An interesting read on the front page of wordpress.com of all places. I enjoy random clicking, and this one came up with a great commentary on the difficulty of using a wiki to get how to information.
Over at SL, the main source of information is on the WIKI, which in my opinion has some great information but because Linden primarily lets the users run the show isn’t as helpful as some sort of information clearing house. Trying to sort out how to sculpt, for example, is an exercise in total frustration. There are some wonderful tutorials, but SL does nothing to properly aggregate and put these tutorials into context.
I wonder what Second Life could do to properly aggregate those tutorials to meet this user’s needs? I suppose long-time wiki writers would answer: use categories and encourage tagging, while looking out for orphans. Any other ideas?
I got a great question from Tom Johnson of I’d Rather Be Writing:
I’m just wondering if you have any thoughts on the WordPress Codex, http://codex.wordpress.org/Main_Page. Yesterday I was looking at this Codex wondering what to make of it all. I think I want to be a contributor, but there are so many topics. It’s chaotic. The organization is like a maize. I don’t know if I should go in there with a wrecking ball and rennovate, or not. Probably 25% of it is outdated. What happens to those outdated pages? Will I offend people if I just delete things that are outdated?
Can you recommend a book or strategy for making sense of massive wikis? Where should I start? I spent a good hour editing a page of it last night that I considered critical. It’s then that I realized this is a huge project and I have no sense of direction. Any insight you can give me would be much appreciated.
With the OLPC wiki, David Farning on the Library list went through the wiki and said he found these categories. It’s quite an accurate content analysis from what I’ve seen, so I was impressed. At the same time, it also helped explain my initial wonderment at how to wrap my arms around the entire wiki - and in fact, it is barely possible to do.
Once David came up with these categories, he then asked SJ Klein, director of community content and long-time Wikipedian, if he thought the wiki needed structure.
SJ said that the wiki is purposefully without hierarchy - flat, especially for projects, to not force a parent or sibling sense for projects. He also said, however, if you have a specific tree hierarchy in mind, feel free to develop the idea in some temporary space.
So, when working on a large wiki if you have good organization ideas, set them up, and then ask for community feedback. Seems like an appropriate approach to a large wiki.
Other ideas for starting out in a large wiki environment:
While it might seem like it’s a question similar to “how do I get started on a huge writing project?” in my experience, wiki editing has some subtleties due to the collaboration and community vibe already present behind the pages. You have to work harder to figure out that vibe, and then determine your course.
For new people, there’s the whole question of getting a feel for the community so you can start to answer “who am I going to potentially irritate by editing this” and “as a newbie do I have the confidence I’m right?”
So, knowing your role within the wiki community is a first step. You might take a while to get to know who’s there, what their roles are as well, and where you might best fit in. Introduce yourself with your profile page, following the WikiPattern, MySpace - see http://www.wikipatterns.com/display/wikipatterns/MySpace.
Just like a newbie on a writing team, find out if there’s some scut work that you can do to get your feet wet, if needed, to gain the community’s trust.
Deletions are going to bring much more wrath in a wiki situation, I would guess, so they seem risky to do to start out. If you do think something needs deletion, message or email the original author or the big contributors and ask if it’s okay to mark it for deletion. Then, mark it, and hope that someone else (a wiki admin) determines if it should be deleted.
Start small, like tagging, or applying templates. That’ll help you get a feel for the bigger picture.
Let us know your ideas for wrapping your head around a large wiki, we’d love to hear them.
15% of people are from the northeast 15% of people left handed 15% of people in the world have no cell phone, or no Internet
And… less than 15% of computer science majors are female. [1]
This was the lead-in for the panelists and I liked the tie-ins of 15.
Since this session, I have talked to girls around the 12-15 year old range, and I completely agree with all the panelist’s observations about how girls don’t think they’re good at something, especially computers.
In this session I met Ashe Dryden and we talked about BarCamp Austin - she’s an organizer for BarCamp Milwaukee. I asked her to watch my laptop while I got a “pop” and offered to get her one too. I laughed when she asked upon my return, “Where are you from, if you say ‘pop!’” I have lived in Austin seven years, but haven’t let go of my Midwestern roots (Indiana and Ohio), where we say pop for all kinds of soda, pop, soda pop, Coke, and fizzy drink.
After the session I spoke to Clare Richardson of GirlStart about how the Austin XO user group would like to help out with their projects. One that’s upcoming is the Take IT Global showcase, where they’re working on games for the OLPC project. It sounds like they have enough XOs for their upcoming event, April 26th, which I plan to attend. They’re going to show off the educational game projects that the girls in the GirlStart program have been programming. They’re using a wiki to keep notes, collaborate, do project planning, all for the work they’re doing on their games. It’s great fun to read the game ideas.
Here are my notes from the session.
Clare Richardson - GirlStart in Austin, TX
What class in middle school did you feel smart and confident in?
art, phys ed, math, computer lab?
TechBridge
Free afterschool programs and summer programs.
Role models are key, role model training. Great training document available on their website. I plan to read through it for ideas on taking the XO to classrooms.
Jay Moore MentorNet
Email connection with mentors, 10-15 minutes a week.
Abby Tittizer IBM Extreme Blue
Internship program, not specific to women, for college students.
Q: What are the common misconceptions about girls and technology and getting them interested?
A: Perception is boring and nerdy and you have to already be good at it. Girls have altruistic missions.
Girls don’t think they’re qualified to do something, but boys “just go for it.” girls think that an internship means they already need to know how to do it.
Suggestions:
Have girls sign up in pairs for a computer class.
Spend time with your kids teachers and guidance counselors to find out more about their science education, etc.
Boys tend to have an inflated sense of their own competence.
UT has a club that has a roadshow that goes out to TX high schools to help recruit.
They use pair programming in introductory classes.
Updated to add: There’s a great article in the NYTimes that I found through Anne Zelenka’s del.icio.us links called “Sorry, Boys, This is our Domain.” While girls might not be computer science majors, they are excellent bloggers and customizers of all sorts of web and social sites. Quote: “…a study published in December by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that among Web users ages 12 to 17, significantly more girls than boys blog (35 percent of girls compared with 20 percent of boys) and create or work on their own Web pages (32 percent of girls compared with 22 percent of boys).” Girls may have more patience and perseverance to stick to a site that requires content updates.
I have been talking to SJ Klein regularly via email and phone for my work on the wiki pages and kid’s user manual for the XO laptop for One Laptop Per Child, so I was excited to hear him speak and meet him in person. Also, directly afterwards I planned to go to lunch with SJ and with Robert Nagle, the technical writer (and self-named idiot programmer) in Houston who originated the idea of XO user groups across the states after the Give 1 Get 1 program completed.
I had tried my best to promote an XO meetup as a lunch after the Textbooks talk, even getting it listed on the entirely awesome sched.org, but when the four of us arrived at Las Manitas at about 10 after 1, we were the only ones with the “little computers,” as my son calls them. So we just waited our turn for seating, and got to know SJ and Melissa Hagemann, a program manager with the Open Society Initiative who was moderator for the panel. As it turned out, she and Robert had been in some of the same cities in south eastern Europe in the 90s. While speaking of books, Robert described hand-carrying two fifty-pound bags of books along dirt roads as a Peace Corp volunteer and for me it really brought home the fact that books - they are heavy. Much heavier than the two 3-pound XO laptops I had been “lugging” around the Austin Convention Center all day. The 3-pound OLPC library on the XO laptop probably contains hundreds of pounds of books, and you could add several hundred more pounds of books by putting in a small USB stick or SD card. Quite a revelation for me.
Here are my rough notes from the Textbooks of the Future: Free & Collaborative talk at SXSW Interactive 2008. I’ll link to the podcast of it when it’s available. (Updated to add the link, since now it is.)
For open source textbooks, take a look at cnx.org.
OLPC’s interest in open education materials is that it gives students and teachers ability to share and collaborate on materials. They’re in a unique position in some ways, though, because they’d like to target 15 languages for their materials.
Why are open textbooks possible now?
Convergence of technology and community
Also XML - lets you build lego blogs of reconfigurable, recombinable objects (sounds like DITA topics, doesn’t it?)
Online lets you go past books
Intellectual property now has new licensing - creative commons license
Development of quality control mechanisms, repository of content
Lens - gives you a filter, lets you see things through a lens, filtering which items which you think are valuable
National Instruments, Texas Instruments, checking the books, offering lenses
Print on demand options - if you can’t produce shiny books, you aren’t taken seriously in many parts of the world, and in some age groups, print is important. With just-in-time printing, books are assembled automatically, index generated automatically, print on demand only costs students $20 instead of $120.
The same thing will happen everywhere that knowledge is valuable.
Is there a role for publishers in the new learning environment? There can be conflicts even in branches of publishing. All major publishers he’s talked to know that a change has to happen. They’re investing/investigating.
What strategies are useful? “The Budapest Open Access Initiative: an international effort to make research articles in all academic fields freely available on the internet.” from http://www.soros.org/openaccess/index.shtml
Three dimensions -
people (blurring the lines of roles, in today’s society we have rigid lines of roles of teacher, or author)
networking, transmitters, guides
Q: Robert’s question as a representative from Teleread.org - people searching for tutorials or text books want “the best” - what’s the finished state?
A: People looking for most efficient and effective way to learn things. Those sites will rise to the top.
Q: Can you use a lens that is another company’s lens?
A: Next version, yes you can.
Q: What about “controversial” areas or areas that evolve year over year?
A: For CXN.org, they decided not to develop with a wiki model, allowing for a multiple entry model, such as causes for the civil war has multiple articles with author attribution. Lenses can then point towards most used, or most heavily peer reviewed, your choice.
Q: From instructional designer in corp. environment - she sees missing things such as visual representations or animations, what’s happening or needs to happen to bring in those valuable designers.
A: Inkscape - open source vector drawing application, access to others’ illustrations (svg, vector graphics standards) Also mentioned the payment for illustration contribution based on Phillip Greenspun’s donation to Wikimedia Foundation.
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.
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 projectiondisplay 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.
So many sessions that I want to attend, but at least sched.org lets me select more than one session at a time. Such an awesomely simple interface and login is so quick, just an email address and a password and you’re scheduling in no time.
I’ve also put an invite out on upcoming.org to anyone who wants to meet with other XO users to come to Las Manitas for a late Sunday lunch. Thanks tantek for the photo.
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.
We tackled this question and then some at the January Central Texas DITA User Group meeting. I’m a little tardy in writing up my notes and thoughts about the presentation but it went really well and I appreciate all the attendee’s participation as well. We had a high school teacher in the audience and I applaud him for wanting to learn more about DITA to pass that knowledge on to high school students.
I brought along my XO laptop since I was talking about my work with wiki.laptop.org and Floss Manuals and found some more Austin-based XO fans, so that was a great side benefit to me as well.
One of Ben’s answers to the question “What does DITA have to do with wiki?” is “Maybe nothing.” Love it!
Ben introduced another the triangle of choices - you have likely heard of “cheap/good/fast, pick two.” How about “knowledge/reuse/structure, pick one.”
I have to do some thinking about that one and his perception of the limitations and tradeoffs offered by those choices or priorities. Reuse and structure are particularly difficult to pair but also give you the most payoff. Structure and knowledge are another likely pair, but it could be difficult to find subject matter experts who are also able to organize their writing in a very structured manner, and finding writers who know DITA really well and also have specific content knowledge may also be difficult to obtain. His workaround for the difficulty you’d face while trying to come up with a structured wiki is a sluice box - where raw, unstructured data is the top input, some sort of raw wiki is the next filter, and the final tightest filter of all is a topic-oriented wiki.
My take on the question is that there are three potential hybrid DITA wiki combinations, and Chris Almond at this presentation introduced the fourth that I have seen, using DITA as an intermediate storage device, interestingly.
The three DITA-wiki combination concepts I’ve seen are:
Wikislices - using a DITA map to keep up with wiki “topic” (article) changes. Michael Priestly is working on this for the One Laptop Per Child Project (OLPC.)
DITA Storm – web-enabled DITA editor, but not very wiki-like. However, with just the addition of a History/Revision and Discussion tab, and an RSS feed, you could get some nice wiki features going with that product. Don Day had an interesting observation that sometimes when you add in too many wiki features on a web page you can hardly tell what’s content and where to edit it. I’d agree with that assessment.
DITA to wikitext XSLT transform- but no round trip, have writers determine what content goes back to DITA source. Lisa Dyer will describe this content flow in the February session.
The slides are available on slideshare.net. Here are the slides that Ben Allums, Ragan Haggard, and I used.
I’ve just walked through the scenario of downloading the epub files from Bob’s download page and copying them into the correct directory for FBReader to read them. Here are the instructions with screenshots taken directly from the XO. If you see inefficiencies, please let me know because my Linux is only good enough to make me very, very dangerous to files and folders.
Start up the Browse Activity on the XO.
Click in the address bar and press ctrl-A to select all the text, then type in snee.com/epubkidsbooks and press enter.
Scroll down to the book you want to download, and click the link. You’ll see a nice countdown while the file downloads.
Switch over to the Journal Activity, either by pressing the magnifying glass icon key or by going to the Home View and clicking the Journal icon at the bottom of the Home circle.
Insert an SD card or a USB stick into the XO. The Journal shows an icon in a bottom bar when you put in external storage media.
Locate the downloaded epub file, but don’t launch it (they launch as EToys projects, go figure.) Drag and drop the file to the SD or USB icon in the bottom bar.
Click the Home View key and start the Terminal Activity - you have to scroll right to see the Terminal launch icon.
Click in the Terminal window (otherwise you’ll be typing in the Terminal search box). Find the name of the external media, which is in the /media directory. For example, type: df
You’ll see the name of your SD card or USB stick in the row with /media/ before it. You need that name to copy the epub file from the external media to the correct location for FBReader to find the book file.
Change to the media directory where the epub file is stored and rename the file to something shorter. For example, type: cd /media/USBMEM
mv “File TheThreeBears.epub downloaded from_http___www.snee.com_ebooks_TheThreeBears.epub..zip” TheThreeBears.epub LittleBoPeep-ANurseryRhymePictureBook.epub
Copy the newly shortened-name file to the ~Books directory. For example, type: cp TheThreeBears.epub ~/Books
Launch FBReader by typing FBReader at the Terminal prompt.
If you don’t want to type a whole bunch of text on the little XO keyboard, eject the SD card or pull out the USB stick, and put it in a “regular-sized” computer, and then rename the file there.
Or, plug in a USB keyboard with normal size key layout to do all your typing in the Terminal Activity.
If your USB stick has a space in the name, you can’t use it with your XO. Put it into another computer and rename it without a space.
We got the two other XO buyers that I know of in Austin for lunch last week - buyers of the One Laptop Per Child computer, called the XO laptop. Whurley and Mikus and I met at Berryhill Baja Grill, where indeed, wireless access was present. My XO was able to connect, but for some reason Whurley’s did not. And Mikus had hacked his network configuration to use a USB-Ethernet adapter cable, so his wireless wasn’t working. We thought that Whurley’s machine would be able to “mesh” with mine to get a connection, but that wasn’t the case. Even in the Group View I couldn’t see the other XOs sitting right next to me. Pout.
Still, we got to compare colors (look at the variety!), try out the Distance Activity (it didn’t work, and it’s not acoustic, we are not fooled), and Meebo worked like a charm on my XO. So all in all, a fun time! I think one of the Linux Austin groups got their XOs together recently, and we’re going to try to get together again, so stay tuned. Rumor has it that 30 XOs were purchased in the Austin area, so hopefully we can get them together and see what we can do.
I’ll report more later this week when I show Turtle Art and Tam Tam Jam to the four-year-olds in my son’s preschool class. Wish me luck giving a demo to a bunch of four-year-olds!
Just wanted to give another update on the happenings in the end-user doc front from my neck of the woods. (Idioms sprinkled throughout!)
I got an HTML copy to SJ and a second copy with an Index and some customizations on the CSS. I tested it on an XO emulation and the Browse Activity does really well with the Index and search so I’m pleased with the results. http://www.mooseworld.org/olpc/index.htm
Here’s what it looks like when you view it on an XO in the Browse Activity (click on the image to see it full-sized).
I’ve written a letter of appreciation to Author-it for giving us the license and ability to do quick rearranging. It’s coming in handy.
Adam Hyde of FlossManuals.net and I met to talk about a migration path for the kids end-user doc content at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Simplified_user_guide. They’ve just finished a lot of translation work so that we can also have multiple language versions of the simple user guide on the FM site and translators could work in a side-by-side view which is nice. The next steps are for me to re-arrange the content in Author-it into an outline closer to the structure that FM uses (Introduction, Installing, Interface, Tutorials, Appendices). Once I get the new structure to the content, Adam and I and anyone else who wants to pitch in can do copy and paste of the HTML into the FM pages. Adam’s filling out the infrastructure on FM now here: http://en.flossmanuals.net/bin/view/OLPC_simple/WebHome
From Adam I learned that the formatting of the print versions out of the Floss Manuals wiki uses Scribus - http://www.scribus.net/. It’s an open source page layout and publishing tool.
Also, I have had a few people contact me this week to see how they can help so I’ve sent them the information about the different groups for the different user guides from the wiki.laptop.org/go/Manuals page. Here are the basics for how to help.
Sign up for an OLPC wiki account at wiki.laptop.org.
Download and install an emulator. (optional, but helpful) QEMU is an open source processor emulator that can emulate an entire PC, including its peripheral devices like the disk, display, network, and so on. You must download and install this package to emulate the XO laptop.
Feel free to edit or start a new page with a new audience in mind. Note that we are porting the kids manual to Flossmanuals.net so also become familiar with their structure.
I’ve also started an Educator’s Guide at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Educators_guide . I am way out of my league writing about constructivism and intervention guides (lesson plans) but I figure I have to start somewhere. I also want to link to as many additional reading materials about constructivism and how to teach with that learning theory in the forefront. There’s a nice post over at OLPC News that has great reading materials and ideas for accessories. I’ll also study the http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Educational_activity_ideas page as well.
I still have some edits that I need to do to the Simplified user guide wiki page, and I really want to re-write the interface instructions (or someone else could if they are feeling energetic.) I recently re-wrote the instructions for installing a new activity with screenshots from Update.1 for each. So I’m now able to run Update.1 in my emulation environment.
I’m also working with people who have worked on the artwork. There are some talented artists giving their time to the project.
The journey to Floss Manuals is going to be interesting for several reasons. One is, which wiki is source? Floss Manuals or wiki.laptop.org? Adam and I will likely have to get notifications on each wiki and attempt to keep them synced. I’m also trying to design for re-use because it’s easy to remix manuals in Floss Manuals. So there should be a way to use content from the simplifed user guide where kids are the audience for the teacher or instructor’s guide. The translation workflow in Floss Manuals lets the translator view both text side by side, which will be helpful I believe, but there’s no translation memory.
Another observation - my perception is that OLPC really wants the wiki.laptop.org to be the single place to get information. A recent status update encouraged the developers to make sure their Activity wiki pages are clean, neat, up-to-date, and accurate. However, there is a nice set of topics at laptop.org/start that the Give1Get1 participants are pointed to in the letter they receive when opening their XO laptop box. (Thanks to whurley for posting his xo unboxing photos on flickr.)
Since I think it is a good idea to have these separate pages, my perception is that there is definitely a limit to what the wiki can do for the general public (although I would qualify that statement by saying that most XO participants are not the general public.) The laptop.org/start pages are an excellent design and clearly written with an easy-to-use navigation system. I’d love to find out the page hits and find out if there’s any way to measure effectiveness of those pages versus the wiki pages (or the wiki as a whole).
So many sessions that I want to attend, but at least 
Anne is a senior technical writer at Advanced Solutions International. Read 
