University program

 

NOTE: The contents of this page are not set in stone, and are subject to change! This page is a draft in active flux ... Please leave suggestions on the talk page.

This is a page for the University Program where interested students and professors can create OLPC University Chapters at their schools. Please edit, contribute, add! We are currently launching, and the first chapters are forming now; this page is under construction. Contact mel at laptop dot org if you want to form a chapter at your school. (Note that formation of a chapter doesn't imply that the school itself needs to officially endorse, approve, or have ties to oLPC - it just means that a group of community members in that institution wanted to collaborate and form a group.)

Introduction

Who we are

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is an education project that's changing the way kids learn by giving them tools they can use to teach themselves. Yes, we're building them a ridiculously rugged, cheap (actually, free to the kids; we're giving them to every kid in each country that signs up), spiffy laptop (http://www.laptop.org and http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Hardware_specification for the engineers).

We're also getting open-source software and open-content groups to write programs, books, shoot movies, translate stories, songs, etc. so they kids can freely share, collaborate on, remix, and create knowledge, starting grassroots groups to empower local people to create resources to educate their own children, working on distribution, translation, accessibility...

So what?

Well, we've got a laptop now. But we still need things to put on the laptop, things to do with the laptop, people to help children learn with the laptops - and we need help. We're looking for students who want to help us out - for community service, for credit, maybe even for internships - to form campus chapters and band together to do projects they're interested in. See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/University_program.

What can you do?

1. Your normal schoolwork. We're trying to get students to do their course projects for it, so instead of building a boring old circuit you can make a peripheral for the laptop instead (still fulfills course requirements, but also gets distributed to, y'know, millions of kids instead of just your TA). This works for more than just engineering and software classes, by the way. Check out the list below for some ideas for business, law, education, art, journalism, politics, history, anthropology, medicine, and more.
2. Get professors to let you do research (or even run a class) on an OLPC-related topic so you can volunteer for credit - several undergraduate and graduate students are doing research and even thesis work related to the OLPC project, and we'd love you to join them. Or mentor a younger K-12 student in doing a project of their own.
3. Start a chapter. Get faculty and university support for your projects. Give demos to local kids. Get the community involved. Attend or host a conference (where people don't just talk - have every attendee complete a mini-project while they're there. See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Jams for more.)
4. Travel - volunteer - intern... Want to help with laptop deployment in Nepal? Debug hardware in Boston next summer? Collaborate with a health organization to make its outreach materials multilingual and open-licensed? Build a bike-powered charger with kids in Nigeria?
5. And yes, more. We believe students know best what they want to work on and what they'll be great at doing, and that you'll come up with great ideas we'd never think of - so tell us what you want to do, and we'll do our best to help you get started.

If you're interested in volunteering yourself, interested in organizing campus interest (at least getting together a first meeting, after which you can foist the leadership on someone else ;-) , or know someone at your school who might be, email mel at laptop dot org.

How to form a chapter

The process of forming an University chapter is very informal. University chapters are really just good excuses to get groups of interesting people together to do interesting things... that happen to be related to OLPC. The following instructions are suggestions - feel free to change them according to what works best for your group.

• If you'd like some help, contact Mel (mel at laptop dot org) or other OLPC people you might know - Mel is acting as a liason to schools and helping University chapters get started.
• Gather a group of at least 10 interested people (students, faculty, staff, community members and their families) at your school who want to form a chapter. If people at your school use computers a lot, creating a mailing list or website can help you recruit. Template flyers and letters are also available - please remix, modify, and create new ones!
• Create your group's homepage on the OLPC Wiki and include it in the University chapters category. The easiest way to do this is to use the University chapter template.
• Create a mailing list for communication within your group. Universities will often host mailing lists for clubs and community service groups; talk to your IT department if you're not sure how to do this. Google and Yahoo also offer free mailing list services. It is often convenient to define group membership and mailing list membership as the same thing (in other words, if you're signed up for the mailing list, you're a member of the group).
• Once you've got at least 10 people, call a meeting and collectively decide on a name and some projects to begin working on - see the What University chapters can do section for some ideas. Holding a Jam is often a good first project to bring a group together (and can help you recruit new members and projects to boot).
• Designate one person to be the main external contact for your group. (This is usually called "electing a leader," but your ideas on self-governance may vary.) The external contact person (and any other interested members) should subscribe to the university-chapters@lists.laptop.org mailing list (discussion mainly in English).
• You may want to turn your OLPC chapter into a club or community service group at your university. Talk to your Student Life department or student government representative if you're not sure how to do this. Forming a campus group often makes it easier to obtain resources from your school.
• When you have an active group, a first project, a webpage, and a contact person, add yourselves to the Current university chapters list at the bottom of this page.
• Send out an email announcing your new chapter and introducing yourselves to the university-chapters@lists.laptop.org mailing list. (note: this needs to be created.)

Benefits

• An "XO lab in a box" - some number of spots (3? 5?) in the developers' program so the students can have machines to play/experiment with (note: not sure if this is possible yet)
• Connections, networking, etc. with others in the OLPC community (not that you can't do that without a university chapter, but this lowers the activation energy for people to join in)
• Announcements about research, internship, etc. opportunities for OLPC work
• A good excuse to work on OLPC for credit :-)
• Your ideas here - what else would you like to see?

Activities

• Participate in the Classrooms for Free Culture program
• Run Jams at your school
• Take on OLPC projects as class projects/assignments for CS, engineering, education, history, language, etc. classes - see Andy Barry's X(I/O)_Reconfigurable_Gaming_Input_Device, Arjun's Measure project ideas for some examples
• Serve as mentors for younger students making content, software, hardware, etc

These are just for starters - add your own!

Engineering

build a peripheral, write a program, test the wireless network, build a human-powered charger, do environmental impact testing, build engineering curricula for middle-schoolers in the developing world...

Language

Translate a couple paragraphs of a childrens' book, help students in Peru and Kenya find a way to pen-pal, work on language-learning software, test out the resources we have by learning a new language with them yourself!

Journalism

Help kids start and grow local newspapers and magazines, blogs and podcasts, so that "world news" really includes the whole world - a video of a calf being born in Mexico, a storekeeper's commentary on economics in Thailand, etc.

Business

Mentor fledgling entrepreneurs (are local moms starting repair shops to help kids who accidentally break their things? does a teenager in Guatemala want to start a business selling his mom's textiles online?), come up with a program to teach kids and their parents about economics, Help nonprofits and grassroots groups start up, cultivate local businesses producing accessories and services for the laptop, find ways to market and publicize it within a country.

Law

How do you license material, or persuade others to release their materials under open licenses or in the public domain so that the children are free to use, share, remix, etc. it? How do you teach children about their intellectual property rights and the licensing of the things they themselves create?

Politics

Can you help the citizens of a country get their ministry of education to join the program? The laptops are distributed through a nation's public education system, so government buy-in is a prerequisite.

Education

What can teachers do with these new things in their classroom? How do you learn how to learn with computers if you've never seen one before?

And more

If you're taking a Medieval English Lit class, write a chapter in a history textbook. Fly to Nepal in the summer to help kids come up with ways to use their computers. Make art for educational computer games, write documentation, help kids use the built-in camera to shoot movies of life in their hometown, share the music you compose with them, experiment with using simple sensor peripherals, software, and resources to monitor the environment, perform basic medical diagnosis (one peripheral in the making is a microscope), educate people about public health, make laptops usable by children with disabilities...

Schools

Olin College (USA)

• Nikki Lee

Olin university chapter

Olin is an engineering college, and also has large numbers of students interested in appropriate technology, education, sustainability, and developing nations (and various combinations of the three). Nearly all classes are project-based; there have been attempts by professors to find community service projects for their students to do for credit, but despite interested professors and students, good projects are hard to come by (potential need to fulfill here!) Olin has community service hours on Friday afternoons where no classes are scheduled so that students can volunteer on a project of their choice. OLPC would probably be a popular one. There is an active group of Linux users who occasionally run installfests. Several professors (Mark Chang, Lynn Stein) have expressed interest in OLPC, and there would probably be more.

Northwestern University (USA)

• James Levy

Northwestern has world-class engineering and management programs, as well as the Medill School of Journalism. NU also has a very strong activism environment. OLPC would likely get interest from a variety of student groups and new volunteers eager to achieve greater awareness and help OLPC, run Jams, and have major-specific initiatives.

Oregon State University University (USA)

• Tim Budd

OSU has an active group of students working on OLPC projects. The port of the AbiWord wordprocessor used by the OLPC was made by an OSU student. Other students are working on the media player. Professor Budd teaches a course on open source development, and would like to get more students involved in projects for the OLPC.

Pontificia Universidad Catolica (Peru)

• Lglira

Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú(PUCP) is a top-quality private education institution. There are currently 16,000 students who pursue 43 different specialties (undergraduate and graduate) in 9 faculties (Science, Engineering, Education, Business, Social Science, Humanities) . The campus also features a wireless high-speed internet connection and Internet2 available to all members of the PUCP community.

E-Quipu is a special program to support students groups and there are many chapters of professional and international organizations. Cultura Libre is the FreeCulture.org chapter at PUCP. Other student chapters: IEEE, ACM, AIESEC, ASME, ACI.

South East European University (SEEU)(Tetovo - Macedonia)

• ALIU

http://www.seeu.edu.mk SEEU is a contemporary, young, educational institution, established in 2001, based on the goodwill of ‘friends of higher education’. SEEU is a university with five faculties, featuring quality undergraduate and postgraduate programmes within the socio-economic disciplines, business and public administration, law, communication sciences and technologies and teacher training. All programmes offered by the University are modular and follow the pattern of the European Credit Transfer System (ECTS) conform the Bologna Agreement. This gives students the flexibility to specialize or take a more broadly-based programme.

Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Colombia)

Offray Luna

We have some initial experience in the building of learners networks and "communities of discourse" inside one class (Introduction to Informatics) as as way to "imitate" the communities of practice of Free Culture/Software/Content and in the process we produce free content and software (this is an experience with first semester students, so the software is not much advanced --small games, interactive books in Squeak-- and is used as a "probe of concept" of their own learning process). All the process is documented in Eduwiki (www.eduwiki.info), which, at this stage is a little messy, but it works as an organic memory for the class and new students improve it every semester. We need now to work on extended and sustained bridges with the Free Software/Content community, but the main problem is that there is still not a Spanish speaking community of practice for teaching/learning at that grade in the tools we use, so we're trying to build a Spanish Squeakers community for young people in contrast with English speaking communities for children or young programmers. Another problem at this moment is the lack of comprehensive Spanish documentation on the subjects we try. We can find plenty open content documentation in the form of small tuturials and we produce also new content in the classroom experience, but this can be as comprehensive as a textbook, so we're planning the liberation of excellent textbooks as the Stephane Ducasse's "Squeak: Learn programming with robots" under an open content license

Another place where we have been working is in differential calculus and linear algebra with computational mathematics using TeXmacs/Yacas/Maxima as the principal free software tools to produce free content. The open content at this moment are solutions of text book problems and exercises, but there is no problem on comprehensive free content mathematical books to be translated/changed or even created from the scratch on these matters as there are on themes related with new technologies (as Squeak, for example).

About the previous issues I have being planed some projects for the summer of content that I would link when they're better structured.

University of Salford (UK)

Frances Bell [1]

We are forming a chapter at Salford based on content development with a group of home and international students. Computer science colleagues are also interested so we may contribute code too. We need to do much more research into OLPC.