Story Jam New York/Results

Photos

All photos in the gallery below were taken by Henry Edward Hardy.

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  Watching Elise Moussa present use case scenarios for the Digital School in a Box project (www.borderlesseducations.org)

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  Alicia (center) discusses her XO modding project with David (L) and Blake (R)

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  Members of the Community Mapping and UNIWIKI teams hacking away

Digital school in a box

• Brainstormed use-case scenarios with Team Content Awesome
• Hardware discussion/presentation with OLPC people on IRC on what kind of hardware could be used (type, price, space, power consumption, and eventually links to actual equipment you could buy - largely based on using XOs as the School In A Box's computers)

Mchua 02:34, 1 April 2008 (EDT)

Story recording

I had the privilege of interviewing a number of the developers who were writing code this weekend - hearing the stories of how they started out in programming, their thoughts on software and education, what they do outside of code - was endlessly fascinating. Chalk up more stories for the story library! Mchua 02:34, 1 April 2008 (EDT)

Report by Henry Edward Hardy

The following content is released under a Creative Commons Attribution + Non-Commercial License (by-nc).

OLPC'ers SJ Klein, Adam Holt, Chris Ball and Henry Edward Hardy joined a "Story Jam" at UNICEF's headquarters at the UN in New York City on March 29-30, 2008. The event was co-sponsored by One Laptop Per Child, Google and UNICEF.

OLPC intern Mel Chua played a significant role in organizing the Story Jam. She posted notices on the OLPC wiki and helped coordinate activities and events.

On Saturday the 28th, a contingent of OLPCers from Boston and New York gathered around a table to experiment with the laptop and chat. Several UNICEF staff visited with us. Elise Moussa, Founder of Borderless Educations, presented on use cases for the school in a box, including how to leverage social networks and video for learning leveraging mesh networks and an "e-game' activity on the XO. Jeannie Joshi, an MFA student at Parsons, discussed with us her Borderless Classrooms project. The Borderless Classrooms software uses geospatial location and social networking to implement the experiential learning theories of Seymour Papert. She is interested in porting her project to the XO as an activity.

Ecuador's Ambassador to the US, Luis Gallegos, came over to see us and was presented with a green and white XO laptop. He praised OLPC's marketing efforts.

Later that day, Team OLPC set out to collect some children's stories. OLPC Support Manager Adam Holt led a group who went to a local park and used the XO to conduct video interviews with children for the UNICEF Our Stories Project of which the Story jam was a part.

Using build 656, we encountered a number of sharing problems with the write and chat activities. Another desired feature was the ability to easily play and edit the video which was collected for the Story Jam.

OLPC engineer Chris Ball collaborated via Internet Relay Chat on DSIAB, the Digital School in a Box.This project is to create a portable internet server which can be transported along with first responders in a conflict zone or disaster area.

Two UNICEF projects, ROSCO, the "Radio Station on the Go" and Rapid SMS, a chat server using SMS messaging to reach participants through their mobile devices, were worked on and tested.

On Sunday, Mel interviewed many participants. Several people had stopped by to visit the OLPC contingent. Among them were Ryan Brack, Chief of Staff for the New York City Department of Education, Chris Canizzaro, Research Asst. Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Tufts University, Richard Graves, Program Director of Americans for Informed Democracy, Andy Jordan, Technology Reporter for the Wall Street Journal Online and Matt Lee, Campaign Manager for the Free Software Foundation.