New Millenium Learners Conference 2010

A couple of weeks ago I stumbled across a tweet with an announcement that the "New Millenium Learners Conference 2010" would take place here in Vienna between February 22 and 24. I now spent the past 2 1/2 days at the conference which turned out to be really interesting and inspiring.

I won’t go into any further details here since I covered the conference in three quite extensive blog-posts over on olpcnews.com: day 1, day 2 and day 3.

As you can see over there I used ustream.tv quite extensively to broadcast and record the various sessions and I hope to be able to blog about my experience with it in the not-too-distant future.

Nicely done video on OLE Nepal

Found this video on Twitter the other day and thought it’s worth sharing here:

OLE Nepal from INVISIBLE HAND on Vimeo.

Of course it doesn’t come close to my favorite OLPC feel-good video from about 2 years ago… ;-)

Notes from a Nepali deployment

As previously mentioned I unfortunately haven’t been too great when it comes to blogging about my experiences here in Nepal. The one thing I did  manage to write up are some of my impressions from a visit at two schools here in the Kathmandu Valley where students in grades 2, 3 and 6 are using XOs. The two-part article was published on olpcnews in early September, let me know what you think about it:

Notes from a Nepali deployment, Part I: Updating

Notes from a Nepali deployment, Part II: Challenges

Blogging about Karma

Admittedly I haven’t done too great a job in keeping the blog updated with my impressions from my time here in Nepal. Looking back at the archives the entries have been mostly limited to links to my Flickr album.

(Though I am somewhat proud that I’m at least taking the time to go through all the photos as soon as I get home from taking them to compile best of selections. There’s still several thousand photos from my previous trips in China/Mongolia/Russia and USA/Canada which I haven’t even looked at!)

Anyway, one of the topics which I haven’t really talked about here is the work I’ve been doing as part of my volunteering gig at OLE Nepal. The project I’ve been spending most of my time on is Karma (Web site / entry on wiki.sugarlabs.org) which was supported by Google as part of their Summer of Code program.

In a nutshell the goal of the Karma project is to provide an easy-to-use framework for interactive learning activities based on HTML 5 and Javascript. I’ve been mostly working on several issues related to the user interface and I’ve documented some of my work over on the Karma blog:

• Chakra Progress
• Karma Lesson Navigation
• Karma Pages

Since this is the first time that I’m really working with HTML, CSS and Javascript things take a little longer to get done but I’m really learning a lot and having a great time doing it. Plus being able to collaborate with two awesome fellows, Bryan and Felipe, makes the project all that more more enjoyable, even those weekly IRC meetings at 8AM on Tuesdays;-)

330° panorama from the OLE Nepal offices

Admittedly I’ve been quite obsessed with panorama photos lately mainly thanks to Microsoft Research's awesome Image Composite Editor. So today I took my camera to work and sneaked up on the roof in the morning while everyone else was in a meeting;-)

I have to say that I’m really quite happy with the resulting 330° panorama! I’ve included a small version of it below but admittedly it doesn’t really do the whole scene justice so I’d recommend you to look at the full-size (8770 x 1180 pixel, 3MB) shot for an impression of the environment around our office.

On a related side-note I took two more photos today which worked out quite well thanks to the awesome late-afternoon / early-evening light:

View from the office

The hill across the Ring Road at 6PM

Hope you like ‘em!

1st school visit

Today I visited two schools in the greater Kathmandu area where OLE Nepal has distributed a total of ~180 XO-1 laptops. You can expect a full report over the coming days and for now I’m leaving you with this photo.

Thoughts on Educational Content Management

I posted some thoughts on Educational Content Management, which is one of the areas which I’m working on right now, over on the OLE Nepal blog:

One of the tasks that I’ll be working on during my brief stint here in Nepal is researching and (hopefully) implementing a way to organize all the different media objects produced by OLE Nepal as basis for their E-Paath learning activities. Currently we are talking about several thousand images, sounds, texts and videos but it’s not hard to imagine their repository containing hundred thousand or more artefacts in the not-too-distant future. Apart from the specific OLE Nepal use-case I also believe that even larger content repositories have to be a core consideration for both the larger OLPC and SugarLabs efforts.

You can find the complete blog entry here.

Going to Nepal…

YES, I’m back on the road! :-)

I’m typing these lines as I’m making use of a kiosk with free WiFi and charging here at Doha International Airport while waiting for my flight to Kathmandu.

I’ll be in Nepal until the end of September, hanging out with my friends of OLE Nepal and soon to be joined by the one and only Daniel Drake.

However before I get too carried away getting my online fix (and potentially missing my plane like at PDX last year;-) I’ll rather head to my gate and see that I keep this blog updated over the coming weeks and months.

Back in tech-publishing...

Guess who the new co-editor over at OLPCnews is? Yes, that would be me. :-)

I am honoured to be able to take over the site from the one and only Wayan Vota who built this prime OLPC community over the past 2 years. Over the course of this week the transition from Wayan to the new editorial team consisting of me and Bryan Berry from OLE Nepal will be made. Earlier today Wayan posted this comment which was followed by a joint statement from Bryan and myself where we give a brief overview of our plans for the near future. I'm very much looking forward to taking OLPCnews into the "post-1CC" era, highlighting all the great things that are happening in OLPC communities around the world and I'm sure it will be a great experience.

On a more personal note, I find it interesting that after being the assistant manager (yes, I choose that title myself) over on EPIACENTER.com for the better part of the past 5 years I only managed to stay away from tech-publications for a couple of months. As previously mentioned there's something about writing articles and comments on technology related subjects that I really enjoy. Looking ahead to the coming weeks and months until university starts again on October, 1st I'll be spending most of my waking hours writing one thing or another:

• two feature articles for work
• OLPCnews
• additions to the OLPC Activity Handbook
• updating this blog

These tasks should certainly keep me busy for awhile. Not that I was ever afraid of being bored! :-D

Technology Review's article about OLPC in Peru

There's an interesting article about what's happening with OLPC in Peru in the current edition of Technology Review. While it doesn't contain any radically new information about the deployment and mostly focuses on the general environment and the experiences made at the pilot in Arahuay it's quite a nice read. My favourite quote comes up towards the end where it says:

"The success of OLPC can no longer be judged against ­Negroponte's early predictions and plans, nor by the technical merits of the laptop itself. Peru is what matters now."

...and Nepal, Uruguay and every other country where deployments and pilots are happening these days.

Regardless of all the bad press (no links necessary) and the occassional feel-good what really keeps me going is thinking of the potentially large impact that OLPC and similar initiatives and programs can have on people around the word.

And looking at this video (from the Technology Review article) I realize that I have to find a way to get back to Peru as soon as possible. I really want to visit some of these schools to gain a better understanding of what actually happens when you introduce ICT into educational settings and come up with ways to better disseminate that feedback to developers, the larger interested community and policy makers. Now that mission should certainly keep me busy over the next few years.

P.S. The second video that accompanies the article is also worth looking at!

Videos from the OLPC Learning Club DC Holiday Meetup

Here are two videos that Mike Lee took during the Holiday Meetup of the OLPC Learning Club DC on December, 19th.

(1) Bryan Berry from OLE Nepal talking about the challenges in Nepal:



(2) Aaron and me talking about OLPC Austria and what we've been up to:



Bryan's talk was extremely interesting and I hope that people also enjoyed our short presentation... Personally I certainly had a great night there at the Mayorca Cafe in Washington, DC!

P.S. In case you haven't heard about the OLPC Austria's XO Laptop Bag, check out this short OLPC Austria's XO Laptop Bag infomercial:



Sorry, I'm only now realizing that the revver.com videos a slightly too wide for the layout I'm using... :-(