User:Sj/w

Curators

Language

• Colingo's Ben Lowenstein is moving towards a very free license for his site, and developing some PD videos and materials for the XO, including an activity for downloading sets of small video clips and playing them to practice another language and hear it in a variety of accents. His ideas for producing local video with local talent seems scalable and fun; I'm looking forward to seeing it develop. an example.

World Heritage

• The World Digital Library posted an encouraging note Friday; their next snapshot should be ready early this week.

Collections of primary school materials from educators

• Connexions, some of whose priary materials are already in an instructional set online, is making new snapshots for us, now aiming to conform to our content bundle format. They are working on a community portal, with an 'OLPC' lens that allows anyone to see collection-revision numbers and download an entire collection at once.
• Curriki is preparing a new toolchain, and hopes to be able to mentor a group of Summer of Content interns this season. The new tools will allow for automatic export from Curriki syntax to .xol content bundles, and for a channel for editors to create materials right away.

Collections of learning activities from everyone

• Wikiversity is moving towards a learning-activity model for many of its courses, exemplifying learning through doing in its work, across dozens of disciplines. A first effort to demonstrate format conversion from Wikiversity to Connexions and back with primary materials is also underway.

Toolsets

Java

Java CDC, a new take on J2ME, has been recommended by two parties as a subset of Java for us to consider. It is less than 15M, and should suffice to run most Java applications with little recoding (note: it does not include Swing). This needs to be tested out. This is also a reason to set up Firefox...

Browser extensions (note)

Some excellent Java-based applets and Google Gears tools are becoming available. To test these on the laptops, we need to find out exactly how heavy firefox and Java would be on top of a recent build.