OLPC Learning Club - DC

The OLPC Learning Club DC’s information table at the Takoma Park Folk Festival has been confirmed. Mark your calendars for Sunday, September 14, 2008.

David Rothman, editor of the TeleRead Blog on the Ebook industry, is a happy customer of the DC-area OLPC repair service.

Both of the third-party XO accessory stores, XO Explosion and I Love My XO, will soon offer replacement parts such as keyboards and batteries. XOExplosion will also carry the OLPC specified 10-watt solar panel.

LEGO recently announced that a special XO-compatible robotics system for developing countries, the WeDo, will go on sale January 1, 2009.

Students at Duke University organized OLPC GrassCon,  the first virtual grassroots web conference. The conference video was streamed live Saturday, July 19. There were some technical glitches and speaker lineup changes, but the presenters’ content was excellent in my opinion. I’ve posted a few minutes of video and screenshots on Flickr. The con organizers say the archived video and chat text will be posted soon.
Update 7/23: The archived video of the GrassCon talks are now posted.

The Waveplace Foundation has released 30 (!) new video tutorials on eToys. The tutorials are already being used for teacher training in Haiti, Florida and Nicaragua. The videos will also be released as a DVD and book. Currently, it is necessary to sign up on their web site to be granted a password (some days later) to see all the videos.

The Birmingham Alabama Board of Education has voted to accept the remaining 14,000 OLPC XO laptops after piloting the 1,000 received in the spring.

Jim Gettys’ most recent OLPC Community News Update is chock full of deployment stories, new software activities and product development progress.

TED.com now has a couple videos in its archive of Nicholas Negroponte pitching OLPC at the conference as well as some classic footage of Nicholas from 1984.

Lastly, I notice that the CBS DVD of Nicholas Negroponte’s appearance on 60 Minutes can still be ordered (for $17.95) on Amazon. I got a copy of this a while back, and it has been very useful in briefings on the OLPC mission and history.

Because we know that using an OLPC XO isn’t always a joyride, we’re going to focus our July meeting on helping club members get more out of their laptops. With the laptop piped into an LCD projector, we’ll swap tips and tricks on navigating the Sugar user interface, demonstrate new or interesting software activities and also talk about the latest accessories for the laptop itself.

There should be a little something for everyone who attends. And if nothing else, you can get help practicing the XO gang sign (proudly conceived by Edward at left). We will log the discussion points for posting to this blog or our wiki. If you want to demonstrate anything that requires installation on our projector enabled XO, please let us know during the week before.

What: Family XO Mesh Meetup
 
When: Saturday, July 26th, 2008, 10 am to 1pm

Where: Gallaudet University [map], Student Union Building, Lower Level [floorplan], Flexible Room L040 and L041, Washington, D.C. 20002

If this is your first time at Gallaudet, and you are driving, come to the main entrance of campus (see map link above) and check in at the security kiosk where you’ll be directed to the proper parking lot. This time, we’ll have balloons by the entrance to the Student Union nearest to the parking lot.

It’s also a doable walk from the nearby Metro station.

What: Family XO Mesh Meetup
When: Saturday, June 28th, 2008, 10 am to 1 pm
Where: Nortel Networks, 101 Constitution Avenue, Washington, DC 20001 [Map]

Thanks to Michael Connet of Nortel LearnIT, we’re back at Nortel Networks’ DC office this month to teleconference with Nortel’s office in Ottawa where some Nortel staffers will host some XO owners from their local area. We will also attempt to patch in some people with Teamspeak VOIP. There’s lots to report on from recent events such as the 4PC Bakeoff, OLPC Grassroots Jam NYC, OLPC Grassroots Unconference in Boston, OLPC Photo Jam 1, and more.

Nortel Networks is a secure office complex so someone will be on the lookout to let people in between 9:45am-10:15am. The building is walking distance from the Union Station and Judiciary Square Metro Stations.

Update 6/28: I emailed a few more details on the meeting agenda to our club list. No change in the location or time.

Update: 6/29: Here are some photos from the meeting.

Here’s a nice video of our February meeting produced by the students involved with Nortel’s LearnIT project. LearnIT has started a page about us on their learning resources web site.

And if you didn’t catch it on OLPC News, Wayan shot a sweet clip of 6-year-old meeting regular Marayd demonstrating XO Speak.

At a time when Nicholas Negroponte could use Iron Man (or even Fusion Man) to help get XO laptops to the children of the world, the OLPC community has its own summer blockbusters to consider with the departure of Walter Bender and the new alliance with Microsoft. And next week, the press is supposed to get a look at the next generation XO laptop.

So to help us with some perspective, we are pleased to have Aaron Kaplan and Christopher Derndorfer from OLPC Austria as well as the famous Mel Chua from OLPC Headquarters. We return to our gracious host Kevin Cole at Gallaudet University where we met back in March.

What: Family XO Mesh Meetup
When: Saturday, May 24th, 2008, 10 am to 1pm
Where: Gallaudet University [map], Student Union Building, Lower Level [floorplan], Flexible Room L040 and L041, Washington, D.C. 20002

The free raffle will include the first XO-friendly third-party AC adapter (soon to be piloted by OLE Nepal), an XOView Viewfinder and one of my “naked” car power adapters.

As always, kids of all ages are welcome.

Update 5/22: Gallaudet has alerted us to the fact that the campus shuttle bus will be running on a modified holiday schedule because of the Memorial Day holiday weekend.

The “Cube” in the basement of the MIT Media Lab

Our next meeting will be at the Arlington Career Center in Virginia.

What: Family XO Mesh Meetup
When: Saturday, April 26th, 2008, 10 am to 1 pm
Where: Arlington Career Center
816 South Walter Reed Drive,
Arlington, VA 22204
(Contact Page, Map, Bus Info)

Mike Lee will distill several years of visits to the MIT Media Lab into a photo log on the culture of innovation and invention that gave rise to the One Laptop Per Child project. To make more tangible some of the lab’s work, several commercially available products from spinoff companies and sponsors will be demonstrated including the Ambient Orb, Clocky, LEGO Mindstorms, Scratch Sensor Board, Hyperscore, and E-ink.

Then we’ll cover the news on OLPC’s software Update.1 for the XO laptop and help install it for the brave. Much meshing should ensue.

We’ll also bring back the raffle with at least one XOView Camera Viewfinder as a prize.

UPDATE: An event page for this meeting has been created on Facebook.

Photo credit: Ewan McIntosh

What better way to end the week in Washington, DC than with a good XO geek fest? How about one with your favorite OLPC News writers at a local pub?

This Friday, we’ll have Jon Camfield, Mike Lee, Wayan Vota, and in from OLPC Austria, Christoph Derndorfer, at the Looking Glass Lounge in Petworth.

On tap will be a lively discussion of all things One Laptop Per Child as the beer brings out our brilliance in everything else. We’ll also have a collection of XO laptops for public use. If you’re around, do come join us:

OLPC News DC Meetup
Friday, March 28
Looking Glass Lounge
3634 Georgia Ave NW (map)
Near Georgia Avenue Metro Station
6pm till we stumble home

I’m testing out my new Flip Ultra video camera this week, so I used the camera’s built-in software to edit and automatically upload to YouTube this 5-minute video clip (playable above) of our guest speaker, Richard Bullington-McGuire, and his 7-year-old son Patrick as they talk about the projects they and Richard’s students have done in the MIT Media Lab’s free Scratch animation and programming software. In his talk, Richard said he finds the user interface of Scratch much more inviting than the eToys activity bundled with the XO. Scratch, however, still needs to have its interface “sugarized” to be more readable on the XO’s high resolution screen. I particularly enjoyed seeing Richard’s laminated set of Scratch Cards. The Scratch Cards illustrate a basic feature on one side and show the programming steps on the back. It would be great to have a large set of these for the XO and its bundled activities.

From my photos on Flickr, you can see that at this month’s meeting, we continued to attract a diverse group of parents, kids (lots of them!) and other XO fans of all ages. We made some more progress in getting the school server up and running on a laptop with an active antenna, but alas, we didn’t have a USB-to-ethernet adapter so that we could bridge to the open internet through the server.

Pizza for lunch was an impromptu suggestion at noon which produced enough contributions from the group to have Capital Pizza deliver a pile of pies and liters of drinks. Thanks again to Kevin Cole of the Gallaudet Research Institute for handling all the logistics of the meeting room. We are scheduled to meet back at Gallaudet in May.

Michael Connet of Nortel LearnIT, and the host of our last meeting, has just posted some of the fabulously creative student animations that were previewed. Highschooler Phi Tran was the primary animator, and in another video, he explains how he created them. In the animations, an energetic XO kid runs around a fanciful rendition of the Sugar user interface to demonstrate networking concepts through gestures and movement. The animations are the first in a series and one can easily imagine a superhero cartoon character coming out of this project. This is just another vivid example of the diverse talent we have in the DC area XO community. Bravo!

 Updated: 3/20/08

Hold the date: The next meeting of OLPC LC-DC will be hosted by Kevin Cole at Gallaudet University in DC.

What: Family XO Mesh Meetup

When: Saturday, March 22nd, 2008, 10 am to 1pm

Where: Gallaudet University [map], Student Union Building, Lower Level [floorplan], Flexible Room L040 and L041, Washington, D.C. 20002

At the meeting, Richard Bullington-McGuire will demonstrate the MIT Media Lab’s Scratch animation program which also runs on the XO. Richard has created a number of Scratch courses that he has taught to gradeschool children in Virginia. Richard will give a quick overview of the class he’s teaching, show some of the classroom materials, explain how he got the seminar series started, and show what some of the projects students have done. He’ll also report on the alpha implementation of Scratch on the XO, with a quick explanation of what works and what doesn’t.

Here’s a screenshot of one of Richard’s student projects, a capture the flag game:

http://tinyurl.com/24vccq

Richard’s web site is:

http://www.obscure.org

In addition to Richard’s presentation, we’ll be offering technical support and an opportunity to mesh with other XOs.