User talk:Gregorio

My list of places where student and educator input results in new software being developed for the XO or XS.

Places where developers collect and analyze incoming requests

Roadmap: http://dev.laptop.org/roadmap

Its based on a bug tracking system. All items appear to be related to deploying the XO and addressing critical bugs which interfer with core functionality. Mostly Wireless and booting issues. One note on activities and library is listed. Need to find links to that software/ideas.

User experience, input, ideas and blogs

NYC School Report

OLPC Report on XO Roll Out in Arahuay

Talk Main Page: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Talk:Main_Page This page is for discussion of the Main OLPC Page. Its achrived every month and it appears that all input so far is coming people commenting on rather than using the XO.

Ask OLPC a Question: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Ask_OLPC_a_Question Long list of incoming questions. Lots of sub links to questions asked and some answered. I'll extract and categroize relevant links soon. Mostly questions from people wanting to help the project or get a laptop.

Blogs and user pages outside OLPC Wiki

Chile Un Computador Por Nino page

Ceibal Blog
Uruguay pilot blog.

Great feedback from Nepal!
See especially the blog for details on technical configuration, challenges and strategy.

Detailed feedback and reports from XO deployment in the Carribean
Sign up for their superb newsletter too and make a contribution to keep this feedback coming in.

OLPC Wiki on Peru
Input from Peru. See Actualizaciones de Perú section for two reports and check back as this site is being built by a teacher in Peru.

South Bronx Teacher Feedback

Uruguay Main Wiki Page

OLPC Colombia Web site

Colombia team in OLPC Wiki

Peru OLPC Wiki page
Make sure to click on the Lambayeque link. Good details there!

Uruguay Teachers Blog
Active as of April 2008

Blog from Pakistan by Waqas Tor

Home site for Bangalore

UI Development, UI in Education and Education on its Own

The overall Interface Guidelines page covers some of this:

OLPC_Human_Interface_Guidelines

Super article by Alan Kay on UI and learning
http://www.vpri.org/pdf/human_condition.pdf

An In Depth Look at School System Goals in Uruguay

First major XO roll out in Uruguay Ceibal Blog

Requirements and Deployment Update
Slowly growing web site on OLPC Wiki

Uruguay Volunteers site
Updates and blog on team deploying XOs and doing training in Uruguay

Report on Education In Uruguay In General
Report on Education in Uruguay by Government Ministry

First questions from kids in Uruguay
El más solicitado, la pregunta más oída fue: “Señor, señor, ¿cómo hago para poner música?”
My rough translation: The most asked questions was "Mr. Mr, how do I play music?"

La segunda: “Señor, señor ¿me enseñás a sacar las fotos?”
My rough translation: Second, Mr. Mr. teach me hlow to take pictures?"

La tercera: “¿dónde están los juegos?” Y la cuarta: “¿cómo hago para escribir?”
My rough translation: The third, where are the games and the fourth: how do I use it to write?

From Ceibal blog at:
Entregando laptops del Plan Ceibal

Ethiopia Roll Out Plan

http://wiki.laptop.org/images/2/23/Ethiopia_ecbp_Pilot_Project_CONCEPT_v0.5.pdf http://wiki.laptop.org/images/9/97/Ethiopia_ecbp_Pilot_Project_IMPLEMENTATION_v0.5.pdf

I have no history or other information on this deployment beyond these well written documents. If someone contacts the author, please update this page with any info found.

http://www.eduvision.ch/en/meta/documents/ethiopiareport_080227a-mh.pdf
Report on progress in Ethiopia

Comments and Suggestions on How To Teach Caring For Your Senses

Some ideas on education with the XO liberally construed from a single image taken in Peru.

I originally wrote this as a follow up to my post on OLPC News: http://www.olpcnews.com/software/applications/xo_application_development_process.html

My time has since been taken up by interacting with Uruguay team (see below) and helping Nepal get an XS Server up and running.

My challenge, add your input and ideas below....

Its time to revisit my idea of how to make early XO deployments successful with an interactive development model. I am still on step 1, gathering input and creating a dialog between users and developers. The dialog part has been especially challenging. That's probably a good thing as we don't want the XO users to be deluged with questions and distractions from the vast world of XO commentators. That said, its amazing how many forums, blogs, wikis and web sites have sprung up with G1G1 users posting at a torrid pace. In comparison, the similar number of XOs distributed in the developing world have left nary a ripple of requests on the web..

What do people think about why we don't see requirements or feature requests from XO users in the developing world? One possibility could be time and experience as suggested in the essay, "Models of Growth" http://www.laptop.org/Models_of_Growth.pdf: It refers to one project where "there was a limited use of the online environment ... Primarily it was not in the school culture to spend time on-line. teachers' time is more than full accounted for already. They have virtually no extra time for seeking answers to their questions, for edification, for curiosity, for improvement."

We need to deal with that by ensuring we only engage in meaningful and constructive dialog which leads to real results. Protecting the privacy and time/bandwidth of teachers and students is paramount. Nonetheless, we should look for a safe intermediary or process that allows kids and teachers to talk about what they want to do with their XOs. Then hopefully we can mobilize large groups of resources to respond. We may need an asynchonous and uneven process. For example, a teacher in Peru only has 5 minutes to comment on what software they need. In return their collaborators need to spend 5 days researching options and proposals. Then the suggestions need to be presented back in way that only takes 5 minutes to evaluate. That's my guess but we need to engage that dialog to see how it works on real projects.

In order to start a dialog it helps to show that you have something useful to offer. That is a reason for others to want to engage you.

So I have come up with a project that I think would be valuable and which we can start on without needing any further input.

Carla Gomez Monroy posted a super report on the roll out of XOs in Arahuay, Peru: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Peru/Arahuay In it there is a picture of a beautiful learning tool created by one of the teachers for her students: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Image:024_Arahuay.JPG

My rough translation is: Care that we must take for our senses
- Go to the eye doctor
- Don't sit too close to the television
- Don't put anything in your eye
- wash your hands
- don't touch hot things
- don't put wet hands in a power socket
and one I can't read

This teaches students about the senses of touch and sight and it teaches kids how to protect those senses.

This brings to light three challenges:
1 - How would you teach this with the XO and could you design software that teaches it as well or better?
2 - How would a teacher use the XO to create this kind of learning material for other lessons? Could they do it a more quickly and with better results than drawing it by hand?
3 - Is there an activity available that would preserve or even enhance this teachers superb sense of creativity and design?

That's taking a lot from one simple picture. Still, if we can address those challenges we can create a set of tools that implements a broad range of educational goals. The good thing is that its a real lesson that a real teacher wants to teach her kids. I don't know if its what the kids want to learn but it does seem like important life knowledge. This is targeted at first and second graders, ages 6 - 8. Its almost a trivial example but it may be harder to teach ths with the XO than it looks...

I envision four stages of this development:
1 - A tool and template that let's teachers pull down images from a collection (google?) and place them on a background. Then let's them add lines and text to create essentially the same thing you see on the page.

2 - A way to share that creation with the kids (web page?)

3 - A concept of interactivity which allows construction and agency on the part of the kids. Something that the kids can create themselves and that allows them to go beyond the primary message to explore the ideas further. e.g. what if the kids wanted to learn why wet hands are more dangerous with electricity than dry hands or why sitting too close the TV is bad for your eyes? What if the kids learned something more and wanted to add it back to extend the lesson or wanted to add more safety lesson? What if they want to virutally see what happens when they violate one of these rules? What would it take to make this lesson interesting to the kids (e.g. make it a game or let them make it their own)?

4 - How would you make it faster to create this on the XO than to draw it by hand? Could you do it without diluting the chance for creativity?

I think we can knock off the first two pretty quickly. The second two look much harder. I'm not an educator though I pretend to be one at home with my kids :-)

The high level goals of this software development in priority order are:
- Make an XO tool that is useful for teachers and saves them time in creating lessons.
- Make an XO tool that creates lessons which are more interesting and creates more effective learning for 6 - 8 year olds.
- Empower teachers and students to create their own lessons and learning tools using the XO

The Health Project would welcome anyone wanting to pursue this idea. --FGrose 23:25, 14 March 2008 (EDT)

Developer collaboration with teachers and students

Thanks for your ideas. I've commented briefly on our Talk page: Developer collaboration with teachers and students. Do you sense any particular usability problem in penetrating the time, space, & cultural barriers? We can continue there or here. --FGrose 22:43, 14 March 2008 (EDT)

Translation of pages

Gregorio,

Mucho gusto. . . I'm happy to try to help get you pointed in the right direction, but I must be clear that I'm no wiki expert (started here in Jan '08), but I'm trying to learn and I'm a quick study.

As for RTFM or is it RTFWiki :-), here are some pages to start with.

Translating, Translating/HowTo, Template:Translation, List_of_translators.

Getting the translation thing right definitely requires some knowledge of the proper use of templates, and I'm not an expert there. It might be best to post a similar question to User_talk:Xavi. Special:Contributions/Xavi shows a lot of work on translation issues. Maybe also User_talk:Homunq who looks like something of a template expert or User_talk:Dupuy. I think any of them would be better able to help you. I will take look at your pages when I have a chance to see if there are any suggestions I can offer, but for the translation process, I'm probably not your expert.

Cjl 12:47, 11 April 2008 (EDT)

I went ahead and inserted the translation template on OLPC Uruguay, I'm afraid my anglo-centric upbringing caused me to make a mistake. I really should have created the translations page indicating that the "original" page language was (es) espanol , but my fingers typed (en) english. I'll try to fix it, hopefully I didn't make too much of a mess of it. Cjl 22:49, 11 April 2008 (EDT)

Requirements Test Table - Not Confirmed, Prioritized or Finalized in Any Way

Feature	Function	Benefit	Lead customer	Requester Contact info	Priority	Target Development Team
Mesh Level Collaboration	Mirela Use Case	Fulfills expectation. Allows collaborative editing and learning.	Uruguay, Peru	See thread on Sur list http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/olpc-sur/2008-May/000118.html	High	OLPC and Marvell?
XS extends storage	Allow XOs to backup, archive and restore data from XS	Increases space for XO user generated data, especially video and images.	Nepal	Rabi	High	XS in OLPC and Open Source helpers
Secure XO to XO E-mail	Allow kids to find each other and communicate via e-mail without the danger of non-XO people getting direct access to kids.	Increase inter-kid communication without minimal risk.	Sur e-mail http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/olpc-sur/2008-June/000244.html and follow up from Yama	Yama and Daniel Ajoy	Medium	?
Robust Jabber server	Allow collaboration when XS is present	Same use case and value as "Mesh level collaboration"	?	Kim, Henry	High	?
Reliable track pad	Ensure that track pad never moves without user input	Easier to use and better user/student experience	Nepal, Others?	Bryan, Greg S	High	OLPC HW team?
Wireless AP compatibility	Ensure that more wireless APs work with XO (WEP, WPA, cloaked, others ?). Better config options and diagnostics.	Easier install and setup. Lower cost and more flexibility for connecting to Internet	G1G1	Adam and Support Gang	High	Support gang? OLPC code needed?
Prevent crash and warn before running out of disk (NAND) space	Ensure that no applications or user action can fill the NAND so that the XO crashes or doesn't boot.	Improves user perception of reliability and allow more aggressive use of disk space without fear of crashing.	?	Greg S	High	OLPC engineering
Lower power consumption and increase battery life	Optimize the battery usage to minimize consumption with minimal interference in user experience.	Longer battery life allows more teaching and home time with XO without needing recharge.	?	Greg S	High	OLPC engineering
Support USB storage	Ensure that USB storage file systems are not corrupted	Better backup and interoperability.	?	Greg S	High	OLPC engineering?
Support Flash	Allow playing Flash and using interactive features within the browser, support YouTube	Enable playing more available internet content	?	Henry	High	OLPC engineering?
Run X-Windows	Enable X-Windows as an activity within Sugar	Allows kids to learn skills useful in the real world.	?	Henry	Medium	OLPC engineering?
eBook mode	Allows reading PDF (other?) with screen folded over.	Saves cost of buying books	?	?	High	OLPC engineering (Scott?)
Multi-battery charger	Allow charging of many batteries from a single power source	Faster charging of full classes XOs	?	?	Medium	OLPC engineering (Richard?)
Self signing	?	?	?	?	Medium	OLPC engineering
Run School Server on one more XOs	Allow some XS services on an XO	Cheaper hardware costs and easier admin.	Agressive enviromental conditions	Michael	Medium	?