User:Mchua
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Who are you?
Mel Chua, itinerant hack of all trades and OLPC summer 2007 intern. I'm active in Support gang, OLPC Chicago, and an alumni from (and involved in the OLPC groups of) IMSA and Olin. You may also know me from the MIT Media Lab or Design Continuum. I'm an electrical and computer engineer by training, educator by passion, artist by hobby, journalist by accident, and everything else out of sheer curiosity. Pressed for a short job description, I would say that I engineer educations. More at http://melchua.com.
Contact
To find out where I am, check the Doppler badge on my blog. Leaving a message on my talk page or sending me an email (my first name at laptop dot org) is the best way to reach me 99% of the time. I usually respond within 48 hours. You can also find me on IRC (mchua) and skype (mel_chua). If something's truly urgent, text or call me at 847.970.8484 - please don't leave a voicemail though, as they're extraordinarily difficult for me to understand (I have a hearing loss).
About me
I keep a blog of entropic thought at http://blog.melchua.com I program (primarily in C, C++ and Python, but can pick up other languages), build simple computer peripherals (primarily using PIC microcontrollers, though I'm looking to branch into other platforms), and am learning web programming and interface design. Feel free to grab me if you think I'll be helpful for a task.
What... is your quest: To make a world where makers make themselves. (I need to come up with a more elegant wording of this.) Eventually I want to get two PhD's, one in engineering and one in education, and become a professor teaching and researching at the (currently shaky and fledgling) union of the two disciplines. I am currently preparing for a research trip involving an around-the-world plane ticket and visits to engineering colleges around the world to see how engineers are taught in different parts of the planet.
What... is your favorite color: Yellow.
Drugs of choice: Python, soy milk, and TAing intro engineering classes. Discussions on the future of education and learning and where technology falls into this. I have fairly radical ideas about classroom structure (my preference: none), information distribution (my preference: everything is freely world-readable and world-writable) and student evaluation (my preference: feedback yes, grades no), but these ideas are still quite open and under formation and I love talking to people about these and related topics.
I am Chinese and my family is from the Philippines. I was the first person in my extended family to grow up and be schooled outside the developing world, and the first to develop hardware, software, and participate in internet communities. I grew up as a "disabled" kid with a hearing loss severe enough to warrant a host of technological aids, special classes, and a full-time sign language interpreter. This has shaped many of my attitudes towards education, access, technology, globalization, and development.
Projects
Current
- Rewriting the Accessibility portal.
- Compiling material for the first edition of the Weekly zine (particularly Education/Research materials).
- Maintaining How laptop delivery works and How laptop delivery breaks.
- Working on support-gang from the Chicago area for the month of January, focusing on wiki cleanup and training documentation for new volunteers.
- Laying the groundwork for a full-time OLPC office in Chicago this summer.
Ongoing
- Jams
- Working on resources and a framework for future content Jams of different types. Writing the woefully neglected How To Run A Jam cookbook.
- Testing
- Starting a program for Review squads of young testers and teachers to give feedback on our content. Now recruiting.
- Wiki cleanup
- Metacontent - Finding information can be tricky. Let's try to fix that.
- Metapresentations - Compiling a review/summary of presentations on Laptop demonstrations and Presentations. Can you help?
- Metawiki - Doing clean-up as per the Style guide whenever I can
- Being a sort of wiki welcome wagon and helping out newcomers. Let me know if you're interested; we could always use more people to help show newbies around.
- Grassroots groups I'm actively involved in
- School chapters I actively mentor
Back burner
- Developing the Summer of Content program, which had a summer 2007 pilot and needs to be picked up again when everyone has time. Also see Summer of Content.
- Together with Andy Pethan, I am working on the design of Bounties for awesome, a system of collecting open content problems, encouraging work on them, and moderating rewards for progress on their solutions. Not entirely OLPC-related, though.
- The Classrooms for Free Culture project would be a good follow-up to University programs.
Notes
For Mel's reference; random scratchpad work which probably won't make sense to anyone else.
- User:Mchua/Templates
- User:Mchua/Todo
- User:Mchua/Templates
- User:Mchua/Calendar
- User:Mchua/Volunteers portal
- User:Mchua/Braindumps
- User:Mchua/Awesome
- User:Mchua/Sandbox
- User:Mchua/G1G1
Potential
These are some ideas I had kicking around that I would like to tinker with at some point; if you'd like to work with me on one of these, offer support, or even adopt it as your own project and go (I'm not clinging to or possessive of these ideas by any means!) go for it.
- OLPC webcomic
- Rosetta Stone clone in Pygame
- Front-end for music composition (GUI for Lilypond? Something to translate between TamTam and Lilypond?)
- "Heathkit" style build-your-own peripheral kits for the XO (solder your own gamepad, etc)
- Intro to electrical engineering through taking apart & developing for the XO
- Ad Libris, a lightweight metadata structure spec for the Library.
Past
- Was one of the coordinators of the first OLPC Game Jam (and indeed, the first OLPC Jam), Game Jam Boston June 2007.
- Helped out at Free Content Jam Taipei and represented OLPC at Wikimania, including (loosely) staffing the "XO station"
- Co-ran a week-long OLPC project camp with Scott Swanson at IMSA in Jan. 2008
- "Unofficial cat-herder" (read: instigator) of the first OLPC Chicago meetup at Google Chicago in Jan. 2008.
Goodies
- Made a set of Firefox wiki bookmarks for convenience - feel free to use.
- Some wiki templates up that I use occasionally - feel free to steal.
