OLPC Rochester, NY

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 projects or activities. 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.

To receive updates to this page, log in / create an OLPC wiki user account (at the top rightmost link of any wiki page), then use the 'my preferences' link on your account to enter a private email address and select the option to receive email whenever a page you're watching is changed. Finally, click the watch tab at the top of this page to include it in your watchlist.

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 - 12–26 March - Submit ideas in Project ideas below.
• study proposal and design - 28 March–16 April - Study plan drafts.
• In-school study - 07 May–08 May - See Ted Sakshaug's blog entry.

Events

OLPC XO user's group meeting at the Rochester Institute of Technology - (See the Flyer.pdf.)

The Lab for Technological Literacy at RIT is supporting the OLPC XO Laptop project by raising awareness locally and conducting research and development initiatives.

RIT will be forming a OLPC XO Laptop user's group in January of 2009.

All meetings will take place in B. Thomas Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences, Building 70, Golisano Auditorium, Rm 1400, (See RIT Building 70 Google Map, or campus maps at http://inside.rit.edu/maps/.)

7:00 pm - 8:50 pm, on the 4th Thursday of the month.

Please join us on the following dates:

• 22 January 2009
• 26 February 2009
• 26 March 2009
• 23 April 2009
• 28 May 2009

Past events

• 26 March 2008 - Show & Tell Workshop at RIT

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)