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
What... is your name? Mallory Solomon Lim Chua. Most people call me Mel.
What... is your quest? To make a world where makers make themselves. (I need to come up with a more elegant wording of this.) The job I'd like to retire from is that of an university professor with two PhD's, one in engineering and one in education, teaching and doing research at the (currently shaky and fledgling) union of the two disciplines. My goal is to have as many interesting things happen between now and then as possible. (And, of course, to seek the Holy Grail.)
What... is your favorite color? Yellow.
Random background: 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. I also grew up as a voracious library addict (at a young age, books were easier for me to understand than people talking) and a tomboy who hung out with the guys to talk about math and science (and occasionally play football). This has shaped many of my attitudes towards education, access, technology, globalization, and development.
I am a hacker of hardware, software, brains, and the boundaries between them. Please feel free to grab me if you think I'd be useful for a task.
As an electrical and computer engineer, I work with microcontrollers and design simple peripherals and control mechanisms. That sounds a lot fancier than it probably should; basically, I make Things With Electrons Talk To Each Other. I'm still very new to the hardware world, and feel less comfortable in it than any other, but I've "learned enough to teach myself more," as a prof once told me at the end of my undergrad career. (My choice to major in electrical engineering is a canonical masochism story involving a dartboard and the decision to study the field I had the least background in and the most terror of.)
As a coder and Linux user (thanks to some high-school friends and a stack of Debian install floppies) I adore the command line and have picked up programming along the way, primarily in C, C++, and Python. I can usually pick up other languages fast (and forget them even faster) with the exception of assembly, which tends to drive me slowly insane if I work with it for extended periods of time. Open source software has also led me into the related topics of open licenses, open content, and (the young but burgeoning field of) open education.
As a long-time TA (since 2001), I'm fascinated by how people learn and believe in the power of nosce te ipsum. (Personally, I am a highly visual, big-picture person who learns best by teaching and writing documentation, which is usually highly convenient for classmates and fellow hackers with new projects.) I have fairly radical ideas about classroom structure (my preference: none), information distribution (my preference: everyone has read-write access to everything) 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. Having completed my undergrad degree in engineering, I'm planning on going to graduate school in education in the near future.
I'm also an enthusiastic (if amateur) wordsmith. I keep a blog of entropic thought at http://blog.melchua.com, on which I occasionally post about OLPC-related things, but no promises are made as to coherency or relevance.
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
- /Todo - OLPC task list of things I've committed to getting done. If you'd like to assign me a task, leave a message on my talk page and I'll notify you when I accept (and move it to my tasklist). Feel free to harass me about anything on the Todo list.
- /Braindumps - Thoughts in progress that are not yet fully formed or ready to go to main wiki. Probably inaccurate, half-baked, or some combination of the two. You have been warned.
- /Sandbox - For testing wiki syntax, templates, etc.
Someday
Projects and ideas I'd like to do, or see done, but haven't committed to yet. Usually the missing part is a collaborator, knowledge, resources, or just plain old activation energy and free time. If you'd like to take one of these projects (the important thing is that they happen, not who makes them happen), collaborate with me on any of them, offer support, or just talk and brainstorm about related ideas, please contact me.
- OLPC webcomic
- Rosetta Stone clone in Pygame (Update: An IMSA student is now doing this as her research project.)
- 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. (Update: This may have been taken up by OLE Nepal, but I can't tell from their descriptions yet.)
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.
