OLPC Birmingham

OLPC Birmingham, Alabama, USA

About

The Birmingham Interest Group is a way for people in the Birmingham area and surrounding locations to talk about and work together on OLPC. We aren't necessarily interested just in trying to bring OLPC into classrooms in Birmingham (although we generally think it's a wonderful idea) we're also interested in volunteering/contributing to the project.

OLPC BIRMINGHAM IS

1. a nucleation point for exchange between local groups, towards the OLPC Boston office and back, and with other groups worldwide
2. helping in organizing XOs for the local groups
3. supporting and cherishing the autonomy of local groups
4. focusing on rough consensus, grassroots involvement, and working projects

OLPC BIRMINGHAM IS NOT

1. going to do a local pilot in your school (although we'll encourage and support you if you want to do one yourself)
2. going to tell you what you are and aren't allowed to do (although we're always up for idea-bouncing and brainstorms)

Contact and chapters

Stefan

Henry

Mailing List

If there's enough demand, we'll set up a mailing list. If you'd like to have an LOCATION-OLPC mailing list, post a link to your contact info (wiki userpages work) below - the minimum number for starting a list is 10 recent requests.

1. Stefan
2. User:Yamaplos
3. Chris H.
4. User:Danceswithcars

Chapters

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

Existing Projects

• If you're in the Birmingham area and have a project you'd like to share, please link to it below.
• On Google Groups: Birmingham OLPC User/Interest Group (AL)
• Birmingham Alabama to get 15,000 laptops.

Peer-reviewed educational content to implement in your classroom

• Come and explore: Interactive online schoolbook A cool new type of textbook for XO. Please try out.

• We love to learn: Einstein.School 2.0 The interactive schoolbook that you can edit, update and improve. It makes passion the primary tool for learning.

This peer-reviewed [1] [2] educational content [3] is written under an open license [4] and gives everyone the freedom to use or modify the material to suit his or her own needs.

Events

Future Activities

• We're planning a meetup! We'd like to have an informal, getting-to-know-you gathering soon, but need a place to host it, and a date. Can you help? Want to come? Want to help plan? Let Stefan know.

• Tuesday, April 1st, I'll discuss doing a presentation on 4-19-08 at BALU's (Birmingham Alabama Linux Usergroup's - http://www.bham-lug.org/) monthly meeting Stefan 09:53, 28 March 2008 (EDT). Update 4-7-08: Been there. Not sure I want to do it because I am currently struggeling with the XS build 160(+) because of problems with raid support.

• A BarCamp is coming up on April 12th: BarCampBirmingham2 and besides considering many other topics, OLPC is also on the agenda. Actually there is an even less formal opening session on Friday night...

Past Activities

None yet - we're still working on upcoming events, which will be posted here as their dates pass.

Project Ideas

If you're in Birmingham and want to work on a project with someone local, post ideas here.
Also, if you have a soldering iron and phillips screw driver in place of thumb and index finger, we want to support the Birmingham roll out and other near local XO enthusiasts by setting up a repair center. Maybe doing repair jams, or give guidance for do-it-yourselfers, or do a commercially active full service venture. Or all three of these options simultaneously.

Metropolitan Youth Orchestras of Central Alabama

Our community outreach program, Scrollworks, offers music lessons to the many children in the Birmingham area with no school music curriculum. Some of our students will be given the XO soon (as we understand it, we've yet to see them). We're considering a computer music and or sound project. Except for CSound, we haven't been able to find out what software the XO ships with. We are aware of the gigabytes of audio files that have been made available for the OLPC. Is anyone else doing this and do they have any suggestions of where to start? We're also investigating adapting the Sonic Arts Network's Sonic Postcards project to suit the XO.

best,

Rick Nance President: Metropolitan Youth Orchestras PhD, electroacoustic composition

News items

Council, BOE approve laptop pilot Bham Weekly, 03 April 2008, K. Whitmire. See also United States country page

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Primary Language	,|x|Language spoken::x}}
Number of Laptops	Number of manufactured laptops::15500
Keyboard Layout	Keyboard::OLPC English Keyboard
Build	,|x|Software release::x}}
Date(s) Arrived in Country	,|x|Has received laptops on date::x}}
School Server	,|x|School server status::x}}
Deployment Status	[[Deployment status::Will deploy build 714. Also using customized versions of FF, flash, mplayer Will use School Server 0.4. Deployment started target of 14K XOs total.]]