Content repositories
| Philosophy |
| Creating Content |
| Curating Content |
| Educational ideas |
| Activity ideas |
| Software ideas |
| Hardware ideas |
| Help Translating |
| Library |
| Content network |
| Repositories |
| Collections |
| modify |
By distributing laptops and school servers with learning materials on them, and a global index of content that can be used with no modification on the laptops, OLPC is developing a network of digital libraries and collections in a number of languages.
(see also: content ideas, sharing your content with OLPC, and content rating).
Contents
Potential materials
for a breakdown with size estimates, see Content repository/sizes
TV & Radio
Audio and videocasts
News
Books and texts
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{{{ #!html }}} Interactive courseware
Wikipedia & sister projects
 Web and blogs
Mail, chat, file transfers
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Daily updates
Repository mirrors
We will have regional mirrors in every country and region where OLPC is distributed en masse.
Materials to be included in the mirrors include:
- a full Fedora repository
- developoment tools used by OLPC subteams in constructing builds
- cross-compilation toolchains used by various contributors
- a Free content repository
- Wikipedia snapshots [2-20GB], archive.org & gutenberg texts [2-100GB]
- Wikimedia Commons [1M resources, ~1TB]
- Other media resources (Jamendo, archive.org; size TBD)
- Collections made specifically for OLPC
- A collection sized for the XO
- Local collections sized for the XO and for school servers, developed in-country
- Collections sized for school servers (larger sets of data, maps, video, texts, and software)
- Software suitable for OLPC schools
- Packages for FC7 school servers
- Extensions and additions for existing tools and services in the OLPC network
Mirror sites
In general, the Internet Archive is considering launching local and regional mirrors of their collections. We will want a larger mirror that can host a dozen TB of data for each region, connected to multiple peers; and a number of smaller mirrors in each country. Details on potential mirror hosts:
South America:
- Brasil -- Google, AMD. See also Rodrigo M.
- Uruguay -- Google and GMail
Africa
- Nigeria --
- Ethiopia --
Asia
- Nepal -- see OLPC Nepal
- Taiwan?
Large archives
- Free media collections : Flickr, Wikimedia Commons
- Music : Freesound, Free Music Project
- Texts: Project Gutenberg, Google Scholar, Wikipedia;
- Stories: ICDL, other children's pdfs
- Language: WiktionaryZ / OmegaWiki, Dicologos and Universal dictionary system
- Reference collections: the Humanity Development Library, eGranary
Small subsets will need to be culled for pre-installation of choice material on the laptops themselves; larger subsets will need curating to pick out material suitable for the laptop's audiences; classification and categorization; and checks to avoid unbalance or repetition. Most content needs internationalization.
Specific projects and collections
- Avallain literacy and basic skills learning
- A World Digital Library portal
- Wikijunior, WikiHow
- Our Stories project, with Story Corps, UNICEF, and Google - capturing local stories
- Book scanning and digitization:
- Children's picturebooks, with support from ICDL
- Public domain materials, with archival support from the Internet Archive
- Other local cultural materials, with support from the World Digital Library
- Wikieducator tutorials
- OER subcollections from Curriki and OER Commons
- Health collections from EOW, WHO, and others
Proposed implementation
The head page for a curriculum or cohesive set of content is just an HTML page. It can have any text interspersed in it. The document should have a tag in the header: <link rel="olpc.content_bundle" href="sitemap.xml">.
The sitemap is a Google Sitemap XML file, a simple enumeration of a set of URLs. Unlike Google's restrictions, the URLs do not have to live "on" the site where the sitemap is located -- they may cross domains. Embedded content (like images) do not have to be enumerated, but any linked content should be enumerated (for instance, if you link to a movie file from one of the documents).
Note that this head document can be constructed by anyone, and need not be hosted where the original material is located. Multiple head documents can refer to the same content, representing multiple versions of the curriculum, different target audiences, etc.
A document may contain multiple <link> tags, representing an aggregation of curricula. For instance, a teacher version of a curriculum would include the student version (the sitemap from that version) plus another sitemap enumerating all the documents intended just for the teacher.
The head page represents the collection. It may contain any text, and no special restrictions or interpretation is made of that text. The browser will detect this link tag, and when the student visits the page will offer to pre-fetch the entirety of the content. The pre-fetched content will appear to be at the same URL as it was originally, but will be served from the local cache. Additionally the school server may use this to cache data.
The student may manage their pre-fetched content, which takes up local space and may need to be purged. The head page and the head page's title represents the content in these situations.
The content may link to other documents not enumerated in the sitemap. These may not be available, since they have not been prefetched. At that time the browser should offer to fetch the content when the laptop is able to find that content, and optionally notify the student of the availability of the content. The laptop may seek that content on other nearby laptops, the school server, or the wider internet. The content will be pre-fetched at that time. An option may be provided to do deeper pre-fetching (e.g., fetching down one line, or down two links into the content).
Use cases
Conceptually, a content repository could be used in a variety of ways: to publish and share new material, to collaborate on material development over time (synchronizing online and offline contributions to a shared document or project), to search for and download material, to distribute and cache from large collections that can't be contained on one machine or at one school. For more, see the talk page.
Content rating
Simple ratings can be done
- via a matrix of subject areas and reading levels,
- via a group rating system where anyone can affiliate with a rating group and apply their shared guidelines and ratings to materials
