One Laptop per Child

Sameer Verma of OLPC-SF, as he mentiond at last week’s amazing community summit, is putting together a book server for use in rural India, with 20,000 books and audio files on it for students and teachers to use locally. He is going to deploy it at a school pilot near his familial hometown.

This is a Pathagar server implementing the OPDS bookserver standard, running on a tiny Sheeva Plug device, accessible over a local network to XOs in the neighborhood.  The Sheeva Plug is low power and has USB and SD ports that make it easy to expand such an offline library.  Here it is plugged in and in use, drawing a total of 4 Watts:

Sayamindu Dasgupta, who contributed to the design of the OPDS specification, developed the Pathagar server to implement the spec; Manuel Quiñones created the version of the server used here.  Book and audio suggestions are welcome for this particular build, and a web-based form for linking to OPDS archives suitable for inclusion in the image will be up shortly.  If you have your own Sheeva Plug, you can torrent the original disk image of this installation.

The setup was load-tested last night, using a simple build: a stock Sheeva Plug and 16GB USB key (total cost: $100). Quick statistics:

• Power draw: 4W
• Simultaneous downolads: 500
• Library size: 10,000 – 50,000 books

For details, images, and a mailing list for discussion, see the bookserver project page.

Nickelodeon Latin America and One Laptop per Child announced the wniner of their video contest focused on creating a better environment last month. Primary school children across Latin America were challenged to use their XO laptops to create videos focused on creating a better environment, and the best was judged to be a scratch video from Giuliana Violetta Pozzoli, a 10 year-old girl from Caacupé, Paraguay.

This week Nickelodeon is hosting Giuliana, her mother and teacher at its annual HALO Awards ceremony in Los Angeles — an event recognizing kids who are working hard to make the world a better place. The videos of all five finalists in the contest can be viewed online at http://olpcstories.org.

“Our partnership with Nickelodeon Latin America is a great example of how private sector corporations can work with OLPC to advance children’s education and development,” said Rodrigo Arboleda, CEO of One Laptop per Child. “We look forward to other successful collaborations with Nickelodeon and MTV Networks Latin America, as well as the U.S., in which we continue to inspire children to use their creativity and skills to make a difference in their communities.”

“We are thrilled to have partnered with OLPC on this initiative,” commented Mario Cader-Frech, Vice President Public Affairs and Corporate Social Responsibility for MTV Networks Americas. “The response from kids throughout the region to participate in this contest was amazing, and we are delighted by their desire to want to make this world a better place.”

If you haven’t seen it already, take 5 minutes to watch this ridiculously joyful clip from the pilot project in Nosy Komba, Madagascar, supported by OLPC France.

If you have, it’s worth watching again and sharing The lyrics are a popular Malagasy dancing song, carried out with XOs and other props.

At the community summit, Caryl Bigenho talked about the need for a musical keyboard for the XO, and discussed a design for an overlay that could be placed on top of the normal (typing) keyboard with the names of musical notes.

And there was a little repair session, including showing how to fix various XO-1 issues. There are still a few people who need the frozen keyboard fix. Others were playing around with keyboard overlays.

Others need touchpad fixes, and benefited from upgrading to 11.2 or 11.3 — which has an option in the frame to turn on the resistive touchpad mode. For people working in areas that are very humid, or have high iron content of the dust, the resistive touchpad mode can be a reliable alternative to an external mouse.

The OLPC Community Summit hosted again by OLPCSF this year is underway now at the downtown SFSU campus. Student volunteers and the amazing local group have again pulled together an amazing event… you can follow a live stream of the process all day today and tomorrow no the summit’s main page.

If you are inspired by the event, and are in the area, please stop by.

Jeff Elkner of the DC Learning Club is already saving the date for next spring’s Scratch Day DC, at their traditional haunt. Local teachers are already signing up to run workshps; for details see their event page.

The OLPC Community Summit is back for a second year, hosted again by OLPC San Francisco. It promises to be the year’s best rundown of OLPC efforts around the world, large and small.

You can see the schedule online at olpcsf.org, and should register now if you want to attend. Last year was pretty packed!

OLPC Rwanda has been named to the scientific subcommittee of the International Conference on Technology in Education, organized by the Rwandan Education Ministry and Education Board. The conference will take place in early 2012. Great to hear; let us know when the call for papers is out!

OLPC Mexico notes the great work by a team at San Luis Potosí who finished localizing Sugar into Téenek, the indigenous language of a people in Mexico. The whole post, drawn from a recent report on the OLPC deployment in the region, is worth a read.

Tech Camp, an effort by the US State Department to support civil society initiatives across the globe (to develop a world of “Civil Society 2.0″), organizes camps around the world for the local civil society groups. The program explores the use and development of mobile and online ICT in education, and supports open source toolchains and communities.

Tech Camp Montevideo was organized last weekend at LATU headquarters, with participation from and a focus on the community of OLPC students and teachers there. It drew a solid crowd of presenters from around Latin America. The tech camp agenda focused strongly on children’s learning and engagement — not surprising considering the wave of capable Gen-XO students in Uruguay. But this is the most child-centered Tech Camp I’ve seen so far.

Right now they only have the list of speakers, but that wiki should soon have updates from the sessions and the problem definition they started with.