Ask OLPC a Question about Countries

Mauritius

Mauritius is the place where I was born and it does not show in your list of countries where you intend to promote your program. Can we be of any help ? We surely would be very glad to especially if we can help the poor kids overhere as well. Looking forward to be hearing from you

Pierre

You can create a page for Mauritius, contact the government there, organize a group to support the laptop there, and other things. I'm ready to help. --Mokurai 05:15, 26 November 2006 (EST)

Libya

I just saw that John Markoff wrote in the New York Times about Libya signing a contract with OLPC. The story says that four other countries have signed up, which was recently denied on this site. The tale gets 42000 hits on Google. So where is the press release? Where is the news story on this site? What actually happened?--Mokurai 02:23, 13 October 2006 (EDT)

Aha! It's not a contract, it's a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). OK. Now, can the rest of us have a look at the plan? It answers a lot of the questions being asked here and elsewhere, according to the description.

"The committee was presented with the outline of a comprehensive plan to distribute the laptops, create connectivity and server infrastructure, and prepare teachers and students."--Mokurai 17:32, 15 October 2006 (EDT)

What plan do you have for teacher training? I have been working in a staff development department of a school system that has been one-to-one for 6 years now. We have found that training teachers to integrate technology is as fundamental to the success of a one-to-one program as the hardware itself. If the Libyan teachers do not have extensive, well-organized training, the students of any program will be shortchanged. Jon Morris jjmorris@henrico.k12.va.us

The plan given to the Libyans addresses this. They seem very interested in the OLPC program. --Mokurai 17:39, 15 October 2006 (EDT)

Map

On http://www.laptop.org/map.en_US.html, you define Green, Orange and Yellow. I presume that Grey is "no interest as yet". What is Red? -- 212.24.70.122 07:56, 16 October 2006 (EDT)

The map now indicates that Red indicates "those countries we plan to include in the post-launch phase"

How are participating countries chosen

I am a graduate student at ASU in Tempe, Arizona and I was wondering why you chose the countries for the pilot that you did. I am writing a pseudo thesis paper on this for a class (I may end up writing an actual thesis on it but haven’t decided yet) and the professor asked me why these countries were chosen. Any assistance you can give me on this would be really appreciated.

The OLPC did not choose the countries. Instead, the countries chose to be early users of the OLPC laptops. As for why Brazil and Libya did so, you will have to ask them.