OLPC:News

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Laptop News 2008-03-01

1. Learning learning: Darah Tappitake and David Cavallo are preparing for March Learning Workshop with confirmed participations from Thailand, Mali, and the Committee for Democracy in Information Technology.

2. Lima: The Peru deployment continues to progress. 40K laptops arrived in Lima this week and are being sorted by distribution district and school in anticipation of delivery and activation. Ivan Krstić and Scott Ananain have been working with Hernán Pachas Magallanes on a mechanism to map CSV files into activation leases that will be useful across all of our deployments.

The first tranch of training in Peru begins on Monday. The 143 representatives from the regional distribution centers (UGELs) and 20 ministry of education personnel will attend a 5-day workshop on all aspects of the XO laptop, school server, and the learning models. John Watlington and Walter Bender are heading to Lima to help with final preparations over the weekend. In the following weeks, teachers and university students will also be attending workshops throughout the country.

3. Assessment: David Cavallo, Edith Ackermann of the learning team, and Tony Earls and Maya Carlson of the Harvard School of Public Health are developing a new framework for assessment that goes beyond typical school approaches to enable accurate sensing of the overall mission of OLPC. In particular, the framework will enable a more scientific evaluation of the whole child and the community. The framework will also permit a more contextualized view as conditions and goals will vary from site to site (e.g. from Haiti to Uruguay to rural Peru to Afghanistan). Haiti will serve as the first instance for applying the framework.

4. Ceibal: Plans are moving forward for an OLPC/Ceibal children's festival in Uruguay in March. The festival will not only provide an environment for children to explore construction and collaboration on the laptop, but also a means for team development in Uruguay. We expect many guests from other countries to visit for both the festival and to visit the initial school in Vila Cardal.

5. Sugar: The Sugar team has posted some new designs for the Home view, Journal, and Frame (See Design). The gist of the proposed changes is to swap the roles of the Frame and Home view in regard to activities: they'll be launched from the Home view and active activities will be carried from view to view on the Frame. The intention is to make it easier to issue invitation and notifications and manage the growing number of activities in our builds (Peru will have more than 30 activities loaded on the laptop by default).

6. Wikireaders: A dozen different development projects related to wikireaders are now signed up to our new wikireader@lists mailing list, to work out how to coordinate Google Gears, pyxpcom, and existing python and php codebases to generate and browse readers. An old "static content" project on Wikipedia is being revived around the same themes.

7. Phil Carrizzi, a professor at the Kendall College of Art in Grand Rapids has created an XO viewfinder on his FDM machine (See [1]).

8. Help wanted: There have been several requests for "typing tutor" software on the XO coming from the various pilots. If anyone is interested in breathing some life into the Typing Tutor Activity, please contact the devel list.

9. Support: Adam Holt reports that discussions are under way regarding setting up repair centers with Moraine Valley Community College (we gave them 12 broken XO laptops towards prototyping a repair center) and IMSA.edu.

Darah Tappitake discussed the long-term challenges of volunteerism at last Sunday's support volunteers meeting.

Adam worked with Sandy Culver and Brightstar on shipping out outstanding RMA machines and Fedex "undeliverables"; and he worked with Alan Claver who's resolving dozens of escalated support tickets daily.

10. Meshing: This week we held a tech meeting in Cambridge to work on issues of scaling our collaboration technology. In attendance were OLPC staff, Dave Woodhouse and Marco Presenti-Gritti of Red Hat, Dafydd Harries and Guillaume Desmottes of Collabora, and Javier Cardona of Cozybit. Several new bugs were identified and characterized; some short-term fixes were adopted; testing of the fixes was started. The longer-term strategy for achieving more scaling was discussed extensively. The actual characterization of the result awaits testing in a quieter network environment—there are over 100 access points that can be detected from the OLPC office, one ofthe most severe network environments anyone has ssen.

11. Custom builds: Scott Anaian and Michael Stone worked with Daniel Grajales Santana of Telmex and Hernán of the Ministry of Education in Peru on developing a customization key (See Customization_key) to create builds for Mexico and Peru.

12. FOSDEM: Simon Schampijer, Tomeu Vizoso, Benjamin Berg, and Bernardo Innocenti attended FOSDEM, a European meeting for Free and Open Source Software Developers, in Brussels over the weekend (See [2]). They improvised a booth at the GNOME stand to answer questions and offer their machines for people to try out. Besides questions about hardware specifications and the current status of the project the visitors were mostly interested in where to buy the laptop. Thanks to the GNOME people for sharing their facilities and helping answering questions.

FOSDEM was as well place for OLPC-Europe's (See OLPC_Europe) kickoff meeting where the idea behind this initiative was outlined. The different grassroots projects and European OLPC communities (Greece, Netherlands, Bulgaria and Germany) gave an overview about their work and goals and described the efforts already made.

13. Sugar: Tomeu, Benjamin and Simon stayed in Brussels for a few days where they worked together on the XO laptop. Tomeu started work on the infrastructure needed for adding keyboard bindings (accelerators) to activities; he discussed with Simon about the best way to implement the UI for the control panel.

14. Power management: Chris Ball released a version of OHM that asks NetworkManager to rescan and reconnect when coming out of sleep—amongst other things, this should make sure that we don't continue to use the link-local mesh after the laptops arrive at school in the morning.

Andres Salomon worked more work on framebuffer code, testing, and debugging a lid close bug with Jordan Crouse of AMD and Richard Smith.

15. Localization: Sayamindu Dasgupta reports that we have a new Pootle project for Khmer—volunteers are welcome. Sayamindu is also testing out an experimental system to generate language packs for the languages that are in Pootle. (Current packs are in http://dev.laptop.org/~sayamindu/langpacks/). Users simply need to run them in an XO (emulated or real) laptop and the latest translations will automagically get installed. The primary focus now is to enable translators to test out their translations more easily.

There has been much discussion about how to localize Turtle Art, which is currently in English and Spanish only. The issue is that Turtle Art is rendered using GIF files. Alexander Todorov is exploring using ImageMagic to generate the GIFs from Pootle. Something similar could be done using the Scheme extensions for The Gimp. Tomeu has suggested that we design icons for the program blocks and use rollovers for the text. (See http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/3585 for details.)

We've finalized the keyboard design for Kreyòl thanks to the efforts of Guy Serge Pompi, Michel DeGraff, Arjun Sarwal, Dale Joachim, and David Cavallo. Bernie helped to finalize Italian as well. Both keyboard layouts have been sent to Quanta for mass production.

Thanks to the efforts of e have Mike Dawson, Dr. Habib Khan, Waqas Toor, Salman Minhas, Ebtihaj Obaidi, and Usman Mansour Ansari, we have almost finalized a new layout for Afghanistan that is compatible with both Pashto and Dari. (See http://wiki.laptop.org/images/b/b5/Pashto-v2.png for details.)

We have been making similar advances in Khmer. Chea Sok Hour and Noy Shoung have provided invaluable guidance (Please see http://wiki.laptop.org/images/c/c2/Khmer-v2.png).

16. Jams: Fred Benenson of NY free culture held a jam at NYU ITP, with ~30 attendees. They are planning for a larger jam at the end of the month hosted at UNICEF, and introducing a wider group to the XO laptops. Gian Pablo Villamil demoed Processing and Arduino running on the OLPC. (http://wiki.freeculture.org/NYU_OLPC_Jam_Session).

Mel Chua and Christopher Fabian are helping organize a story-telling jam March 28-30. Building on the Journalism Jam from last fall and our experience to date with Our Stories, but also telling the stories of people of all ages interested in storytelling and in OLPC. They expect ~150 people (See Story_Jam_New_York).

17. Collections: Erik Zachte has tools for making compact Tomeraider collections that deal intelligently with images.

18. Health: Chris Leonard, a medical researcher, is organizing material related to animals and agriculture. He and his wife are both editors and writers, and he has been working with a few people on an index for an animal health collection (See Animal health).

19. Music: Our music collections are growing : this week the full 9GB of sound samples from the "Boulanger" collection can be found on dev.laptop.org. Andriani Ferti is working with Charlotte Landrum, director of the Gardner Museum podcast series, which will be contributing their concerts in some form for use by our schools.

20. Pakistan: Habib reports that the first formal contact with the Government of Pakistan was successfully established this week through the delivering of a presentation to a group of 80 mid-level managers, who gathered for the purpose at the Academy of Educational Planning and Management in Islamabad from across Pakistan. Habib made a three-hour detailed presentation on all facets of OLPC with a key focus on the educational aspects, implications for policy makers and budget.He also dedicated ninety minutes for special hands-on training/familiarization on 20 XO laptops that he carries with him for that purpose. The event left a magical impact on all present.

21. XOctoPlug: Resulting from extensive school implementation experience Carla Gomez Monroy presented the idea for an 8 in 1 power supply to maximize safety, convenience and battery life. Carla named it the XOctoPlug (See Peripherals/XOctoPlug). The first prototypes arrived at OLPC this week. The design comes from close collaboration between Carla and Joshua Seal of Belkin. It is anticipated the final design will incorporate magnetic quick release connectors to prevent tripping and be fully sealed to maximize robustness.

22. Waveplace: Timothy Falconer and William Stelzer report on St John and Haiti Pilots ([3]).

23. The OLPC Learning Club-DC met in the Capitol Hill offices of Nortel Networks last Saturday. Attendees of every generation got technical help with developer's keys, meshed with a school server and shared ideas on software projects. Host Michael Connet staged a teleconference with Nortel staffers in Ottawa. Student videographers captured footage for a future installment of LearnIT. (See http://www.olpclearningclub.org and http://www.nortellearnit.org for details.)

24. Yesterday, 29 February, was Seymour Papert's 20th birthday!!

More News

Laptop News is archived here.

You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the laptop.org mailman site.

Press requests: please send email to press@racepointgroup.com

Milestones

Latest milestones:

Nov. 2007 Mass Production has started.
July. 2007 One Laptop per Child Announces Final Beta Version of its Revolutionary XO Laptop.
Apr. 2007 First pre-B3 machines built.
Mar. 2007 First mesh network deployment.
Feb. 2007 B2-test machines become available and are shipped to developers and the launch countries.
Jan. 2007 Rwanda announced its participation in the project.

All milestones can be found here.


Press

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Video

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Testimonials about my XO laptop

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