Keynote on "One Laptop per Child in Latin America and what we can learn from it" [video]

I spent the past four days in Switzerland as the University of Teacher Education Central Switzerland in Goldau had invited me to give a keynote at their "One to One Computing in School" conference. The title of my talk was “One Laptop per Child in Latin America and what we can learn from it” and a recording of it is now available here, plus you can find the accompanying slides here. (Please do note that the keynote was given in German.)

Update (16.02.2011): I just got a copy of an article in the Neue Schwyzer Zeitung which talks about the conference as well as mentions my keynote. I’ve made it available for download here.

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.

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! :-)

Radio Ö1 piece on OLPC

As previously mentioned I was interviewed by Austrian radio station Ö1 about OLPC last week. The piece aired today and it’s now available via the Digitales Leben podcast feed.

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...

Update to the OLPC Activity Handbook

Back in January I mentioned that we had released the first edition of our OLPC Activity Handbook. Now it's my pleasure to announce a significant update to the handbook which we worked on over the past weeks and months. We have now included chapters on topics such as the Sugar user interface, datastore and collaboration, the Journal and XO Input Devices. The handbook was formally presented by my colleague Daniel Jahre at the Wiener Linuxwochen (Vienna Linuxweeks) on Friday.

At the moment the current version is only available as a pdf that's been optimized for print purposes (alternating margins, etc.) but we should have a normal version soon. I also hope to find an hour or two this week to upload some of the .py and .xo files that I produced for the handbook to the wiki entry.

I have to say that I'm quite happy to have reached this milestone. Going forward I definitely want to enhance the current material however I'll have to see how much spare time I have in the coming weeks and months as I'll have another significant committment starting tomorrow...

OLPC presence at the ACP-EU meeting in Ljubljana

I spent the beginning of the week in Ljubljana, Slovenia to attend the ACP-EU Joint Parliamentary Assembly and to help out at the OLPC table there. The interest in OLPC from ACP representatives was overwhelming and we had many great discussions. The whole trip happened on very short notice and it was probably one of the most fun, intense and insane things that I've experienced in a long time. :-)

Below you can find a photo with (from-left-to-right) Walter, me, Giulia and Simon that was taken and kindly uploaded by the amazing Bernardo Innocenti.

OLPC Austria presentation at CeBIT 2008

Apart from having an OLPC Austria booth at CeBIT 2008 Aaron and me also held a presentation at the LinuxForum. This presentation was recorded and is now available at the Linux-Magazin.de website: LINK (Again the video is in German.)

Presenting the OLPC XO at CeBIT

My friend Sascha from eeepcnews.de recorded this short 5min video of me presenting the OLPC XO laptop and some of its highlights at CeBIT earlier this month. (Please note that the video is in German.)

olpcaustria blog goes soup

During a meeting dedicated to planning our presence at CeBIT in March it was decided that OLPC Austria needs to get a blog so we can document the work that we're doing. I'm not sure whether it was Simon or Helga who came up with the idea of using soup, soup.io that is, a very light-weight KISS (that's keep it simple, stupid) blogging-service that was invented right here in Vienna.

I have to say that I'm extremely impressed with soup.io and especially its interface that really gets out of the way and let's you post links, texts, pictures, etc. in close to no time. I think it would be a bit too simplistic for my own blogging needs, especially since I love having those long lists of links, places I want to travel to, etc. on the right hand side of the blog. However for the intended purposes, keeping people posted about what OLPC Austria is up to, it's just perfect!

So head over to olpcaustria.soup.io where for now you can see Helga, Daniel and me hackin' away on the Activitiy Handbook.

OLPC Activity Handbook

I think I previously mentioned that Daniel, Helga and me are currently working on the so-called "Activity Handbook". To quote myself from the introduction of the handbook:

"The purpose of this handbook is to provide you with all the information you need in
order to get started with software development for the OLPC XO."

Last weekend we managed to finish the first few chapters and we therefore decided to post the activity handbook over on the OLPC Austria website. Currently there are two downloads available, the first pdf is optimized for printing purposes (with alternating margins, etc.) while the second one is meant for regular viewing.

We're working on cleaning up the DocBook files (basically the source-code of the book) so we can also make them available to the community. This will enable people to contribute by submitting corrections, additional information and extra chapters in the form of patches. Therefore the whole project is very open and we encourage anyone to contribute to it! We're already working on the next chapters and we're also integrating some of the outstanding feedback that we've gotten from other OLPC Austria members.


This is definitely one of the most interesting projects I've ever been involved in and while it's a lot of hard work I'm having a great time doing it. I'm really learning a lot along the way and it's fun to learn Python while also spending a lot of time thinking about how to come up with a readable and useful documentation.

Stay tuned for updates in the future!

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... :-(

Posting from OLPCnews.com HQ

I know I haven't posted in quite a while but life has simply been too busy these past 2 weeks... However I do intend to get back to regular posting over the coming days as I'll be documenting my 6-day trip to the United States which started earlier today and took me straight from Vienna to the OLPCnews.com HQ here in Washington, DC. Thanks to the kind invitation by the one and only Wayan Vota (could there be a better welcome than a cold beer and a 2h discussion about OLPC, I don't think so) Aaron and me will be attending the first meeting of the OLPC Learning Club DC which takes place tomorrow, December 18 at 7 PM in "Mayorga Cafe & Lounge" (3301 14th. St. NW - Google Map). Come join us for an evening dedicated to OLPC, I'm sure it's going to be a blast! :-)

Early on Wednesday we're going to move on to Boston for a couple of meetings with the fine OLPC folks. Then we fly back home on Sunday evening. That should definitely make for a busy and great week!

I actually wanted to leave you with an impression of the Christmas decoration by one of Wayan's neighbours but I'm just to tired to even take out my camera. So good night everyone!

OLPC News 100 Laptop XO Fundraising Drive

OLPCnews.com or more specifically Wayan Vota and Alexandre Van de Sande from OLPCnews have started a fund-raising campaign to support one local OLPC effort via the OLPC's "give many" initiative!

I'm not going to go into any details here because you can find them in Alexandre's article but basically they want to collect $21.400 which leaves exactly $20.000 after the processing fees of $1.400 have been paid. Thanks to "give many" 20K gives you 100 X0s, 60 of them will go to whatever educational institution you (or rather your local OLPC "learning club" - as they call it) decide on and 40 go towards a school designated by OLPC. The great thing is that the OLPCnews.com readers will have a say in the decision of where the 60 laptops as they're involved in the decision and discussion process surrounding the campaign.

They have even created a very nice video to promote their efforts and I've embedded it here for your viewing pleasure:


I certainly think this is an outstanding initiative and once I receive my money for December I'll certainly be making my $100 contribution via their Fundable page.

However I also have to add that this initiative shows that there's clearly a need to improve the current distribution- and purchasing-system that OLPC is using at the moment. I definitely think there are many aspects that need to be improved. The three most important examples for me include:

(a) bring "give 1, get" 1 to Europe and the rest of the world
(b) improve communication with the public about G1G1, especially when it comes to details such as estimated (and realistic) time of shipping
(c) set up a program that allows developers, educators, universities, students, local groups (such as OLPC Austria, etc. to have easy and reliable access to X0 hardware when needed [on a sidenote I'd say that the immediate demand we here at OLPC Austria have in order to improve and facilitate our own developments and to support various groups that are forming at universities are at least 10 ~ 15 laptops; however I also know that OLPC is currently working on setting up a new developers program and I hope to have more information about that in ~2 weeks]

Anyway, I hope you'll also support the "OLPC News 100 Laptop XO Fundraising Drive" for now!

Some more XO testing...

So after playing a bit of SimCity in the afternoon and heading to another OLPC Austria meeting I now spent the past 3 hours trying a couple of other things on the X0s.

First of all I followed Walter Bender's advice on installing the Adobe Flash codec to see whether that would enable me to watch Flash-based online-videos. I went to the Adobe Flash Player Download Center Linux (x86) and downloaded the .tar.gz file. Then I followed the instructions from the Adobe site and installed the codec on one of the B4s (don't forget to close browse while you do that). Afterwards I checked whether the installation had gone well by typing in about:plugins into the browse address-bar to get an overview of all the installed plugins. Afterwards I went over to YouTube to check whether that update made any difference. And indeed it did! After looking for Johnny Cash's Hurt video and looking at the loading animation for some time the video actually started playing. It was quite choppy and the CPU utilization quickly maxed out at 100% so the result was closer to a slideshow than a 25fps experience. The sound was smooth most of the time but did drop out occasionally. I also checked out other video-sharing sites and video-podcasts such as MyVideo.de, CrankyGeeks and Inside One Laptop per Child: Episode 04 by the Red Hat Magazine, all with the same result. Changing the quality of the videos to "low" did seem to speed things up, but only barely so. So for now I'd say online-video is doable but it's not going to be a smooth ride. I do expect that to change though as Gnash gets improved (and Walter Bender also mentioned that "There is a more recent one that will be shipped with the G1G1 machines").

The next thing I tried was to upload a video to YouTube that I wanted to record with the X0's camera and microphone. And while both devices appeared to be recognized (at least that's what I assume by looking at the options) the YouTube recorder says that the video-device isn't ready for recording. So I decided to work around that limitation by recording the video with the regular record activity in order to upload it directly. Unfortunately (and only after I had uploaded the file) YouTube told me that .ogg isn't supported by their platform. I hate to disappoint you but apparently there's no way to broadcast my wisdom via an X0 at the moment.

Seeing that that this was a bit of a frustracting experience I decided to test how well Flash based online-games would work. Never having played one before I just choose some of the first results I found via Google and gave them a try. The experience was quite similar to the Flash videos in that things did work but were a bit on the slow side. Not a dealbreaker but definitely not all that confortable and exciting.

The next stop was to play around with the read activity which serves as a light-weight RSS reader. I found it to be very comfortable and also liked the fact that links I clicked were directly opened in browse. Unfortunately I didn't manage to work the other way 'round, I would have liked to be able to select RSS feeds from websites in order for them to be directly added to the read activity.

After that I again followed one of Walter Bender's recommendations by downloading and installing the watch & listen media-player activity. Everything went smoothly and after a minute or two I was looking at some of the media-samples I also downloaded from the OLPC wiki. It certainly makes a lot more sense to listen to MP3s or watch videos in that activity instead of relying on eToys (like I had mentioned yesterday). One thing that I forgot to try it whether watch & listen also supports online-radio-stations, I think I'll try that later today or tomorrow.

Last but not least I hooked up an old el-cheapo Microsoft Wheel Mouse to see whether the X0 would recognize it. It worked without a hitch and was usable after less than second.

All in all I'd say that my impression of the current state of things today is more favourable than last night. Following Walter Bender's suggestions only took ~20 minutes and resulted in a significantly better overall user experience. I also believe that the latest software-versions come with many improvements and the whole package will be more polished and ready for prime-time in about 2 to 3 weeks once Update.1 is ready.

Anyway, for now I'm off to play some more SimCity... :-)

SimCity running on the OLPC X0

After last night's session mainly being focused on serious web-services and web-sites I decided to go for something different today. That's why I decided to download and install the legendary SimCity (my Maxis) on one of the X0s I have sitting here. Electronic Arts recently released the game under the GPL and that means that it's now available for everyone to play, hack and sugarize (the process of adapting software to the X0's Sugar environment).

So above you can a screenshot of my city after playing for around 5 minutes. SimCity really brings back lots of memories to when I was in primary school and used to play that game, A LOT!

Anyway, kudos to EA for releasing that game and I hope to see more publishers release older titles under the GPL so they can be ported over to the X0!

Saturday Night Fever

So after that weird Friday night and a good night's sleep I've had a very productive day today. Spent most of my evening at our so-called OLPC Austria weekend-jam getting stuff done for the OLPC project. Unfortunately I only had about 2 hours to work on the activity handbook that we're currently writing, the rest of the time went towards other related to-do items.

Amongst other things the two B4 machines were updated to the latest firmware version and software build 624. Given that we're going to have two meetings where we're presenting the X0s next week I wanted to spend some time with the latest software to see what works and what doesn't. As the rest of the gang decided to call it a day at around 3 a.m. I took the machines home and now I'm currently working with the setup you can see below:


While toying around with the laptops I stumbled across a variety of odd issues, amongst other things what appears to be an odd bug within the search function of the journal. Also I wasn't able to open an OpenOffice Writer document, something I had certainly expected the X0 to handle. Other than those glitches I'm happy to report that many of the things I tested worked flawlessly. Here's a quick overview of the things I tried:

MP3: I tested MP3 playback by listening to a song that was stored on my USB thumdrive. While I'm still not sure that eToys is the best solution for audio-playback I was surprised by the excellent quality of the speakers. They're certainly much than on my regular notebook (Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo 1425W) and most other notebooks that I've used.

pdfs: I looked at some pdfs from one of my university lectures. The quality of the screen really makes this a very pleasent experience. Plus rotating the screen to accomodate a whole A4 page while holding the X0 in e-book mode is just outstanding!

videos: I also tested some videos and they also worked fine. Again I don't think that eToys is the best solution for playback, especially since I didn't manage to get into full-screen mode so the videos were just stamp-sized.

online flash videos: While the videos on YouTube seemed to start being buffered (you know when those white circles started spinning) they never actually started playing back. The browse activity and the Gnash plugin did recognize the video content as I was presented with a menu when right-clicking on the video but I still didn't manage to actually look at a video.

online radio-stations: None of my favourite online radio-stations such as DigitalGunfire, IranianRadio.com or Soundportal.at worked. Not sure whether it was missing codecs or something but whenever I found a feed that would open inside the browse activity I would click on the "play" button only for nothing to happen.

photos: I looked at some of my TransSib photos and here I did notice that the colour representation wasn't quite as good as on a regular screen. That's of course due to the unique design of how the colour mode actually works on this screen but I still hadn't expected the photos to look that washed-out.

collaboration: While Aaron and me didn't manage to get collaboration working on the write activity earlier today I now managed to get it up and running without a hitch. The connect game also works quite well, even though it's obviously a bit boring to compete with myself. For some odd reason the collaboration on the paint activity doesn't seem to work so I wasn't able to work on my masterpiece on both laptops simultaneously.

networking: Looking at the X0s network view I found significantly more WiFi networks within reach than I've ever seen on any laptop that's been in my flat. Funnily enough I only saw that one open network which I decided to leech of on one of the X0s even though they were standing right next to each other.

overall web-experience: I tried a fair number of different web-sites to see what kind of internet experience you're getting out of the X0 at the moment. Flickr worked well, except for the slideshows which for one reason or another weren't viewable. However I did manage to look at a slideshow of Patrick's photos from Mongolia over on pbase.com. It was a bit of a slow experience but it worked. Google's Gmail also worked just fine, however I did manage to send the browse activity into X0 nirvana once when selecting the Google calender from the top-toolbar that you see when you're logged into Gmail. The second time it worked without a hitch so I can't really pinpoint the reason for that initial crash. Working with Google Docs also went smoothly. While I normaly don't use it Digg also worked as expected.

Overall I'd say that software build 624 isn't quite ready for prime time, it's not really beta anymore, but I also wouldn't go as far as calling this a final version. I had a pretty smooth experience all evening even though some things obviously still don't work as expected. To me the biggest letdown at the moment is not being able to look at online video-content. I definitely hope that the next software versions address that issue.

Please don't hesitate to let me know in case there's any other webservice or website that you want me to test for you!

Anyway, seeing that it's past 7 a.m. around here and it's getting light outside I guess it's also time for me to get to bed... Good night everyone!

OLPC Austria T-Shirts

Aaron had already mentioned our OLPC Austria T-Shirts in an entry on his OLPC blog the other day and now I'm proud to be able to show you the first photos of it:



Needless to say that we all looked clock-stopping hot with our t-shirts during today's presentation at the Elevate;-)

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... :-)