One Laptop per Child

Yesterday Sébastien Adgnot sent me a lovely message about Dailymotion’s drive to make Theora encodings available for all of their videos. Blizzard sums up the implications nicely:

Today Dailymotion, one of the world’s largest video sites, announced support for open video. They’ve put out a press release, a blog post on the new openvideo site as well as a demo site where you can see some of the things that you can do with open video and Firefox 3.5.  They are automatically transcoding all of the content that their Motion Makers and Official Users create and expect to have around 300,000 videos transcoded into the open Ogg Theora and Vorbis formats.  You can view the site they have up at openvideo.dailymotion.com.

This is fantastic news; it is a continuation of work DM started with a theora portal for a certain mean green machine, and means another 300,000 videos that will play natively on XOs out of the box.

PSNR comparisons of x264 v theora

More importantly, this is only the start of a wave of free codec adoption.  Theora has been making great technical strides at lower bitrates, with steady support from RedHat, Mozilla, and Wikimedia.  Expect similar updates to come over the summer, perhaps as early as June’s Open Video Conference in New York.

Congratulations to everyone at Dailymotion who helped make this milestone happen!

OLPC.tv is a collection 362 videos about OLPC from around the world.  It has been updating since January 2007 by fan and volunteer Nicolas Charbonnier, of Denmark.  Now its efforts are being expanded to include other Sugar and 1:1 Computing videos.

If you have a video to suggest to add to the ones already posted, please send them to olpctv <at> laptop.org.  If you are at an OLPC event, school, or meetup, help take videos of the people there (with the consent of teachers and parents, of course).  You can also hack Record to let you capture videos of higher quality with your XO.

A view of goods available in the market

Food Force 2, an open source sequel to the World Food Program’s popular Food Force game, is available to try out with complete art and storyboard.   The game leads players through improving the health, shelter, education, and other elements of a small community.

The game has been under development for the XO since our second Game Jam, and gameplay and collaboration are still being worked on.   The latest beta was tested in a school this month at the Delhi Police Public School, facilitated by Vijit Singh.

Congratulations to developers Manu Gupta, Mohit Taneja and Deepank Gupta, and to Silke Buhr who has been the art director and driving force behind the game – it’s looking beautiful.   The team welcomes your suggestions — please download it and give it a spin.

Last week, Jim Rex, State Superintendent of Education in South Carolina announced that South Carolina would be expanding their One Laptop per Child project. A generous donation from Blue Cross Blue Shield is funding the expansion of South Carolina’s current laptop program.

Blue Cross Blue Shield donation helps expand One Laptop per Child project

An initiative to improve student achievement by making laptop technology available to every elementary school student in the state is expanding this month with the addition of 12 schools.

One Laptop per Child /South Carolina is a partnership between the nonprofit Palmetto Project, Blue Cross Blue Shield and the State Department of Education.  State Superintendent Jim Rex and Steve Skardon of the Palmetto Project accepted a $500,000 donation today from Blue Cross Blue Shield division president and COO David Pankau to help fund the expansion.

The laptop program was piloted last year in rural Marion School District 7.  That rollout has been highly successful, garnering positive response from students, parents and the community.  School officials expect test results at the end of the year to show students are performing better since technology has been integrated into teaching and learning.

To read the latest news about the South Carolina deployment, see their website at http://www.laptopsc.org.