My Mission in Haiti

With Haiti's great need of relief and reform, many are seeking food, shelter, and medical care. The world has responded with the largest contingent of volunteers in the world, outside of India (NYT Sept 6). Of the million homeless counted after the earthquake in 2010, hundreds of thousands have left tent cities. Between June and July of this year, 6% of tent dwellers moved into new shelters. What's next?



Both local and global organizations now look to long-term programs. Specifically, what does it mean to be educated in Haiti? In primary school, which is a crucial time for literacy, schools and curricula are fairly independent, something similar to private preschools in the US. Parents take it upon themselves to find a school near home which meets expectations for their children. The general consensus is that organizing and monitoring these schools would improve literacy and increase the number of students who continue their education.

A few years ago, Haiti received laptops from One Laptop per Child to modernize their schools and attempt equal access to education throughout the country. Since then, volunteers from Waveplace and the Illinois Institute of Technology have expanded these projects with new schools and activities. See olpcMAP of Haiti.


CC-BY One Laptop per Child

My goal for OLPC Haiti is trifold: to continue schools' interest in their computers, to develop and share new resources for literacy and creativity, and to show how technology can be part of a national education strategy for Haiti. For example, I will be taking @aiclass to test using online classes to train and assist teachers.



Last weekend, I met several OpenStreetMap volunteers who have made a remarkably innovative and to-the-minute map of Haiti. In only two days, they made the changes shown above. The UN and a handful of others have tapped into OpenStreetMap, but others remain unaware of the data or what can be built on top of it. The lines and shades of an online map are an echo of the real-life situation. I want to develop maps with a new level of detail and perspective, so we can begin to address and change what we see. Some maps you'll see will be made for and by kids, and others will only make sense to engineers.




I believe in a third component, not yet realized in Haiti, that is sometimes called the Maker Movement. In an appearance on Adafruit's Show-and-Tell (video will appear here) and our upcoming booth at Maker Faire NYC, I make the case for do-it-yourself electronics, both as a tactile introduction to technology and as a realistic future for developing nations. I am bringing new sensors and new materials beyond what was seen in Uganda and Uruguay. This one initiative can cross over into many others. A Wiimote can take the place of a keyboard and mouse for novice mapmakers. Sewable electronics hold potential for Haiti's artists and crafts markets. And it will become clear that technology lives to be adapted, not consumed. Just as Mozilla has moved away from reading webpages to teaching the world to code (both why and how), Haitian schools can make a difference by moving from prescribed to open education.

Making a delicious web soup

If you've ever walked in on a web development conversation, either in person or online, you probably picked up on the three major technologies: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The troubling thing is that you can't just become good at one or two. That would be too easy.

Instead, the web arose from a number of different sources. There are rules, but the rules came from mobs and teleconferences between clashing interests. You had the scientists who founded the web, the businesses looking for pretty layouts, the media and content makers, and the gamers. Whenever one group stopped innovating, programmers elsewhere would share new ideas and put them on their webpages, discriminating against companies that hadn't kept up the pace, in a form of protest.

So what started as HTML, a pretty basic way to write documents like this:


<html>
    <title>Welcome to my page!</title>
    <body>I wrote it in HTML</body>
    <button>Click Me!</button>
</html>


Got prettified by CSS, which looks useful to designers:

body{
    font-family:arial;
    color:green;
}
.headline{
    font-weight:bold;
}


It then got animated and interactive through JavaScript, which appeals to programmers:

function clicked(source){
    var x = document.createElement("span");
    x.innerHTML = "you clicked this";
    source.appendChild(x);
}


You might see all of these as equally barbaric ways to write, because you don't realize how difficult it is to make a simple program look nice and work on everyone's computer or phone, without the open web. Flash games, for example, still don't work on the iPhone or iPad.

It's actually very convenient that these parts are separate, because you want one consistent design across your web pages, which means one CSS file, and the interactions on a profile page are the same regardless of whose page you're looking at, which means one JS file. In large companies, the designers and programmers are working on separate files and don't tread on each other's feet.

Unfortunately, learners quickly find it can't always be this straightforward. The new technologies HTML 5 and CSS 3 are very tightly connected to how people write all three languages. And when you add an interactive map from ESRI or Google or Bing, the HTML and CSS of the page are so advanced and rapidly changing that you manipulate it through code, in JavaScript. It's kind of like how you start your car and run the AC by turning a little key and pressing buttons, instead of opening all the valves and crossing wires yourself.

Learning about this a few years ago was really useful for me, much more than Word document margins and PowerPoint animations. Every time I printed out a lengthy print report at school, designing a new building and leaving it all on paper, I wanted to make an interactive web page to display the project in a way you could browse and explore. I've been looking into projects like hackasaurus which open this up to kids and get them started on this type of programming. Hoping to help take it to Haiti soon =)

Paso de los Toros

Today was my school visit in Paso de los Toros. The students' preparation and the response from the principal and teachers was fantastic:




Also it was great to visit the school alongside the experienced teacher-trainers from Tacuarembó. I want to share their insights with Plan Ceibal and the Sugar/activity developer community. These are the people who see how an activity works in the wild, and their support for an activity can make or break its use in the curriculum. They also confirmed numbers we heard at the conference - rural and impoverished schools are using the laptops more than urban ones. They say a similar trend exists for eToys and TurtleArt. This was part of our larger discussion about programming, which was an encouraging look at how teachers could move their curriculum in that direction. A major issue here was the rapidly changing interface, and how on Olidata, programs such as TurtleArt have too little actual workspace.

I did a demo of the new Uruguay Map activity, Memorize with Sensors, and a new version of the Browse-Hack activity. The general consensus is that the new Uruguayan Map activity fills the need for creativity in their current geography activity, Conozco Uruguay. The group was most interested in expanding the Memorize activity - asking for some source code and hardware diagrams ASAP.

This experience is making me re-think the discussions we had about putting libraries on the schools' local servers. While the Plan Ceibal organization is considering ideologies of education and privacy while considering a wiki, teachers are already making wikis and blogging with their classes, online. The experts specifically talked about WikiSpaces.

Travel photos included in newly-posted photos