One Laptop per Child

OLPC in Greece has distributed 550 laptops to over 30 classes in each of 28 schools, and will soon be done with the deployment phase of their program.

In each participating class every student gets their own laptop, but no school has saturation.  I am curious as to how it will turn out.  Each school seems to have done its own internal training and planning, with a high ratio of participating teachers to students — many teachers are engaged in each school.  They all share a country-wide mailing list to discuss their work.  They have made a lovely visualization of their national network, linking proudly to the individual sites of each participating group.

Worldfocus.org has produced a video report that describes OLPC Rwanda’s plans to provide computer access to the country’s 2.3 million schoolchildren:

via worldfocus.org

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A lot of other blogs are linking here, and a lot of articles are linking to the wiki or recent post.  A selection:  ipodindia, dualiko, the-informer.info, ajun.org, inteeer gadgets, freegadgetnews, spotgadgets, gps-navigation, wiredpen, ontorebd.

Internationally : e-day.it and pasteris.it, and a few German-language posts

Yama posted one of his inimitable essays, pony and all, on the blog that everyone can edit.   John Paczkowski wins the prize for the catchiest post.

Comment here if you want your own thoughts added to this list.  I’ve also seen a few good threads for pulling out more ‘best of OLPC commentary’ quotes… some of them with helpful reflections.  Those are worth listing, as well.

Todd Kelsey, long time OLPC volunteer who has helped with documentation and translation projects in the past, has a mesh proposal in to the Knight News Challenge.  He writes of his proposal:

Mesh News is an entry on the Knight News Challenge, which has received a request for a full proposal. As of 12:30pm EST on 11-20, the 2000 entries have been narrowed down to around 350, and Mesh news is in 8th place in terms of overall number of views, and dropped from 3rd to 5th place in terms of “ratings”. If it does make it past the full proposal stage to the “final 50″, and then to the “final 20″, I think it could help a few kids out in various parts, provide a bit of employment, and help to get some additional publicity for OLPC.  Go G1G1!!!

guest post by the inimitable Anne Gentle

Copy this book! We hope you will.  I am proud to say that through a collaboration with One Laptop per Child, Sugar Labs and FLOSS Manuals, a print and online manual about using the XO laptop and Sugar operating system is now available as via print-on-demand at Lulu.com.   Tom Brady checked it out when he was visiting the office last week and thought it was pretty neat.

You can order your own print copy for a modest price – someone walks off with one of mine every week, and I’m due to order some more.  Or you can read it on your XO laptop -  the PDF is always available for free and for remixing into your own works. Soon, the book will be for sale on Amazon as well.

Two sides of an elegant book

The OLPC Laptop Guide has a simple, clean cover design and the content inside was written by a community of professional writers, editors, open source experts, and OLPC staff. This book contains 240 pages of how-to information for your XO laptop and the operating system that kids love, Sugar. This book was written by a group of people in the unique wiki tool offered by FLOSS Manuals. Much of the content was written in a five-day collaborative BookSprint. In it you’ll find instructions for connecting with and caring for this unique little laptop. The neat thing is, once you’re done with a real book, you can pass it on to the next person who wants to learn about their XO. Get a book and pass it on.