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Posts Tagged ‘XO laptop’
BookSprint for Floss Manuals writing for the XO and Sugar
I’ve been busy lately working on plans for a Floss Manuals BookSprint. A BookSprint is a week-long concentrated effort of technical writers getting together to create a manual for free, libre open source software products. BookSprints are like a workshop where writers come together to learn how to write good user documentation. BookSprints are also a social experience where writers come together to form a community who share common goals and experiences.
Writers are giving a week’s time to be curators of information housed in wikis and websites everywhere, bringing it all together into the FLOSS Manual TWiki implementation to be ready for online viewing or gorgeous print output. If you’re interested in joining us for a day or all week, we’d love to have you. We’re planning to invite local students to the event also.
This picture shows the recent Inkscape BookSprint held in Paris France. We’re planning to hold the XO/Sugar BookSprint here in Austin, but I’m guessing the collection of laptops and cables will be the same here as there!
Inkscape BookSprint in Paris
In this case, we’ll produce a comprehensive manual for the kids, families, and teachers using the little green XO laptop. While the manual that exists at flossmanuals.net/olpc_simple is a targeted effort, it is outdated for the new line drawn between hardware (XO) and operating system (Sugar). Our hope is to expand the manual in advance of the new expanded Give 1 Get 1 program will give educators and children a chance to learn about their laptop, repair it, program with it, and teach others.
What can you do to help? Right now, I’m raising money and asking for in-kind donations to help with this concentrated effort. Here are some ideas, although you can come up with creative ideas yourself if you want!
$500 would provide hotel accommodations for a writer
$250 would provide a catered lunch for all the writers
$100 would provide gas money for many writers all week
Updated to add: You can also directly give donations at http://en.flossmanuals.net/donate.
Sponsorship earns not only good “whuffie” but we’ll list your name or business name on these websites: FLOSS Manuals, JustWriteClick, Sugar Labs, and OLPC.
An exciting aspect of this BookSprint is the international effort behind it. Adam Hyde, founder of Floss Manuals, is planning to make the trek to Austin from Amsterdam, and there’s a French Floss Manuals coordinator working behind the scenes to ensure that the document can be translated to French. I’m also working with Yama Ploskonka, admin of the OLPC-Sur list of Spanish-speaking OLPC supporters to find Spanish language translators.
All in all, this is a very exciting effort and I’d love to get readers of JustWriteClick involved in any way you’d like. I’m very excited to be part of this effort and pleased to play host - let’s gather some more community around the BookSprint to make it a success.
Stories from SXSWi 2008 - Textbooks of the Future: Free & Collaborative
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.
Yes, wikibooks are now possible. Pedia press had been doing high quality book output for a while, now partnering with Wikimedia Foundation.
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.
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.
How to download and copy epub files using the XO laptop
Bob DuCharme recently converted 16 children’s books from the Project Gutenberg archive into .epub format for use with FBReader on the XO laptop. Thanks Bob!
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.
Tips:
- FBReader must be installed on the XO. It’s a simple process. Go to the Terminal Activity and type:
su -c ‘rpm -i http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora/updates/7/i386/fbreader-0.8.8-2.fc7.i386.rpm’ - 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.
Happy turkey day - but let’s talk wiki, not turkey
Happy thanksgiving everyone! I have much to be grateful for. Here’s me with my son, both of us stuffed full of turkey.
Deadline extended… multiple meaning
I just learned that the Give 1 Get 1 program to purchase two XO laptops has been extended through December 31st. Hurrah!
I’ll admit it - my first thought was, good, I can delay that $400 escaping my bank account until after the holidays. But my second thought was, “Say, we can work more on the simplified user guide to get a nice PDF and even more language translations!”
Wiki writing workflow
I said I’d try to describe the workflow of wiki to Author-it. It’s pretty feeble and I really want better ideas so feel free to offer up your thoughts here.
Some history on the legacy. The file started out as a Google Document, which basically meant it had nice clean HTML code underneath and could be written on collaboratively and shared discerningly. The links to the wiki URLs were actual URLs rather than the wikitext linking code. The text contained a bit of passive voice and was more descriptive than task oriented.
Always start with task analysis
Once I read it, I did some task analysis, which is available in this published Google spreadsheet. I broke down the tasks based on whether the user was a kid, a parent, or a teacher using the XO. Then Emily Kaplan and I started re-writing the sections and adding section (or topics) based on the task analysis. First we tried writing each topic as an unpublished WordPress blog entry, thinking that we could eventually get translations done using the Worldwide Lexicon open source initiative. An interesting concept, perhaps well-matched to the spirit of the OLPC project, but we learned that maintaining a Table of Contents would be difficult, and also found that the Laptop.org folks like SJ Klein really wanted the wiki at wiki.laptop.org to be the source for all content.
Wiki as source
I completely agree with this wiki-centric approach and we have adapted. All the Wordpress entries (there were less than eight of them) went into the Google doc, and then Todd Kelsey “wikified” the Google doc by saving it as Word, then using a visual basic script to convert to wikitext. We lost all the graphics placement but were able to get a wiki page going with the Google doc.
Word to Author-it…
During the same week’s time, I had taken the Word document saved from the Google document and imported it into Author-it in the instance donated by Author-it (thanks so much) on a server donated by Hostway (again, thanks) and that import worked really well with graphics and links and pretty much everything intact.
Wiki to Author-it… and back again
But this is where the wiki as source becomes difficult, right? Any changes that are made to the wiki must come over to Author-it, and that’s a manual and “think-tual” process. And I’m behind and should stop writing this blog post and go work on synching and writing more topics based on the task analysis.
Localization
As far as translations go, there were several translations done of the document when it was still in Google docs. Interestingly, many of the translators wanted Word documents to work in. Again, though, with wiki as source, I have linked to the translated files in hopes that others will pick up and wiki-fy the translations. One area I’m still learning about is whether the wiki engine has tools for the editors of translated pages to keep up with changes made to the English version and vice versa (if changes were made to the Spanish version of the wiki page, how could we incorporate those into the English version of the wiki page?)
Wikitext, wikitalk
I’m learning so much more about wikis (especially wikimedia) from this hands-on experience - such as “signing” notes with ~~~~ to get your username and a time date stamp automatically, and using “talk” pages to communicate with others on the wiki by posting notes for another user.
XO User Club in Austin
I’m also committed to starting an Austin-based XO User Club, following Robert Nagel’s lead with his excellent blog post and article in OLPC News. Let me know your thoughts here - I would like to see if we could meet at one of the Austin public libraries, probably on one Saturday a month (although we’ll be competing with soccer and other Saturday activities). We might have to play it fast and loose for a while and see what type of core group we gather. There’s a User Groups wiki page at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XO_Giving/Users and it’s great to see where the groups are cropping up.
How to help
If you’re interested in writing more of the user guide for the laptop, all are welcome to contribute to the wiki page at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Simplified_user_guide. Use the task analysis as your starting point if you want to start a new topic. I’m also seeking a page layout person with Word expertise to get a nice square manual that Lulu.com could easily print. Graphics to explain procedures, especially using the Activities, are always welcome over text. Join the OLPC Library mailing list where we discuss documentation and e-books for the XO.
Also, consider using the give one get one program to give the “get one” to some deserving kid in Austin, especially now that the GIG1 offer is extended. I’d buy ten of them if I could, to start the XO kids club with no “entry fee.”
Also, join us at the XO club meetings, with or without an XO, if you’d like to bring your Linux or Windows laptop and emulate Sugar, the XO’s operating system. EToys and TamTam experts are welcome.
Community support - don’t think of yourself as a customer but as a member of a movement
I’ve signed up for the Give 1 Get 1 program for One Laptop Per Child, and just received the email today, November 12, 2007, with the link to the site, www.laptopgiving.org.
I read the terms and conditions with interest because I am seriously considering purchasing a laptop either for my son, who is four, or for his classroom of four-year-olds. Plus, I’ve been volunteering to help with their end-user documentation.
I’d love to buy one for every classroom at my son’s preschool but that’ll take some fundraising. I’ll boldly propose here that you can contact me if you’re interested in buying enough for a small preschool in Austin, Texas in addition to kids in least developed countries around the world.
I absolutely LOVE the spirit of the support statement. It reads as follows:
Neither OLPC Foundation nor One Laptop per Child, Inc. has service facilities, a help desk or maintenance personnel in the United States or Canada. Although we believe you will love your XO laptop, you should understand that it is not a commercially available product and, if you want help using it, you will have to seek it from friends, family, and bloggers. One goal of the G1G1 initiative is to create an informal network of XO laptop users in the developed world, who will provide feedback about the utility of the XO laptop as an educational tool for children, participate in the worldwide effort to create open-source educational applications for the XO laptop, and serve as a resource for those in the developing world who seek to optimize the value of the XO laptop as an educational tool. A fee based tech support service will be available to all who desire it. We urge participants in the G1G1 initiative to think of themselves as members of an international educational movement rather than as “customers.”
I’ve been working on documentation for the XO laptop in the wiki at wiki.laptop.org/go/Simplified_user_guide and then taking the wiki content over to an Author-it instance. I’ll write more later about a wiki-based workflow, especially with translation in mind, and we are putting a process in place. Please, feel free to edit that page or contact me if you are interested in contributing.
Personally, the most difficult part so far has been my limited ability with design and layout. I have grand visions but feel my layout skills are inadequate for a kid- and parent-friendly look within Word. Nonetheless, it is an exciting time to be a small part of such an influential project.
I’m one of the friends, family, and bloggers who is willing to help with the XO laptop. So I urge you to go to www.laptopgiving.org and put your U$399 to good use.
