Contributing content

The One Laptop per Child project (OLPC) is gathering quality educational content for distribution around the world to the children who will be using the OLPC laptop computers.

OLPC is extending a call for content creators, publishers, and archivists to suggest educational material for inclusion in our digital library network. We are particularly interested in materials that are produced specially for children and teachers, that are available in many languages, and that are available under a free content license. Materials can include:

• Texts – stories and poems; textbooks, workbooks, how-tos and lab manuals;
• Reference works – encyclopedias, dictionaries, maps and atlases;
• Images – symbols and fonts, blueprints, sketches, photographs and art;
• Multimedia content – animations, audio books, songs and audio recordings, videos;
• Software – games, tools, scripts, simulations, self-assessments and interactive tools

All material installed on the laptops will be available under a free license, such as the GNU General Public License or the Creative Commons Attribution or Attribution/Share-alike licenses (The Creative Commons No-derivatives and Non-Commercial licenses are too restrictive and should not be used). Materials under other Free licenses may be included in school and regional libraries.

To offer your content to the One Laptop per Child project, or to find out about running a laptop exercise in your classroom, please write to content@laptop.org.

If you have suggestions for educational content that could be useful for the laptops, please add them to the Educational content ideas page.

File formats

The material above needs to be distributed in file formats that support the OLPC goals. In particular, they must be unencumbered formats (not requiring patent licensing or other restrictions), and they must take relatively little space (so compressed formats are valuable). Document formats like HTML, PDF, DJVU and OpenDocument should be encouraged. In particular, DJVU allows existing paper books to be scanned into an efficient storage format so they can be used as e-books.

See Choosing image formats for more about image formats, such as PNG and SVG. Ogg is valuable for audio.

More about OLPC

For more information about the project, see the overview of OLPC and list of current events on this site. There is also a static website with background information at www.laptop.org.

Examples

School books become mini-websites

Once publishers/authors share their normally printed materials (so that electronic versions can be formed), kids will be able to -at the teacher's instruction- turn to page-x simply by clicking on the shortcut icon (or bookmarked web page) of the "eBook" in question and instantly go to page-x; and will be able to associate ther assignments directly with a page in the book. This will require D-BUS support to be added to Evince.