One Laptop per Child at GADI 2010

As I had previously mentioned back in March I gave a talk about OLPC in the “ICT and Society” (“Gesellschaftliche Aspekte der Informationstechnologie”) lecture series at Graz University of Technology. A recording of the 45min presentation (which I gave in German) is now available here and if you’re interested in a copy of the slides then please e-mail me.

Upcoming presentation at TU Graz on March 24

I’m really looking forward to next week as I’ll be spending 2 days in Graz. The main reason why I’m going is that I’ve again been invited to give a talk on OLPC as part of the “ICT and Society” (“Gesellschaftliche Aspekte der Informationstechnologie”) lecture series at Graz University of Technology. Apart from the really impressive set of speakers one of the coolest aspects of this yearly lecture series is that it’s also being livestreamed. So if you’re interested in watching my talk (which I’ll give in German) then mark your calendars and head over to http://curry.tugraz.at/ at 4:15PM on Wednesday, March 24, and tune in. I’m also thinking about how to best integrate some sort of backstream so even remote participants can ask questions, most likely I’ll rely on Twitter and a public Google Wave to achieve that.

Apart from the presentation I’m also looking forward meeting the fine folks involved in the Austrian OLPC pilot project at Pädagogische Hochschule Steiermark again. Plus I’ll also get to meet some other friends and I’m pretty certain that I’ll spend at least one evening enjoying the great food and drinks at Sägewerk.

OLPC Austria meetups in autumn

After the summer break OLPC Austria is going to restart its monthly public meetups at the Museumsquartier in Wien in October. Apart from the normal socializing component this time ‘round we have organized a series of presentations that will look at the OLPC project from a global perspective and present the current state of affairs in various countries.

For that purpose presentations about the projects in Nepal (October 3), Peru (November 7) and Graz (December 5) will take place as part of our public meetings each first Saturday in the month, always starting at 3PM at Museumsquartier Quartier 21, Room D.

I’ll of course report on these meetups as we go along and might even try to set up some live streaming of the presentations. But most importantly I hope to see you there in this thing called meatspace! :-)

OLPC launches Give 1 Get 1 2008

Apart from finally managing to meet up with some friends today for a good game of soccer I spent most of the day glued to the screen and trying to stay on top of the developments surrounding the return of OLPC's Give 1 Get 1 program. That means reading / writings tons of e-mails, checking the olpcnews forums, following keywords on news.google.com, tuning into IRC, etc.

Anyway, since I've done quite a bit of blogging about it over on olpcnews.com I'm not going into details here. Except to say that despite what some media outlets are saying OLPC is a pretty great project making good progress, additionally I've met a large number of smart and awesome people via OLPC and that alone is highly motivating. And even if this sounds stupid ,I probably wouldn't know what to do with all my spare time if I didn't spend it on related efforts. ;-)

Most of this week will go towards OLPC as we're working on publishing lots of great content on olpcnews. Plus I'll be heading to Graz on Wednesday evening to hold a presentation for future CS teachers at the Technical University there on Thursday morning. Afterwards I'll be attending the USAB 2008 Symposium which I'm really looking forward to. I'll also have a small table there to present OLPC and especially some of the projects that OLPC Austria has been working on.

In related news I gave an interview to BBC Radio's Up All Night program last night and I was quite happy with it. (In case you're interested it's available as a stream here, the segment on OLPC starts at 01:11:40.) Last week I also had an interesting talk with Cyrus Farivar who was working on a story on Inveneo which I had visited when I was in San Francisco. You can find the excellent piece (with a short comment by yours truly) at The World/Technology - definitely my favorite tech-podcast these days!

Anyway, I badly need to grab some sleep now, I can barely keep me eyes open as I write these lines...

OLPC Austria @ Elevate Festival

I'll be heading out to the station in about half an hour to catch a train to Graz, a city in the south of Austria, where OLPC Austra will be featured in a presentation and workshop at the Elevate festival. Our presentation will be held tomorrow, Friday, Oct. 26th, from 11 a.m. at the Grüne Akademie so if you happen to be in Graz then do stop by! (full English information about our presentation)

Aaron and I will probably make roughly the same presentation we had at the Vienna University of Technology 2 weeks ago. I will be proposing a couple of small changes though to improve things a bit. Additionally I'm currently studying the notes I took while watching the video of our last presentation, there are a couple of things that I definitely want to improve upon. One of the things that always happen when I make a presentation or talk or something is that I speak way too quickly and don't include enough pauses to give people a time to think about what I said. I also tend to have at least one nervous gesture, at the university presentation it was a swinging right hand that kept going back and forth while I was talking. Another area I have to work on is deciding whether I'll be speaking in dialect or straight-forward German because I do have the habit of switching back and forth mid-sentence which does sound a bit odd.

Enough, gotta run if I still want to buy some food and drinks before I head to the train-station... :-)