Stephen Jacobs

I'm Stephen Jacobs, a Professor in the College of Computing at RIT. We have departments of CS, IT, SE and Networking. The game design and development degree program I teach in is within the IT department. I also run something called the Lab for Technological Literacy at RIT...

I bought 3 OLPC XO laptops through "Give One, Get One." One was for my personal use. I've been using it as a travel laptop when I go to conferences instead of my 17", 7-lb departmental laptop. Not only does the XO it do what I need it to do in terms of web. e-mail and word processing while traveling, it's also a great conversation starter when meeting new folks on the road.

I bought the other two with the intent of using my lab to be an umbrella for OLPC projects. My gaming colleagues are interested in putting something together, but the interest in the XO's doesn't stop there.

After I showed them around at the school, others followed my lead. My department bought one for use as a "School Server" and two other faculty in my department bought one each. Two of our peers in the networking department bought one XO and one of them has put up a Sugar virtual machine on their VMware system.

Last week we had the first meeting of an ad hoc SIG to discuss the creation (and/or support) of the following possible efforts on our part...

1. Student club projects 2. Independent Study projects 3. A seminar course across the departments 4. An informal or formal web-resource for our use and/or open to the community.

(Ok, those are our goals but we spent our first meeting just playing)

While there's a slim chance (but one worth taking) that the group might get something going during our spring quarter this year (starting in March) its more likely that we'd begin planing now for something to begin in the summer or fall.