We’re participating in America’s Giving Challenge, a virtual contest that rewards nonprofits who get the greatest number of people to donate to their Facebook Cause. They’re giving away $1,000 to the nonprofit who gets the most donations in a 24-hour period or a $50,000 donation to the nonprofit who get the most donations overall by November 6.

We want to win the daily challenge (and $1,000 to create more life-changing volunteer projects)! Past winners have only had a few hundred donors, so with our many volunteers and supporters, we know you can help us beat that.

Please visit our Cause and make a donation of any amount between 3:00 p.m. on Thursday, October 29, until Friday at 3:00 p.m. Remember, this contest is not about the amount of money we raise, but the number of people who donate. Tell your friends and help us win!

We just got back from a showcase at an awesome book festival this evening, where the Internet Archive finished making its 1.6 million digitized books available for use on XOs.

Recently we announced a joint Bookserver project with the Archive to help all authors, libraries, and publishers share metadata in a way that can be more easily aggregated and searched. The Archive’s bookserver implementation for their extensive collection and the ‘Get IA Books’ activity by Jim Simmons and Sayamindu were the first large-scale test of the project.

And at today’s Boston Book Fest, the Archive announced that all of their works will be available in the lightweight EPUB format, which our tests suggest will make almost all of them render elegantly and cleanly on the XO. [you can help us test by trying out the activity and trying to open a few downloaded books with the latest version of Read!]

The Book Fest was awesome in other ways, too – we had a tent in an optimal location, just between the ice cream truck and the Legal Seafood truck, and a 50Mbps connection donated by Comcast which served the entire event.  More after the jump… Continue reading →

Today Uruguayan President Tabaré Vázquez handed out the last XO in the initial project of Plan Ceibal, Uruguay’s national olpc project, providing an XO to each of the 395,000 children in primary school from 1st to 6th grade across the country’s 2332 public schools.  Of these, some 1900 are connected to the Internet; and those students and teachers generate a significant percentage of traffic to this and other OLPC websites (sending us hundreds of thousands of visitors a month).

The handout was of the last laptops was made in Montevideo at Escuela 28/80.  It is remarkable to see how quickly they reached this first milestone, and I can’t wait to see what the program does next.

When I visited Uruguay in August, I got to see one day-long handout at a school; the care with which the head teachers worked with every parent to introduce them to the laptop along with their child for a minute apiece as they were taking them home for the first time has stayed with me.  It was very much a social process, not technical training, making what might be foreign to parents seem fun and natural.

Plan Ceibal have already published the most comprehensive evaluations of a full-saturation olpc project to date, for both teachers and administrators, and a series of remarkable videos and books about the project for the lay public.

Continue reading →