Category Archives: Children

Major updates about children learning, in the field, XOs in classrooms.

Making the world a more intelligent and humane place to live

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Rodrigo Arboleda is giving a keynote address today at the International Symposium on Convergence Technologies (ConTech 2011) in Seoul, Korea – a gathering focused on making the world a more intelligent and humane place to live.   His talk is “Children as a Mission, not a Market“, focusing on the challenges of making modern education available to children in developing parts of the world, and OLPC’s lessons learned to date.

OLPC retrospective in the latest Linux Journal

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SFSU professor and OLPC-SF organizer Sameer Verma wrote a nice project summary in the latest Linux Journal titled OLPC: Are We There Yet?  In it he discusses the state of the project, and what remains to be done before every child has access to tools for their own education.

Sameer writes from the perspective of his own efforts to promote olpc around the world, and that of the Bay-area education hackers who help with everything from testing hardware, Sugar, and peripherals (leggo my WeDo!) to supporting schools in other countries.  It’s a well laid-out piece, with pointers to how local groups can make a difference.

 

 

Book Server 0.01: Pathagar + Sheeva Plug for offline reading

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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.

OLPC SF Community Summit: October 22-23

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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!

TechCamp Montevideo takes off

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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.

Winning video selected in OLPC Stories contest

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OLPC and Nickelodeon have selected the winner of the OLPC Stories contest: fourth-grader Giuliana Violetta Pozzoli Daiub, age 10, from the class of Liliana Ortega in Paraguay.

You can see the winning submission, a Scratch animation, featuring a narrator, SpongeBob, neon lights, and an XO on a dance floor.

As the contest winner, Giuliana will be attending the 2011 Halo Awards organized by MTV and Nickelodeon in LA next month. Congratulations to her and to the other four finalists on their work. Asked what message she would send to other children, she thanked her parents and teacher for supporting her, and said ‘always remember that with your XO and imagination you can be who you want to be and realize your dreams!’ (recordar siempre que con tu Xo e imaginación puedes ser quien quieras ser y lograr todo lo que sueñas!)