Subscribe to RSS
Posts Tagged ‘laptop’
XO BookSprint instructions
Adam Hyde of FLOSS Manuals wrote up these instructions for how to get involved with the BookSprint going on this week. I’m hoping to write blog entries that describe the planning sessions and surrounding practical advice for this type of writing sprint, but I wanted to let my readers know the basic overview of how to participate this very week. Thanks Adam Hyde! Adam’s presenting at DocTrain East this fall, if you’d like to know more about FLOSS Manuals and the remixing the system enables.
XO BookSprint
This week in Austin, Texas a team of writers are gathering together to immerse themselves in a one week intensive documentation jam.
The purpose of the Book Sprint is to produce documentation in 1 week to support the forthcoming 2008 roll-out off the OLPC G1G1. The team in Austin consists of members of FLOSS Manuals (Adam Hyde, Anne Gentle), OLPC (Adam Holt), Sugar (David Farning, Walter Bender), and the Austin XO Users Group, and YOU! We have set up the online tools so you too can contribute! To make a contribution please do the following :
1. Register
To contribute to the documentation you can register at FLOSS Manuals :
http://en.flossmanuals.net/register
2. Contribute!
There are several manuals planned to be finished by the end of the week
(August 29) including a Sugar manual, an XO manual, and 5 Sugar
Activities manuals. You can see the structure of the manuals here:
Sugar :
http://en.flossmanuals.net/bin/view/Sugar
XO (OLPC Hardware) :
http://en.flossmanuals.net/bin/view/XO
Sugar Activities :
http://en.flossmanuals.net/bin/view/Browse
http://en.flossmanuals.net/bin/view/Chat
http://en.flossmanuals.net/bin/view/Record
http://en.flossmanuals.net/bin/view/Terminal
http://en.flossmanuals.net/bin/view/Write
To contribute you must register and then select a manual and a chapter
to work on. if it is not marked ‘complete’ then press the edit button!
Its as simple as that.
Contributions can include cleaning up layout, spell checking, adding
images, proof reading, or taking responsibility for writing one of more
chapters. You don’t have to be a technical writer or a super geek, you
just need to know how to write.
If you need to ask us questions about how to contribute then join the
chat room listed above and ask us! We look forward to your contribution!
For more information on using FLOSS Manuals you may also wish to read
our manual :
http://en.flossmanuals.net/FLOSSManuals
3. Chat
Its a good idea to talk with us so we can help co-ordinate all
contributions. We have a chat room for this using Internet Relay Chat
(IRC). If you know how to use IRC you can connect to the following :
server : irc.freenode.net
channel : #olpc-content
If you do not know how to use IRC then visit the following web based
chat software in your browser :
http://irc.flossmanuals.net/
Information on how to use this web based chat software is here :
http://en.flossmanuals.net/FLOSSManuals/IRC
Stories from SXSWi 2008 - BarCamp Austin III (BarCampAustin3)
Steve Carl already wrote up his notes from BarCamp Austin and I enjoyed his viewpoint very much. This was only my second BarCamp experience, and this year, I decided to take the plunge and actually volunteer to present. Whurley was very encouraging despite my inexperienced questions. “What’s a badge that you wear vs. a badge for your blog?” for example. There are graphics for each, as it turns out. The graphics are completely awesome, and the t-shirts were great, arriving despite an actual train derailment preventing the first shipment from arriving on time.
For those not familiar with the BarCamp format, it’s an unconference where you show up in the morning and put your session into one of the time slots on a white board or on a post-it note. The wiki also had sign-up schedules but the hand-written timeslots at the event win over the wiki page.
The week before BarCamp, I went to the wiki’s Sessions page, clicked the Edit button, and wrote up a short description of a session called Hug the XO. I basically wanted to see if others could bring their XO laptops and I could show them the tricks I’ve learned recently, plus run the Sugar emulation on my Dell laptop.
Getting to Idea City
(photo by Chad Hanna from theotherpaper on flickr)
The morning of BarCamp, getting to BarCamp turned out to be more difficult than I had planned. I got downtown by 9:00, but couldn’t find the Silver Dillo to ride over to 6th and Lamar to GSD&M’s Idea City. So, I took a few touristy photos of Ester’s Follies and the row of SegCity’s Segways, turned around and went back to the Austin Convention Center. I attended a 10:00 SXSW Interactive session, Creating Findable Rich Media Content, and then went back to Sixth street seeking the ‘Dillo. I walked about five blocks until I was past Congress Avenue when I saw a Silver Dillo sign and a person waiting at the sign, then turned and looked up the street to see the trolley coming our way. I double-checked with the woman waiting to make sure there wasn’t a charge since I was silly enough to have not gotten cash out, and sure enough, it’s a free ride. I boarded the Dillo and was on my way.
Getting into BarCamp
Idea City itself is an incredible workplace, full of creative vibes and a wonderful open design with full windows in front. Steve Carl greeted me, I registered with a cool registration application that Twittered my arrival to @barcampaustin (very cool), I had my picture taken for the flickr photo stream, and Steve and I proceeded to the schedule board to see where I could fit in my pres. I really felt more like doing a demo than a full-fledged presentation, so I was happy to see that the demo room had a free half-hour slot at noon. I drew little XO icons on a post-it, titled it “Hug the XO” and headed upstairs to figure out the room layout. On the way up, I saw my old BMC buddy Cote, and ran into Decibel, a good friend of my husband’s, and also met Snax finally, having friends of friends of hers.
Hugging the XO
In the demo room, I hooked up my laptop and ran the Sugar emulation image downloaded from the RedHat Site by using QEMU. In emulation the Activities run pretty quickly, and it’s very easy to display on a large screen. There’s discussions surrounding a projection display for the XO itself, but it’s easiest to emulate for me.
I showed Turtle Art which is really exciting to programmers. People expressed an interest in showing the XOs at Codemash because there’s a grassroots Kidsmash that happens in parallel, so I’ll definitely be following up with Josh on that idea.
I also learned some neat tricks to get deeper into the XO. One way to view the files on the flash memory without using a command line is to launch the Browse Activity and type file:///home/olpc/ as the URL. Now that is a handy shortcut.
I also learned that you can transfer files to and from the XO by using scp from the Terminal Activity by reading the XO setup user guide at OLPC Austria. First, get the IP address by typing iwconfig at the prompt. Then, you can use these instructions:
To upload the file test.py from a pc to the xo (into /home/olpc), use: scp FILE_NAME USER@IP:TO_DIRECTORY
scp test.py olpc@192.168.0.2:/home/olpc
To download the file /home/olpc/xo_test.py from the xo to a local pc, simply reverse the arguments:
scp olpc@192.168.0.2:/home/olpc/xo_test.py ./
We finally got the Acoustic Tape Measure Activity working correctly, and I’ve updated the instructions on Floss Manuals appropriately. Test your task instructions, I always say! Fortunately, this was a fun one to test. We had to have the laptops beep at each other at least 4-5 times before the measurements came into a reasonable range, starting out at nearly 200 meters, and eventually settling on just over 3 meters. Success! The noise they make to each other almost sounds like they’re spitting at each other. Kids will love this activity with a pair of laptops.
People really enjoyed the Speak Activity and we laughed to discover you could give it multiple eyes.
I think we had at least a dozen people stop by the demo room, and after the demo session was over, we set up two of them near the lunch pickup line. Steve was nice enough to “babysit” the XOs while I went back to some afternoon SXSWi sessions, and he said he thinks at least 100 people got to see and try out the XOs for themselves. We downloaded Flipsticks, played some Tam Tam Jam, showed off the Browse Activity, surfing to any URL we needed to, and generally had a great time. We met other XO owners and I told them about the XO-Austin users group, and told everyone they could meet us at Las Manitas on Sunday for an XO meetup. I’ll write another story about my lunch meeting with SJ Klein from OLPC, Robert Nagle, the XO-Houston user’s group organizer, and Melissa Hagemann from the Open Society Institute (OSI). We had a great time together.
Summing it up
This experience was such a great opportunity for me to talk to people about things I believe in (kids, technology, and education) while having fun being a technical writer. I was intimidated initially because I’m not a programmer, and so I wondered if I’d be questioned for even volunteering to present, but I realized that no matter how technical I was, I would be less technical than someone in the room and more technical than someone else in the room. So, the correct action to take is to share the knowledge you have and listen to others to learn more about the topics that interest you.
My only regret from BarCamp is not staying longer for Dawn Foster’s talk about Community Management. I had asked my husband to meet me at the Convention Center with my two sons so we could go to Screenburn together, but after seeing how intimidated my four-year-old would have been by the shoot-em-up video games there, I cancelled on them and wished I had stayed at BarCamp longer. I’ll just have to settle for reading Dawn’s notes about her BarCamp experience instead.
Taking the One Laptop Per Child XO laptop to the preschool classroom
What can you teach with the XO laptop? I’m still pondering that question for US-based classrooms. I’m reading the news from Birmingham Alabama and the blog entries from Dallas-Fort Worth Texas school systems with interest. Apparently you can buy a certain minimum of XO laptops if your school district or other group wants to incorporate them into their learning activities. Sign up at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Laptop_requests. With some grassroots fundraising efforts, a large-scale purchase of XO laptops seems attainable, perhaps even for Austin ISD.
Last week’s post with a picture of my four-year-old using the XO at our dining room table generated a response that a picture shows it all. I’d say that these pictures capture even more of the spirit of the OLPC project, showing a preschool teacher and two students have a blast with them, taking pictures of themselves, each other, and even taking pictures of the others’ XO.
I’ll also attest to the durability and sturdiness of these laptops. My son was walking quite quickly in the classroom with it (okay, maybe even running, but it’s not like he runs with scissors!) and tripped and fell with it. He was unhurt, these kids bounce back unbelievably from falls, and I was equally impressed with the complete durability that the XO displayed even when it probably took a bounce on the carpeted classroom floor.
So, what am I teaching with the XO?
My first session with the kids focused mostly on TamTamMini and Turtle Art, both auditory and visually appealing. These are four-year-olds, so they’re a little young for the target age for these laptops. The target age is about 6-12 years old. But, they figured out the touchpad quickly (and some, like my son, want the touchpad to allow for a mouseclick event when tapped like my Dell laptop responds, but not so with the XO touchpad.)
The kids also crowd around the screen and want to touch everything, which is fine, until I want to do the Turtle Art demonstration which involves clicking Project, and then clicking the icon for Samples and then waiting and then opening a sample file. But they were rewarded for their hands-off stand-off with bubbles and rainbow colors.
In Turtle Art, I thought I’d always have to open the Blocks menu and drag the “clean “puzzle piece out, then click it to get the full starting effect. However, I just discovered that many of the samples have the clean block out already, it’s just hidden behind the menu. I finally figured out to click the hide, erase, or stop buttons to have the turtle stop mid-way through his task. The kids liked the Turtle Art demonstration as well and asked for more. I must admit, I didn’t feel like I was teaching them anything, but these are four-year-olds. With repetition and some more ideas we could build several learning opportunities around that Activity, I believe. I just got a great PDF file showing how to make the turtle draw letters, and I intend to use this demonstration for my next visit.
The next session I attempted to get the Acoustic Tape Measure Activity to work, but it failed miserably. I think it’s because I didn’t go to the Group view and Invite the other XO to the Activity. We’ll try again another day, after I’ve done some more testing.
I also introduced the Record Activity and this was a huge hit for photos. I didn’t show them how to record audio or video, thinking I’d save that for another day. The pictures it takes are 640 x 480, and quite nice with natural lighting. See examples at the XO Photos group on flickr. In a future update of the XO, EXIF data will be available on the photos taken with the XO, and Flickr can then identify the source of the photo as an XO. I’ll have to upload some of the photos the kids took.
One kid even took a picture of his behind with it, reaching way back to push the O button on the game keypad (a nice shortcut way to take pictures with the Record Activity so that you don’t have to use the touchpad and X button click!) His teacher and I laughed so hard at his ingenuity and problem-solving - just to get a picture of his bottom.
Who else has taken their XO into a classroom setting, and what are you learning and teaching with the XO? I’d love to hear more, and I’ll be at SXSW Interactive and BarCamp Austin as well so please do say hi if you see me there.
Ebooks showdown Kindle vs. XO laptop from OLPC
I’m learning more about ebooks thanks to some recent inquiries related to my work for One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) to collaborate on the kid’s user guide. I’ve been so busy with that I’ve barely had time to blog. I’m learning so much it’ll add to the blog entries later.
But I have been noodling on the fact that Amazon’s Kindle and the OLPC XO are at the exact same price - $400 - and that the XO can be used as an ebook reader (PDFs preferred.)
I’m going to try to do a comparison here, but please realize I’m no ebook reader expert nor have I owned one in the past. So I really have no business writing this at all other than my innate curiousity and love of researching and then presenting information.
On to the interesting comparison - let’s look at other parameters, and feel free to suggest your own. Like I say, I have no business writing an ebook comparison so do pitch in where you see fit.
Amazon’s Kindle ebook reader versus the One Laptop Per Child XO in ebook mode
| Comparison item | Kindle | XO |
| Dimensions |  7.5″ x 5.3″ x 0.7″, weighs 10.3 ounces |
 9.5″ x 9.0″ x 1.25″, weighs about 3 pounds |
| Price | $400, free shipping | $400, about $25 shipping, $200 is a tax-deductible donation, so slight discount depending on your US tax bracket, I suppose |
| Content | DRM content, can’t read PDFs unless you have a Windows PC and convert them first. | Mostly PDF, but plans for more format support. With the built-in browser (Browse Activity), many reading materials are available such as Project Gutenberg. |
| Usability | Robert Scoble has a harsh usability review of the Kindle. | Robert Nagle I hope will review it in the future, but he has a great review of the possibilities as an ebook reader for kids. And I like the review written by a 12 year old. |
| Battery | 30 hours | 4-5 hours |
| Wireless connectivity | Uses a wireless cellular network it calls Whispernet to deliver your Kindle content. It’s EVDO. | Uses 802.11b and comes with a free one-year subscription to T-Mobile wireless service. |
| Screen | monochrome: 600 x 800 pixels (167 dots per inch) | monochrome: 1200 x 900 pixels (200 dots per inch), color: 1024×768 perceived (it’s complicated, see the hardware specs PDF.) |
| Warranty | one year | 30 days |
Gizmodo already put the Kindle up against the Sony Reader in this online poll. I realize that the OLPC XO is intended to be a kids laptop, and it’s not really fair to pit it against the Kindle because that’s not the design of the device (nor the intentions of the project behind the device.) But your $400 might be well spent here.
By the way, I read about expected XO delivery information from the new XO User’s Facebook Group 50 members and growing. If you order now, you’ll get your laptop arund the same time as a child in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Haiti, Mongolia or Rwanda - in early 2008. See Shipping information on laptop.org.
