OLPC Rochester, NY

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OLPC Rochester, NY

Local grassroots group

About

The Rochester, NY interest group is a way for people in the Rochester, New York area and surrounding locations to talk about and work together on OLPC. This is a page for those interested in volunteering or contributing to the project.

A discussion thread, OLPC Rochester, NY has been started on forum.laptop.org.

OLPC Rochester, NY is

• just beginning to organize.
• a wiki page open for use by all interested parties in the Rochester area.

Chapters

If you know of any Rochester area schools, organizations, or groups of interested people who have organized or want to organize a Grassroots group or an university, college, or school chapter, please ask them to add a link below.

Existing projects

Usability Testing with RIT course 4004-749 12 March - 21 May 2008

• topic or issue selection - 12-20 March - Submit ideas in Project ideas below.

Events

We are planning an ad hoc workshop and demonstration at RIT on 26 March 2008. Announcement, Notice.pdf, Notice.doc, Notice Poster.doc

This will integrate a Western New York Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (WNY HFES) local section meeting, a graduate class of Professor Keith Karn, Usability Testing, and several XO laptops loaned to the workshop by RIT's Laboratory for Technological Literacy's OLPC project team lead by Professor Stephen Jacobs. The Laboratory is part of RIT's Center for Advancing the Study of CyberInfrastructure. (Donor credits to follow.)

The WNY HFES will meet at 4:30-6:00 pm for this meeting in RIT Building 70 Room 2400. We can meet begining in the afternoon for a walk-in workshop, and perhaps test some ideas to share during the later meeting and class. Professor Karn's class usually meets on Wednesdays evenings from 6 'till 9:50 pm. He is planning to have his class arrive early to merge with the HFES meeting on 26 March 2008.

26 March 2008                         One Laptop per Child, an education project

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      the $100 laptop that is changing the world

Show & Tell, Look, Listen & Learn, Touch & Feel, Give & Take

     An afternoon workshop with OLPC Rochester, NY leading to an evening meeting of the WNY HFES
     XO laptops provided by the RIT Laboratory for Technological Literacy's OLPC project team lead by Professor Stephen Jacobs

Presented by: Frederick Grose, MPH, CIH and collaborators

Location: RIT Building 70 Room 2400 (B. Thomas Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences)
Park in Lot J. See campus map at http://inside.rit.edu/maps/

Abstract

One Laptop per Child, the OLPC project, is a non-profit association created by faculty members of the MIT Media Lab in 2005. The association oversees the Children’s Machine project and construction and deployment of the XO, the $100 Laptop, designed to “revolutionize how we educate the world's children,” including those with limited energy and other infrastructure resources. While they emphasize that OLPC is an education project, their strategy is to promote worldwide collaboration on the development of an open-source computing and communication platform. The platform would grow to accelerate learning in whole communities and among all associated with the project. Their ambitious goals and advanced, but low-cost, and energy-efficient hardware and software have captured the imaginations of hundreds of thousands of people. In November 2007 they started mass production of the XO laptop, and the pioneers of the next wave of worldwide computing seem to be in the making!

Timeline

1-5 pm - Drop In (at any time - All are welcome), Check Things Out, Get to Know Each Other, Try Things Out

• 1:00 - doors open: set up XOs & networking; invite others to do likewise, casual introductions..
• ~1:45 - Identify interests or topic groups among attendees, suggest that they gather and self-organize. Possibly:

XO Mesh network XO Activities

XO Human Interface Guidelines OLPC project areas

XO emulated on VMWare Server 2.0 beta on Windows Vista32 Sugar on Ubuntu 7.10

• ~2:30 (or as seems timely) - Break (popcorn popper) Report discoveries, suggestions, raise questions. Address questions, summarize and document on boards, redirect, regroup, or shuffle among topics as desired.
• ~3:15 (or as seems timely) - Repeat previous step as appropriate.
• ~4:00 - finalize additional demonstrations & topics for 5:00 pm WNY HFES meeting; topic groups summarize items learned, open questions, plans, and report same on wiki and on board in classroom.
• 4:30 - Refreshments (sandwiches for full-day attendees), greet arriving HFES attendees, personal networking.
  
  

5-6:00 pm - WNY HFES Meeting time

• 5:00 - HFES meeting introductions, Facilitator’s comments on OLPC project, screen demos, explain theme, begin to answer new questions.
• ~5:30 - Identify any OLPC topic groups present; have attendees get up to mill around and exercise theme actions.
  
  

6-6:30 pm - Merge into Keith Karn's Usability Testing Class

• 6:00 - Solicit all to visit OLPC wiki, contribute ideas to the project via the OLPC Rochester, NY page, and spread the word about the project to friends and colleagues.

About the Facilitator

Frederick Grose volunteers for the OLPC project. He served for 27 years at Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester, NY as an industrial hygienist, asbestos hygiene manager, workplace epidemiology associate, health, safety, & chemical information systems architect & programmer, and ergonomics associate. Over his career at Kodak, he was the responsible industrial hygienist for significant tours of duty with Synthetic Chemicals, Roll Coating, & Photochemicals Divisions, and the Chemical Manufacturing, Construction, Maintenance, Facilities, Engineering, and Research & Development Organizations. He helped developed Kodak's asbestos control program, occupational exposure tracking systems, and exposure monitoring and analysis systems for historic and active cohorts of workers exposed to methylene chloride. He developed and delivered health education sessions for thousands of people working with asbestos and other hazardous physical, chemical, biological, or mechanical agents. Frederick is a Certified Industrial Hygienist, a Master of Public Health (University of California, Berkeley), and a Bachelor of Science in chemistry (University of California, Riverside). For most of his final 6 years at Kodak, he served as an ergonomics associate, helping industrial clients to develop, understand, and implement ergonomic solutions that improve jobs and workplaces.

For HFES Meeting (5-6 pm) Only:

COST: Members & Students – no cost; Non-members - $ 5 payable at the door

RSVP: Contact Jennifer Dyck by 19 March, 716-673-3828, Jennifer.Dyck at fredonia.edu

Register your interest with ideas here: (sign with ~~~~ )

People

• Frederick Grose
• Professor Keith Karn
• Professor Stephen Jacobs' OLPC page, RIT page
• you

Project ideas

Usability testing

Consider the potential topic areas or issues that might be prime for some usability testing. (Here is a quick review of usability testing, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usability_testing.)

Professor Keith Karn in the Information Technology Department of the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in Rochester, NY will have 4-5 graduate students (from his class of 20) propose, and over the next 10 weeks, execute a usability testing consultation around the XO or OLPC project. The class met for the first time on Wednesday 12 March 2008, and will meet, as a whole, every Wednesday 6-9:50 pm EDT through 21 May 2008. This OLPC project team will be asked to review the wiki.laptop.org and then contact Frederick Grose, serving as client representative. Because of the academic schedule, we need to review and select a testing topic area by 20 March and have a final testing plan by 26 March 2008.

What usability issue is currently most timely and significant to the project? Since OLPC is developing a new information and communication technologies platform, there are many possibilities for significant target users, subsystems, components, and activities.

I suggest starting first with observing general usage of the Sugar shell and base activities (Browse, Read, Write, Paint and Journal) and move from there to other activities. At this point, I don't think more focused testing will be as useful. --Tomeu 08:14 20 March 2008

We have a few G1G1 XOs in Rochester that we should be able to use for live testing with local children. Larger scale tests could be performed with emulated XOs or hosted Sugar in the RIT Usability Laboratories. The class will be expected to go through the human subject reviews as required.

Because so many cultural variables may be important modifiers of understanding user interactions with the OLPC project, perhaps there may be some more basic or common psycho-physical aspects of usability we could focus on that would be timely and significant for the project. Or, we might be able to recruit user participants from one of the recently settled immigrant communities in the Rochester area to delve into the internationalization and cultural domains.

Having different groups of children based on age and previous contact with computers may be more important than cultural differences, in my opinion. --Tomeu 08:14 20 March 2008

Some reviewers of OLPC have been critical of the shortage of reported usability testing results, so far, however, if we appreciate the pace and resourcing of the development, perhaps this is a chance to address any gaps or curiosities that you may have.

We have already had some feedback from the pilot tests, but until now and because of time and other constraints, hasn't been as systematic as we need. Having your commented observations about which tasks are more problematic would already be extremely useful. --Tomeu 08:14 20 March 2008

Please think about the project design needs, possibilities, and constraints, and suggest topics or issues below:

I'm afraid now is not a good moment to ask a big involvement from the Sugar developers, but I'm sure we'll make our best at answering more concrete questions that you have. Thanks and good luck, --Tomeu 08:14 20 March 2008

• I do have a suggestion for the actual usability testing. This situation seems appropriate for having two children at a time do the tasks. The conversation between them when doing the tasks should yield richer information than a typical think aloud from one person. --Stan Caplan 17:18 13 Mar 2008
• I would suggest possibly breaking up the usability studies into two parts. The first part as a formative usability study just to see what children do with the OLPC and if they understand what tasks they can do or want to do on the OLPC. Many of these OLPCs may be handed to children without much explanation and it would be interesting to see what children do with the computer when they first encounter it. Is it intuitive? The second part would be the more formal usability testing with the most common tasks. --Amy Chen 8:15 20 Mar 2008

Other ideas

If you're in the Rochester area and want to work on a project with someone local, post ideas here.

• your idea...

Developer collaboration with teachers and students

Hi Team,

I have a challenge that may fit your project.

I want to setup an interface where teachers and students in XO countries (focus on Uruguay right now) can interact with developers to define requirements and priorities for development. We also want an interface that will allow teachers to share best practices and ideas with each other.

So its two different but related "sites".

1 - The goals of the user - developer exchange are as follows:
- Have teachers and students say what they want to do, what they are teaching, how they use the XO and related infrastructure, suggest ideas and explain challenges that they have.
- Allow developers to ask questions, send links to try out new software or interfaces and in general gather feedback from real users on design ideas and software.
- Create a dialog which allows cross training in education and software and helps uncover the right themes for development and education with the XO.
- Have space for teachers to ask questions and get support or file bugs. An online "help desk" but also a general learning space for resolving short term issues.

I started hashing out some examples of input on a site at:
http://meta.fuentelibre.org/trac/wiki/DesarrolloInternacional
see the links under the report activity section.

2 - The goals for the teacher to teacher exchange are as follows:
- Have teachers give examples of what has worked and what has not for them in teaching with the XO.
- Allow teachers to re-use each others work
- Allow teachers to ask each other questions and get support on details and at a high level
- Allow teachers to build the site choose the threads and identify the themes which are important to them.
- Enable consensus building on priorities for development which can then be shared and pushed for on site 1 above.

That's the main idea. My intention is to support my very user centric development methodology which I have briefly explained on my wiki page: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Gregorio

The challenge is that I can't seem to get to any teachers or get them comment. I have some leads in Uruguay but its still at the systems integrator level. If/when my contact identifies some lead teachers to start to interact with us, I need to send them to a site in Spanish that encourages this exchange as outlined above.

I don't know why teachers and others have been reluctant to share their experiences. It may be that they don't realize the importance of their input and don't want to appear uninformed. Th truth is, I don't know why more users from developing countries have not commented yet and I would like to find out.

In any case, I need to pick an interface and ideas so far include:
- Blog
- Wiki
- e-mail list
- forum
- other?

The teachers are not technologists and don't want to be so it has to be very intuitive and easy to use. They were trained on how to use Blogs but so far they have not posted to Blogs on their own. They did get a lot of blog input from kids and ther but all posts were sent to one person who used their account to do the posting.

See Uruguay blogs at: http://www.blogger.com/profile/06134894806578234196

Let me know if you can help do some testing to pick from the options above or find another choice which will provide an interface that encourages this exchange.

Let me know if you have any questions or if this does not seem like a well defined test subject. Its an interface to help gather input on how to develop interfaces so we better nclude a variable to pop us out of this recursive stack or we'll never see the light of day :-)

I'll reply on the dev list and you can e-mail back directly from there if you need more info.

Thanks,

Greg S

Gregorio 09:49, 14 March 2008 (EDT)

RIT Usability Test Tracking

I have uploaded a draft summary from our first meeting