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!
Nick writes about his first time as a Maker at Maker Faire, where he showed off some lovely hacks involving XOs and hung out with the Raspberry Pi team, among others. More photos and background on his blog.
Reposting an invitation from SugarLabs Argentina to their first Sugar Day, in Junin, to be held September 25-26.
SugarLabs Argentina quiere hacer publico el próximo encuentro de desarrolladores de la plataforma de aprendizaje Sugar. Este evento sera realizado entre los días 25 – 26 de Septiembre del 2011 en la ciudad de Junín, provincia de Buenos Aires, Argentina.
El objetivo del encuentro es de juntarnos en una sesión de trabajo de programadores – code sprint – con la intención de escribir código, enseñar, aprender, colaborar e incentivar el desarrollo de software libre sobre Sugar en las distintas comunidades de programadores. ¡ Y por supuesto reforzar y generar nuevos lazos de amistad en esta comunidad !
La propuesta del encuentro se basa en el dictado de un taller inicial de programación en Python sobre Sugar y en el code sprint ya mencionado. Compartimos el cronograma preliminar:
Por ultimo, queremos difundir que durante el Viernes 23 y Sábado 24 en la misma ciudad -Junin-, el grupo de usuarios de Python Argentina -PyAr- llevara adelante la conferencia del lenguaje Python 2011. Motivo por el cual decidimos realizar nuestro evento en continuación a la PyConAr-2011
Acercarnos tus propuestas e interés en participar, para que juntos, ajustemos todos los detalles necesarios para llevar adelante y compartir entre todos este evento.
reposted on behalf of OLPC France
Registration is now open for the 2nd SugarCamp Paris. Please join us in making Sugar a better learning experience!
This event is organized by OLPC France, and takes place in Paris, France from September 9 (evening) to September 11 (evening).
The goal is to enhance Sugar as a free learning platform, already used by ~2M kids around the
world, and to focus on a specific problem: how to make Sugar *documentation* better with respect to accessibility and readability?Partial travel refunds are available for regional trips for those who could not otherwise come. Please contact the organizers with any questions.
Let’s take this challenge, and enjoy a good time with many members of the OLPC/Sugar community!
The latest version of the Map activity was released this month, and works smoothly with the XO-1.5 and with openstreetmap or google map data.
And olpcMAP has been updated to work with new features of the Google App Engine. Check them both out! HT to SaigonOLPC for publishing these monthly status summaries.
The eduJAM! convocation is going strong, with 2-3 days of Sugar camp and discussion among developers and teachers from across the world. Keep an eye on the ceibalJAM site in the coming days for videos and notes from the event.
You can browse some of the presentations on the edujam2011 slideshare account.
eduJAM! invitacion
Over 20 OLPC and Sugar collaborators are in Uruguay this week, visiting schools, meeting with the Uruguayan communities (ceibalJAM, RAP Ceibal, and the eduJAM event team), and preparing for the eduJAM! summit for Sugar developers and educators across Latin America.
The attendees are using a separate OLPC Uruguay 2011 blog for the week to track their various travels and projects in Uruguay. If you can’t be there yourself, you can follow along (and share your own questions for the group) here.
OLPC Australia has released an update to their USB ‘toolkit’ for XOs, a collection of software on a USB thumb drive designed to assist in recovery, repair, and support scenarios. The new version is ready for testing, and Sridhar expects only documentation changes between now and its final release.
The XO-AU USB is OLPC Australia’s official means of delivering updates and troubleshooting tools to schools.
Professor Hopeton Dunn of the Mona School of Business in Jamaica writes and speaks about the need for more widesperad access to computers in his country. Citing a recent ICT indicators survey, he notes that Jamaica has hit a plateau of access, and that while projects like OLPC are introducing more children to computers and the Internet (a kind thing for him to say, since we are working with under 1000 children and teachers in the region, largely thanks to the efforts of Sameer Verma and Charlie Nesson), new plans are needed to provide access in the workplace and at home for the whole country.
Read more at the Jamaica Observer.
We’re hosting an olpcMAP discussion session at our Cambridge HQ on Wednesday night, with students (and future collaborators!) from Tufts. If you can’t be there, catch up on recent additions and developments to the project with this month’s olpcMAP update.
Meanwhile, mapping maven Nick Doiron shares the view from his seat in Montevideo, where he is a resident hacker this month with Plan Ceibal.
Dextrose2, a revamp of the popular XOOS flavor developed by Activity Central and Sugar Labs, in partnership with Paraguay Educa, is now available for both XO-1 and XO-1.5 laptops. It has a number of performance and other improvements, including 3G modem and connection sharing. I can’t wait to try it out on my old XO-1s.
The original Dextrose build + activities that was released last fall was based closely on the latest XOOS release available at the time (OS 10). This version has one major difference from the main OS: it does not offer a traditional Linux desktop as an alternative to Sugar. (Some students managed to delete their Sugar home directories from within their Gnome desktop, making work with Sugar difficult until they had reinstalled it. As a result, some teachers asked to return to a Sugar-only system.)
This work is now formally supported by Plan Ceibal, which has started to use Dextrose in their schools. It is good to see this much attention being given to activity development and Spanish-language documentation, and to close feedback loops with teachers who use the latest tools every week with their students.
So don’t wait — download a copy of Dextrose2 and try it out!
NB: If you’re looking for the latest Dextrose with the Gnome desktop option added back in, you can request this on the sugar-devel mailing list. It’s on the list of versions to make, but not a high priority at the moment.
This Saturday, Bergen Community College is hosting a free and open-source education event, HFOSS@BCC, with discussions and presentations about OLPC and Engineers Without Borders.
This event will bring together students, members of OLPC groups in NYC and Princeton, and Computer Science teachers in the CSTA across the US and NJ. The OLPC project at Princeton will discuss their recent OLPC library in Ghana, and math teacher John Sincak will talk about his work with XOs. Lunch is included.
For those taking the train: a few people are travelling together from Secaucus Station (just W of Penn Station) and meeting promptly at 7:30 AM on Saturday, most taking the 7:14 Northeast Corridor train (#7821) from Penn Station.
For those driving: the event is at 400 Paramus Road, Paramus NJ 07652, in the Technology Education Center – Room 128
What a great meeting of 14 minds on Friday, March 11 at 6PM at OLPC office, One Cambridge Center (right above the Kendall/MIT Red-Line Stop), facing OLPC’s most serious challenges.
Meeting agenda:
One of the topics was about using eToys or Scratch to engage older kids and/or adults with programming. Nick Doiron summarized some ideas on this topic for the group:
There are a lot of ideas out there about how to do intro-to-programming and I like what people have done with eToys at the primary school level (if you haven’t seen Waveplace’s experiences in Haiti, read about them online! )
As you target middle school level students or above, they’re interested in the internet and media. Some are interested in technical details – ask any programmer you know when they started. You can make a high school kid an expert in eToys, but they won’t be any closer to making their own website or Space Invaders game. If you would give someone a power tool in shop class, you should give them a real programming language on the computer.
Mozilla’s Hackasaurus program is designed for learning HTML at this level. Two amazing workshops in the past month:
http://spotlight.macfound.org/featured-stories/entry/at-hackasaurus-jam-mozilla-encourages-young-programmers-to-change-the-web/and http://brettgaylor.tumblr.com/post/3526122151/web-made-movies-at-bavcThey have information about setting up your own workshop at hackasaurus.org. Also, check out http://palpable-video.appspot.com/sample
This meeting had tremendous value for all participants as it presented an opportunity to connect to people who are interested in similar edu-tech ideas.
This week a team led by Uruguay’s ceibalJAM! (including Gabriel Eirea, Pablo Flores, Gonzalo Odiard, Fernando Sansberro, and Andrés Ambrois) and including Walter, Adam, Christoph, and David Farning, made progress in organizing an education hacking summit in Montevideo, Uruguay.
The name of the event will be eduJAM! 2011 and will take place from Thu May 5 to Sat May 7. Please include the eduJAM! and ceibalJAM! logos below if blogging or writing about the event.
The main objective of the summit is to strengthen the free educational software developer community, with a focus on Latin America and the Sugar + olpc communities. The event will feature discussions around future directions and strategy, hacking on specific projects, and exchange of experiences among different deployments. The event is being planned in more detail on the sugarlabs wiki.
Registration is not yet open. Alongside the eduJAM! a couple of extra activities are being planned to make the most of the attendees gathering for the summit (we already know of people from 10 countries who will be there):
A “Conozco Uruguay Tour” is being organized by members of volunteer group RAP Ceibal and the OLPC community, between Sat April 30 and Thu May 5.
There will also be a Sugar code sprint starting Sunday May 8, right after the summit, expected to continue to Monday May 9 if not beyond!
Sponsors are welcome; Activity Central has already offered to be a sponsor, and the organizers are looking for other sponsors both at the national and international level. We hope you can join us and are looking forward to your comments and suggestions!
Mobile App team bottle rocket borrowed an XO for a few months to play with it and test out their apps on it. They recently sent it back along with a donation from their amazing staff. Their founder Calvin Carter writes:
“Recently I was having dinner with a client. [H]e had his OLPC laptop with him. The waitress recognized the laptop and started asking him questions… While my friend was proudly demonstrating the newest model to her, I was reminded of one of Bottle Rocket’s core beliefs: exceptionally innovative technology not only enhances the way we do things – it redefines the way we live our lives. I realized that these laptops can truly change lives. What a perfect way for Bottle Rocket to give back. The next day, four laptops were on their way to tease out the imagination and ambition of their new owners.”
That’s a great photo! I wonder when some of their apps are going to appear alongside Batovi‘s in the Sugarlabs Activity center…
Community-organized Haitian EduTech Dinner, Tuesday night 5PM SHARP: at OLPC HQ.
Please join! Best of all, Boston’s Haitian Coalition will
join our OLPC_Boston monthly community meeting to discuss certain very intriguing next-gen EduTech plans (OLPC, Sugar,http://open1to1.org etc) emerging in Somerville Massachusetts, as well as the 400 OLPC laptops shipping to Haiti shortly,
with Waveplace’s own Beth Santos flying in to Boston en route to Haiti.
And Marina’s blog (saigonolpc.wordpress.com) is just 1 of many now summarizing other incredible volunteering-is-NOT-a-spectator-sport work on Planet OLPC.
We dearly hope to see you Tuesday — with 9+ tangentially related trips in February alone, among some very connected AND deeply dedicated Friends education/tech thinkers and doers in Boston here, it’s clear there will be tons to discuss! Dinner is being prepared; optionally feel free to bring desserts/drinks if you can and RSVP.
Then join us taking the next step in this critical educational design challenge — 1 humble country at a time 
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