University program
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NOTE: The contents of this page are not set in stone, and are subject to change! This page is a draft in active flux ... |
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This is a page to discuss and brainstorm about the design of a future University Program where interested students and professors can create OLPC University Chapters at their schools. Please edit, contribute, add! We are tentatively scheduled to launch during the fall 2007 semester.
Note that the section of Interested Schools doesn't imply official endorsement of the institution, but instead is related with a group of students/teachers in that institution that is willing to participate in the University Program.
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.
- 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.
Being listed as a chapter
In order to be listed on this website as an active university chapter, you need to keep your chapter profile up-to-date. This is particularly important for contact information, as newcomers who want to join your group should always have a way to find out who to talk to. As such, you should update your entry in the "Current university chapters" table at least once a year. The easiest times to do this are usually at the beginning or end of a school term, or when your group selects a leader. Here's what to do:
- Make sure the link to your website is correct.
- Update the contact information to point to the userpage of the appropriate person - usually the group leader.
- Change the "Last Updated" date to today's date.
Entries with a "Last Updated" date more than a year old will periodically be deleted from the table (if you see any, feel free to edit the wiki and remove them yourself). This is in order to keep contact information current for people looking for active university chapters.
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
- Your ideas here - what else would you like to do?
Ideas
Expand beyond universities - high schools, elementary schools, etc. might want to help
- They could always be part of the chapter by their local college - great mentorship opportunity for the college students.
Interested schools
Olin College (USA)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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.
Current University chapters
| Country | School | Website | Contact | Last updated |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sample country | Sample school | Sample website | Sample contact | 8/26/07 |