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Meet the $100 Laptop

During the second plenary session at the AIS conference today, I was looking forward to hearing Pia Waugh speak. Pia is co-owner of Waugh Partners, vice-president of Linux Australia, and a huge advocate for both Linux and the Open Source Software movement generally. I met Pia last month at the CSTA meeting where we were both speaking, and I had a great chat to her over dinner about all sorts of things that any normal person would probably consider geeky in the extreme. Pia is a super smart lady and very passionate about the whole Open Source movement, so I really enjoyed talking with her that night.

When I saw her in the auditorium today before her session I went to say hi, and was pretty surprised to see her holding a little green and white plastic device in her hands… after the initial g’days were exchanged, I said “Is that what I think it is?” She gave me a big grin, and said “yep!”

Pia had managed to get herself one of the “$100 laptops” that MIT has been working on. For those that don’t know, the “$100 laptop”, or more correctly known as the One Laptop Per Child project, is an initiative started a few years ago by Nicholas Negroponte from the MIT’s Media Lab, with an aim to get computers into the hands of Third World children. By employing clever, simple design and open technologies Negroponte’s dream is starting to come true, with the first shipments of OLPC laptops being delivered this year. They are not quite down to $100 each yet, but are getting closer… Pia said they are being produced for about $170 at the moment.

I was fascinated to be able to have a look at this little device. It’s got a very “Fischer Price” feel to it, with shiny green and white plastic, funny little wireless antennas that stick up, and a cute little keyboard and screen. But underlying the toyish look is some sophisticated – and open – technology. It runs Redhat Linux as the operating system, and comes with an innovative user interface called Sugar. Sugar does not try to model itself on the more traditional WIMP-style UI such as that found in Windows-style interfaces, but instead was designed to answer the question “What would a user interface look like for a child who has never seen a computer before?” It’s cute, very different, and very intuitive. I had a little play, but had to hand it back all too soon so Pia could deliver her presentation.

During lunch however, I spotted Pia again and she let me take the OLPC for an extended play. I wandered over to Bryn Jones’ table and the two of us had a chance to check it out a bit further. I was pretty impressed to be able to get so much hands-on with it, as these things are still very hard to come by unless you are a child in one of the targeted countries. Pretty much the entire production run is going to the kids, and the only reason Pia had one was because she helped do some development work for it. I felt pretty lucky to be able to see and use one, as I don’t imagine too many other people have had the chance.

With built in wifi, mesh networking, longlife battery, tablet or laptop mode, built-in speakers and microphone, USB ports, SD slot, flash-based storage drive, wireless web access, music composition software, notetaking software, and a bunch of other built in apps, it really is a very interesting piece of hardware! Thanks for sharing Pia!

PS. Look forward to hearing Pia as a special guest on the Virtual Staffroom very soon.

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The public (and private) face of Edublogs

I spent the day today at the NSW ICT Integration conference in Sydney, run by the NSW Association of Independent Schools.  The conference is an annual event for those teachers in the NSW independent school sector who carry the responsibility for assisting their colleagues integrate ICT into their work. There were workshops in all sorts of fairly hands-on topics, from wikis and blogs, to Moodle, to graphics tablets, maths and literacy startegies, and so on. It generally seems to be more of a practical how-to conference than a big-picture strategic thinking event.

James Farmer and myselfThe keynote address this morning was delivered by James Farmer, owner of Edublogs.org. I interviewed James a few weeks ago for Virtual Staffroom, so when I found we were both going to be at the same event I was keen to meet in real life. James’ keynote was really interesting, and focussed on the use of blogging as a form of macro-LMS, and he showed lots of examples of how teachers had been using Edublogs with their students. His talk was really looking at how RSS and all the widgets in Edublogs can suck in data and feeds from many different sources and aggregate them into one place, making a blog a more of a personal digital hub. I was surprised just how much overlap there was between his talk and what I was trying to allude to in this previous post.

On the way out of the auditorium I mentioned to James that I’d see him in one of his workshops later. He looked at me oddly and said that I was probably beyond the level where I’d get a lot out of his session, since it aimed more at how to get started with Edublogs. Since I probably already knew most of of that, I decided to go to a couple of sessions on Moodle and Wacom Tablets instead, which were actually quite useful.

After lunch I was walking past one of the exhibitors’ tables and James was sitting there with his laptop, and we got chatting. “Want to see how Edublogs works?” he asked. You bet! So for the next hour or so, James gave me a personal guided tour of the backend of Edublogs, showing me the server and site statistics, graphs of server performance, and all sorts of other nerdy but extremely cool stuff. He shared a little about how the data was structured and showed me some useful software tools he uses to manage the service. Edublogs has over 100,000 users now, so it was really interesting to see it from the backend. I also got a few sneak peeks into some coming features for Edublogs… I’m not sure how much of that I should share here but it seems to me that Edublogs is certainly the best place to host an educational blog these days and it will only get even better!

As I sat there chatting to James, I was having a flashback to Dave Warlick’s keynote session from the 2006 K12 Online Conference where he talked about derailing education and about getting “off the rails” to take side trips of value. I certainly felt the value of those side trips today, as I skipped the session I was supposed to be attending so I could spend time learning about something I found far more interesting.

Thanks James for sharing your time with me, and giving me a little peek into Edublogs… It was fascinating. Oh, and thanks for answering all my dumb questions too! 🙂

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Trying to break Skype

chatskype.pngIt’s cool to see just how our networks of connectivity are letting us find each other so easily and spontaneously, and the conversations that are evolving out of those connections.

While checking my mail tonight, my Twitter goes off. It seems that Jeff Utecht in China is hosting a chat session using something called Wiziq. A number of Twitterers are talking about it. I’m intruiged, but I didn’t have Jeff on my Twitter list so I carry on with what I was doing. More conversation tweets out about this session, and I’m following along vicariously through everyone else’s Twitters. Pretty soon I see another tweet from Kim Cofino (from Bangkok, Thailand) talking about how she’s chatting with Graham Wegner (from Adelaide, Australia) and Chrissy Hellier (from Napier, New Zealand). By this stage, I feel like the party is going on without me, so I decide to have a guess at Kim’s Skype name and do some gatecrashing. 😉

Next thing I’m in a text chat with Graham, Kim, Chrissy and Susan Sedro (Singapore). I suggest we try going to voicecall, and there is some concern over how well that will work. I suggest that we won’t know till we try it… “use it till it breaks”, I suggest.

So we move to voice on Skype, and it’s all good. Poor Graham got shafted as his computer didn’t have a microphone, so he follows along on text chat for a while. Hmm, we start to wonder how many people we can get in here before we break it? Only one way to find out…

I spot Allanah King (Nelson, New Zealand) online and drag her in to the chat (When I say I dragged her in, I don’t mean that she was unwilling at all… on a Mac you literally drag someone’s icon into the chat window to add them to the call) So now we have five.

It’s early morning in east coast USA by this time, and my friend Janet Barnstable (Oak Park, Illinois) pops up on Skype… drag her in too. Carolyn Foote (Austin, Texas) comes online, so in to the chat she goes. Sharon Peters (Montreal, Quebec) appears, and so we drag her in too. This is fun!

We still haven’t broken it, and apart from a bit of background noise and a couple of scratchy bits, Skype is holding up remarkably well. We need more!

Lisa Durff (Maryland) and Robin Ellis (Pennsylvania) appeared online and also got dragged in, although not at the same time, so the most we had online at any given moment was nine.

This was tons of fun… just being able to spontaneously pull a chat together like this is very cool. We had 10 people, from 6 countries and 5 timezones, all chatting away together. As the only male in the group I feel like we maybe need to balance the numbers up a little next time… I tried to drag Jason Hando (Sydney, Australia) in the call, but he must have been away from his computer at the time.

Thanks everyone for jumping in to the call and sharing like that. It was nice to connect some voices with some of the names I recognised. We must do it again some time.