User:Sj/W

weekly notes and errata

week of Jan 20

community

I.CAN Foundation

This foundation creates small teaching libraries focussed on primary literacy, around the world. They focus on early childhood education, but also provide adult-learning education and practical job-skills. They are developed to be self-sufficient within a few years of creation. Founded by Ben Wicks and his wife.

Current interest: acquiring many small lots of laptops for their 1-2k children. Target areas have no primary ed. Specially Brazil, Philippines, Canada. [ABS-CBN contact in ph.] Sari Ruda from the I.CAN board is in contact with Mel Chua about ways to proceed. Potentially joining us for the Sunday grassroots discussion.

Publicity of knowledge

issues that have come up for potential sequestering on private sites -- how to deal with people who write into rt; using rt in general; phone support notes for the new community phone system; private info about team members. The latter has always been safe from google on our Team wiki (for access, please leave me a request on my talk page). The rest probably should be public, with only tiny portions private. [imagine making the FAQ private b/c they were used in responses to emails!]

visitors 

Mel Chua has a few people lined up for the OLPC Chicago office this summer; she will be in Cambridge/at 1CC Jan 31 and Feb 1.

Developers & contributors program

Chris Hager and Aaron Kaplan have finished a new version of his project and XO-request database, which can export in various formats, including to wikitext and xml. He is waiting for feedback from B* on what data and format to export to connect smoothly with their system. Aaron will be in Cambridge Feb 2-5 talking about wireless issues @ MIT, and will stop by the office.

library

use cases 

A review of repository and bundle use cases was held on Thursday and Friday. We reviewed the metadata needed for better tracking and sharing of bundles, and worked through specific use cases from India and Nepal (Bryan Berry was present). Lauren Klein, Martin Langhoff (of Moodle) and Joshua Marks (of Curriki) joined for a discussion of how children and teachers should be uploading their materials to the local network and to the Web. Curriki has added groups features last week that will allow for a customized OLPC portal for educators, and have been working with Lauren to set one up.

Metadata

New bundles should all include new fields in the future, including author, license, and URL. The new proposed .info file format is open for discussion.

Collections

in development and testing this week:

- an updated set of books from ICDL, with Mongolian stories and

higher-resolution images

- a pdf version of Where There is No Doctor (Pascals : 'clean html
conversion will take another 2 weeks'),
- 3 languages of the Holocaust Encyclopedia,
- flash math and language materials from AJ van der Voort and the EFK
foundation (looking for a programmer to help, via arjun & manu; they
have a project in India)
- compressed high-res b&w pdfs from the Internet Archive, curated by
their Marcus Lucero

Health

Interest in Health collections has spiked recently, with David Greisen and Erica Frank back after the holidays, and Anna Bershteyn, Mika Matsuzaki, Arjun Sarwal, Ian Daniher, and Seth Woodworth all working on related projects. Discussions around these are continuing on the Library mailing list, and on the wiki's Health pages.

Game Jams 

Rut Jesus will be joining some 150 developers at the Nordic Game Jam next weekend in Copenhagen.

notes

Babel Prize

Nick Benik is working on a Babel Prize for language learning web apps that work for XO users (1/20 | 22)

week of Jan 13

Library

v.20 of the library is available in the latest joyride, with unified

interfaces across its collections, and an updated set of texts.

spreadsheet

Dan Bricklin, who just got 2 XOs for new year's, writes that he has finished an alpha of his latest js spreadsheet, and it works on the XO, though slower than he would like. He has gathered rendering, including frame-fixing in either direction, and calculation all into the js -- he reports the base renderer is slow, but that it can scale to 10,000+ rows without additional speed hits and [re]calculates ~100 expressions/second. This isn't totally public yet; licensing and reuse issues have to be worked out with SocialText, who supported this

work, but those discussions are underway.

discovery, journal searching

Pascal Martin reports that he has scheduled time for his team to work on search solutions for our journal/datastore starting February 9, and

following details on journal design carefully. [Their help came up briefly during the journal discussions over the past week]

community

grassroots zine

Iain Davidson, Seth Woodhouse, Michael Burns and a number of other community members are pushing to put out a grassroots zine with informal notes from the community. They hope to have a short first edition out this weekend. The name of the zine is still up for discussion.

games

Micropolis

Bill Simser has started a series on hacking Micropolis:

http://weblogs.asp.net/bsimser/archive/2008/01/14/building-a-city-the-series.aspx

Don Hopkins and Alan Kay are hoping to meet up over the next month, while Don is in California (for GDC 2008, to discuss future developments of SimCity ideas to make Micropolis great.

The Nordic Game Jam

this event is growing in interest, with around 150 people registered; all hoping to hack on XOs in the first weekend in February. The resulting games would be ready in time to show off at the Game Developer's Conference, where the two winning groups from last year's Boston Game Jam will also put in an attendance, hoping to show off Spray Play (updated, from the Jordan brothers) and the new Colors! activity (ported from the Nintendo DS, from Wade Brainderd, Jens Andersson, and Robert Anderberg).

people and visits

ePALS

Tim DiScipio and ePALS are planning an announcement about their educational connections in the next 1-2 weeks, and hope to include

their collaborations with OLPC. They are talking with Jackie Lustig about this.

Polycom

(a delayed note from that meeting) -- Walter and SJ met with Polycom's Lea Maynard, from their educational outreach division. Jim Sharp from their team is looking into what grants they work with would be appropriate for us. They are working with the Maliseet tribes in maine, and had hopes of helping XOs get out to those and other native american communities. They also have a 'global nomads' projects of virtual classrooms which would fit in nicely with ourstories.

We asked them to think about how to handle many people using videoconf over the mesh at once. currently we are waiting for an update from them.

on xo wikis

local html editing : A wiki will be the mechanism for local html editing: for help pages, class notes, and more.

links as primary objects : A 'link' should have real meaning in our system, carrying metadata about how it wants to be executed and with what context from its current environment.

distinguishing internal from external links: Links that leave the local context should let you konw and ask you to explicitly try to so leave; or you should be able to set a preference to make this happen.

Options should be : visit that page via Browse; visit it via some other activity; bookmark the page?; copy the link; view the link's metadata and properties.