'Til All Are One

This has been mak­ing the rounds lately and is an abso­lute gem:

Teach­ers’ hefty salar­ies are driv­ing up taxes, and they only work 9 or 10 months a year! It’s time we put things in per­spect­ive and pay them for what they do — babysit! We can get that for min­imum wage. That’s right. Let’s give them $3.00 an hour and only the hours they worked; not any of that silly plan­ning time, or any time they spend before or after school. That would be $19.50 a day (7:45 to 3:00 PM with 45 min off for lunch and plan­ning that equals 6 ¹⁄₂ hours). Each par­ent should pay $19.50 a day for these teach­ers to baby-​​sit their chil­dren. Now how many stu­dents do they teach in a day… maybe 30? So that’s $19.50 x 30 = $585.00 a day.

How­ever, remem­ber they only work 180 days a year!!! I am not going to pay them for any hol­i­days. LET’S SEE.… That’s $585 X 180 = $105,300 per year. (Hold on! My cal­cu­lator needs new bat­ter­ies.) What about those spe­cial edu­ca­tion teach­ers and the ones with Master’s degrees or higher duties? Well, we could pay them min­imum wage ($7.75), and just to be fair, round it off to $8.00 an hour (but we shouldn’t get car­ried away). That would be $8 X 6 ¹⁄₂ hours X 30 chil­dren X 180 days = $280,800 per year. Wait a minute — there’s some­thing wrong here! There sure is!

The aver­age teacher’s salary (nation wide) is $50,000. $50,000/180 days = $277.77/per day/​30 students=$9.25/6.5 hours = $1.42 per hour per stu­dent — a very inex­pens­ive baby-​​sitter and they even EDUCATE your kids!) WHAT A DEAL!!!!

Make a teacher smile; re-​​post this to show appre­ci­ation for all educators.

I don’t think the dol­lar val­ues are for Aus­tralia — our min­imum wage is higher than $3.00. The point should be obvi­ous non­ethe­less: we ser­i­ously under­value the people who are respons­ible for edu­cat­ing our children.

• 2Day and Fox FM spon­sors: Can­cel advert­ising until Kyle Sandi­lands is dumped from radio #Vile­Kyle http://t.co/rG3AQNCS via @change #
• US push­ing UN to lift ban on cluster bombs, say cam­paign­ers http://t.co/Tlo6L4Yj via @guard­ian #
• any ideas on how I can stop the text in the twit­ter box on the side of http://t.co/33dutsqm from over­flow­ing? #lazy­web #word­press #

Update: my talk has been covered by OLPC News.

Here’s the video of the talk I said I’d be giv­ing at OSDC 2011, titled Australia’s Toughest Linux Deploy­ment:

In it, I out­line our edu­ca­tional pro­gramme and how the tech­no­logy fits into it. Some key points:

• we have a bet­ter ver­sion on You­Tube of the video I show in the talk
• we main­tain a Policy Doc­u­ment, which provides an over­view of our over­all programme
• OLPC Aus­tralia have two core prin­ciples in addi­tion to OLPC’s ori­ginal five
• we have some sup­port in gov­ern­ment at dif­fer­ent levels — for example, we were praised in fed­eral par­lia­ment and the print media (pay­wall) by a prom­in­ent fed­eral Mem­ber of Parliament
• we have deploy­ments across remote Aus­tralia — a feat that can only be man­aged through build­ing self-​​sufficiency
• our pro­gramme is show­ing bene­fi­cial res­ults, and we are engaged in lon­git­ud­inal and detailed evaluation
• we have a com­pre­hens­ive edu­ca­tional pro­gramme, with online train­ing and cer­ti­fic­a­tions (such as our XO-​​cert course)
• we are break­ing depend­ence on spe­cial expert­ise and infra­struc­ture — build­ing sus­tain­ab­il­ity and grass-​​roots sup­port is key
• deploy­ments are made at the classroom level, which is more man­age­able than sat­ur­at­ing a whole school at once
• we don’t provide XOs without train­ing — a teacher must earn a cer­ti­fic­a­tion before they can receive XOs for their class
• our sup­port is focused on enabling schools and com­munit­ies to help them­selves, and each other
• we have innov­ated in the tech­no­logy space, with offer­ings such as the XO-​​AU OS, XO-​​AU USB, XOP and XS-​​AU
• con­tex­tu­al­ising learn­ing, for example through loc­al­isa­tion, is a power­ful tool to improve engage­ment from the child, school and community
• we invite people to join our devel­op­ment efforts
• there’s a nice sur­prise men­tioned towards the end, which I shall elab­or­ate upon in the near future

For those of you who have seen me speak about OLPC Aus­tralia at SLUG, this is a much more pol­ished talk.

• @chrisjrn What I was think­ing of was this: http://t.co/6wgzOkXG #olp­cau #osdc #olpc in reply to chrisjrn #
• My grat­it­ude to the #OSDC team for a great con­fer­ence! #
• Eat­ing dump­lings at Can­berra air­port, await­ing delayed flight back to Sydney #
• #osdc folk con­greg­ated at Can­berra Air­port, wait­ing for delayed flights #
• Funny how my ideas for light­ning talks form just AFTER a con­fer­ence. There’s always the next one, I sup­pose. #osdc #
• @chrisjrn yep already into it in reply to chrisjrn #
• @eley­bourn write more Android apps? in reply to eley­bourn #
• @eley­bourn or bet­ter yet, write Sugar activ­it­ies http://t.co/474St0Kx #
• @voltagex @eleybourn @Make­Hack­Void I wrote this guide to Sugar devel­op­ment a while ago http://t.co/xR0qck0I #olpc #olp­cau in reply to voltagex #
• @Claris­sa­Womack it seems to be a West­ern cul­tural thing. There’s no such stigma in many Asian cul­tures, for example. in reply to Claris­sa­Womack #
• redo­ing my blog site and redis­cov­er­ing word­press in the pro­cess #
• @LGnome indeed, con­sid­er­ing I’m doing this in response to an exploit. Though more likely my fault for not keep­ing it up to date. in reply to LGnome #
• @jeremyvis­ser yes, agreed. I’ll stick with the default until I find a theme I like. in reply to jeremyvis­ser #
• Smoker on the bus. I feel sick. They really should be banned from pub­lic trans­port. #

I am speak­ing next Thursday at the Open Source Developers’ Con­fer­ence 2011 in Can­berra. The title is Australia’s Toughest Linux Deploy­ment. Yes it’s a play on the rug­ged­ness and flex­ib­il­ity of the XO’s design to meet the needs of remote communities.

Here’s the talk abstract:

A 300,000 seat Linux deploy­ment is noth­ing to sneeze at. What if those seats were actu­ally children’s laps? By provid­ing a flex­ible learn­ing plat­form, OLPC Aus­tralia aims to cre­ate a sus­tain­able and com­pre­hens­ive pro­gramme to enhance oppor­tun­it­ies for every child in remote Aus­tralia. What’s more, we plan to achieve this by 2014.

In focus­ing on the most remote areas of the con­tin­ent, the mis­sion is by no means easy. These areas are typ­ic­ally not eco­nom­ic­ally viable for a busi­ness to ser­vice, hence the need for a not-​​for-​​profit in the space. Expert­ise for hard­ware and soft­ware is vir­tu­ally non-​​existent. Set­tle­ments are small and spread very far apart. Envir­on­mental con­di­tions, cul­tures and life­styles vary wildly. They are very dif­fer­ent worlds from the coastal cit­ies where the bur­eau­cra­cies are based.

Even within com­munit­ies, dif­fer­ences abound. Schools often stand in stark con­trast to their sur­rounds. Gov­ern­ment and busi­ness interests have also made their marks.

This talk will out­line how OLPC Aus­tralia has developed a solu­tion to suit Aus­tralian scen­arios. Com­par­is­ons and con­trasts will be made with other “com­puters in schools” pro­grammes, OLPC deploy­ments around the world and cor­por­ate IT projects.

For example, stand­ard sysad­min prac­tice typ­ic­ally man­dates tight, cent­ral­ised con­trol over all sys­tems and infra­struc­ture. The OLPC Aus­tralia approach is the exact oppos­ite. By pro­mot­ing flex­ib­il­ity and ease of use, the pro­gramme can achieve sus­tain­ab­il­ity by enabling man­age­ment at the grass-​​roots level. The XO laptops them­selves are built espe­cially for edu­ca­tion. They are extraordin­ar­ily rugged as well as being inex­pens­ive. They are also totally repair­able in the field, with min­imal skill required. Train­ing is con­duc­ted online, and an online com­munity allows par­ti­cipants nation­wide to share resources.

Key to the ongo­ing suc­cess of the pro­gramme is act­ive engage­ment with all stake­hold­ers, and a recog­ni­tion of the total cost of own­er­ship over a five-​​year life cycle.