linking the Kenyan children with American students in a cross-cultural dialogue that will further awareness and friendship on both sides of the world.
2. The MODEL-ITU Youth Organization in collaboration with the school management will carry on with the project, monitoring and evaluation activities. The children will also share their experiences amongst themselves in a way that will generate curiosity on new interested group of participants. This will ensure that children using the skills acquired become agents of change in their social groups and positively translate the outcomes of the project into action.
The local group is capable of carrying on with the project since it already has a similar project in Kenyatta University where its student’s volunteers train their colleagues who join the university from rural areas on basic ICT skills in collaboration with the directorate of e-learning.
The success of the initiative relies on the children’s ability to go back to their social groups and spread the outcomes in an educative way by passing and sharing information boldly to ensure replicable sustainability.
3. Eric and Ben plan to develop a OLPC Registered Student Organization at the University of Illinois to spread the OLPCorps among more university students and uphold bonds to MODEL-ITU.
Support
These support groups will help us implement our project, troubleshoot any technical difficulties, and streamline blogs to the internet.
University of Illinois Informatics Institute: https://www.informatics.uiuc.edu/display/HOME/Home
US Technical Support: Troy Campbell Long: troycampbelllong@gmail.com
Graduate Library of Information Sciences (UIUC): http://www.lis.uiuc.edu/