Here is OLPC Nepal's first official Press Release. Tomorrow Shankar, Ankur, and Rabi will make the opening presentation at CAN Infotech's technology conference.
Please distribute it to every media channel you can, including internet mailing lists. OLPC Nepal couldn't have made the progress it has so far w/out the support of the FOSS community. *Press Release* *One Laptop to Each Nepali Child* A group of Nepali engineers, educators, and social entrepreneurs are designing the next generation of learning materials that will provide each and every Nepali child with a high-quality education. At the core of this initiative is an inexpensive, durable, and highly power-efficient laptop as a learning tool. First produced in November 2006, the laptop will allow children, teachers and parents to engage in the kind of hands-on learning activities previously only available to students in the richest of countries. Two students from Nepal Engineering College were pioneering it in Nepal with its test board for over a year named as Mero Sano Sathi. This group, a non-profit organization known as One Laptop Per Child Nepal (OLPC Nepal), proposes a new approach to education that emphasizes teaching children how to "learn learning" over the conventional method of memorizing facts. OLPC Nepal believes that addressing the 'quality divide' in education in our country is as or even more important than bridging the growing 'digital divide'. This project will provide an array of opportunities needed for 'constructivist learning' - so that children aren't deprived of learning by shortages of paper, pencils, and other learning materials. Accomplishing this goal requires the cooperation and collaboration of the government, international community, teachers, students, and grassroots organizations. Currently the OLPC Nepal team is functioning on voluntary basis in a temporarily donated space. Despite lacking resources, OLPC Nepal's engineers have already successfully used *Devanagari* fonts on the machine and designed several demonstration software programs for Nepali children. They are also working on other languages used in Nepal. They urge all people that to join in this campaign. Last month, OLPC Nepal presented this project to the officials of the Ministry of Education and Sports of Nepal, who received it enthusiastically and urged them to pursue it further. The nations of Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Libya, Rwanda, and several others have already committed to providing one laptop to every child in their respective nations. OLPC Nepal works closely with the global OLPC movement that was started in 2005 by a group of faculty members from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US. OLPC was formed as a non-profit organization to design, manufacture, and distribute laptops that are sufficiently inexpensive, and to provide every child in the world access to knowledge and modern forms of education. This laptop costs roughly $100 US Dollars, is durable, ten times more power-efficient than a typical laptop, and can be powered manually. It can connect to the internet and run most types of software programs. The cost of the laptop will fall steadily over time, perhaps to under $50 within a few years. This laptop was specifically designed with an open-source license meaning that OLPC's software and hardware can be freely copied. This ensures developing nations will not be restricted to purchasing these laptops from any single vendor or subject to pay the cost of software. ............................................... Shankar Pokharel, President [EMAIL PROTECTED] , 9841454278 Ankur Sharma, General Secretary, [EMAIL PROTECTED] , 9841419160 ............................................... Please direct all press inquiries to: Rabi Karmacharya, Communication and Coordination, [EMAIL PROTECTED], 555-1007 ............................................... One Laptop Per Child Nepal, http://www.olpcnepal.org One Laptop Per Child, http://laptop.org, http://wiki.laptop.org --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ FOSS Nepal mailing list [email protected] http://groups.google.com/group/foss-nepal Community website: http://www.fossnepal.org/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
