Idea Sharing

The OLPCorps workshop officially launch Monday this week. It has proven to be an excellent opportunity to share ideas with other deployments in Namibia, Ghana, South Africa, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Sao Tome, and other nations in Africa. The Workshop is not only a gathering of students from the best American and African universities, but also a constructive development of pedagogical beliefs - especially if you had originally had none!

Within the USU Rwanda and Kinshasha Goma teams, this form of idea sharing has inspired a host of new learning projects, deployment logistics planning and creative social investment. Articulate and contagious speakers from OLPC have included Nicholas Negroponte (President), David Cavallo (Vice President of Learning), Juliano Bittencourt(Learning Team), Guy Serge Pompilus (Haiti Coordinator), Miguel Brechner (Uruguay Coordinator), and many, many more. All of the team members are learning from their peers and building opinions on education as well as concrete action plans.

Workshop skills training is also an integral part of the program. So far, we have worked extensively with "Scratch", the most complicated activity on the XO. Once comfortable with "Scratch", we were asked to help familiarize rural Rwandese school teachers with the activity. For many in the corps, this was an introduction to deployment training they'll face within their respective countries.

On Monday we'll begin another stage of field training with teachers and students, observing and possibly engaging in classes.