Kasiisi Project Laptops Video

YouTube video of Kasiisi School Laptop Program from my summer in Uganda. Maps and sensors are featured, and I make my spiel midway through the video. Actually a few interview answers joined together, which works well. Primate Handshake did a good job.

OLPC Kids as Writers and Journalists

Want to teach students how to tell their stories and make a difference? I combined a few new resources with difficult-to-find classics for this list:

SEETA India's Newspaper Activity -
Builds upon the Write Activity with some newspaper / newsletter layouts. May run slowly on XO 1.0

eHow on writing - short videos teaching how to write different topics, from scary stories to business plans, including cause & effect essays, paragraphs, and teaching tips, too.

YouTube's official Reporters' Center -
Videos advising ordinary people on how to conduct interviews, collect information, build a story, and make a powerful presentation. Collects YouTube videos from many prominent journalists.

Pulitzer Center and YouTube's Project Report:
Best of the best citizen journalists. Scroll down the page to see the Pulitzer Center's tips on Production Tips, including lighting, cameras, and action

CitizenTube - Professional interviews and reporting based on questions and interests suggested by commenters. Recent interviewees include Bill Clinton, BP, and Shakira. One of your student's questions could be elevated to YouTube stardom! Their website also discusses online media made by change-makers and politicans.

Knight Foundation Grants - grants for community news-making, arts, and even application developers.

To get YouTube videos working on an XO, download from KickYouTube.com (just add kick to your YouTube video's URL) then convert using ffmpeg2theora , or check out the Flash guide

OLPC Activity Analytics

One of the big take-aways from the OLPC Summit was: let's share more data! We want to know how often students use activities, when they play with them, and how much time they spend.

My SugarLabs GMap Activity takes reports every 3 minutes. I use it to see if users understand the UI for using zoom and adding markers. It's also fun to see if students are checking out the Taj Mahal or the World Cup stadiums in South Africa.

I am now ready to release 904 usage reports (map center, zoom, and marker locations) from 456 activity launches, over a period of ten days - for education, technology, or research purposes. Almost all of this data is from Uruguay; a few reports are from Paraguay and Argentina.

The data contains no student-written text, contact information, nor identifiers. For additional privacy, I am limiting the release to members of the education and research communities -- and these people must agree to a privacy and data usage statement.

Write an explanation of how you'd work with this data, then e-mail it to ndoiron AT cmu.edu

Going to OLPC SF Meeting

I am about to meet so many people in the OLPC community in San Francisco. For people reading this who can't make it - be sure to tune in to the live streams, off-site sessions, or wiki articles to be written later. We still want to meet all of you.

I have an unusual packing list:

• 8 spliced microphone cord wires


• 8 photoresistors


• 10 thermoresistors


• CO and volatile organics sensors


• 2 pounds of homemade conductive PlayDoh


• 1.5 pounds of non-conductive (insulator) PlayDoh


• 2 laptops (one considerably more eared than the other)


• Environmental health T-shirt (you have to see it)


• Sky of Stone (sequel to October Sky)


• Kettleman City, California community development plan


• Arduino Lilypad


• USB drive with the software listed on my blog

I'm also going to be setting up a community networking site tonight. Hope to see everyone there or on the networking site by the time I'm in Pittsburgh on Monday.