what are we doing today, brain?

This is a really interesting read, and a great initiative for openness (software, standards, collaboration) in education!

We are on the cusp of a global revolution in teaching and learning. Educators worldwide are developing a vast pool of educational resources on the Internet, open and free for all to use. These educators are creating a world where each and every person on earth can access and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge. They are also planting the seeds of a new pedagogy where educators and learners create, shape and evolve knowledge together, deepening their skills and understanding as they go.

The Cape Town Open Education Declaration

Also I’m working on the ASK-OSS (Australian Service for Knowledge on Open Source Software) project again, helping with some newsletters, case studies and information services. Should be fun and the newsletter is quite useful.

A month or so ago I was invited by Newcastle LUG to give a talk at their monthly meeting, so on Monday night I gave two talks at the University of Newcastle. One focused on “Careers and making the world a better place with Open Source”, which was focused on students primarily and getting them excited about Open Source. The other was “The 40,000 foot view of Open Source in Australia and the world” which was mainly for the LUG, where I spoke about Software Freedom Day, openness, FOSS in Australia/globally and freedom.

It was a fantastic night and many thanks to both Kymberly Cox and Mark Wallis from LOGIN who invited me and arranged everything. Also thanks to the University of Newcastle who gave me a lovely new bright red University of Newcastle jacket, and to LOGIN who gave me a lovely bottle of wine I hope it helps get people a little more excited about FOSS and Software Freedom Day in Newcastle. I think events that helps energise LUGs are a good thing.

In late July I was very privileged to help roll out the world’s first 100% saturation of OLPC XOs to the country of Niue, in the Pacific near New Zealand. There are around 400 students, and every single one got a laptop! I was in charge of the server/wireless infrastructure, and the imaging of the laptops as well as technical training for the people there on the ground. I worked closely with Ian Thomson who coordinated it (from SPC) and Grisel Carriera, a education specialist from Australia. Grisel and I were volunteers for the project, and Ian/Grisel between them basically coordinated the teacher training.

I thought I’d write up a few notes about the project, although most of the details are on the OLPC Niue wiki page. Basically I spent a week setting up the (currently) fairly beta XS software on the server, setting up a WDS wireless network (to get network connectivity for the XOs throughout the entire two schools without an extensive wired LAN) and a few additions to the XS software such as Moodle (which will soon be integrated) and some great locally relevant education resources pulled together by David Leeming who is working with Ian in the Pacific OLPC deployments. I used the XO 703 image with about 30 applications including Speak, Cartoon Builder, Flipsticks, Colors, Scratch, Ruler, Stopwatch, Wikibrowse (v9 as v10 is all Spanish!) and Sudoku, as well as all the default applications in the activity pack. They worked really well!

Check out some photos below! One of the schools was a primary school, and one a high school, and I believe the primary school will gain the most benefit, but it will be an interesting experiment how the high school goes with them. Ultimately in Australia we will only be looking at primary schools, because they aren’t really made for high schools.

Useful references:

• OLPC Niue documentation
• Some Photos from OLPC Niue rollout
• Teacher training documentation
• Information about OLPC in broader Oceania

If anyone wants to volunteer for these kinds of projects specifically in the next month or two, please drop me an email at pia dot waugh at olpc dot org dot au with when you are available, your interests and skills, as Ian and David need more volunteers for Pacific based projects For people able to volunteer in the medium to long term, there will soon be a rego system available.

The world's oldest XO user (we think) She's 70yo

Grisel and Ian, holding up mountains!

Students using the XO

I have a lot of blogging to catch up on! In the last month I’ve been to Norway, the US and Niue on really cool projects and conferences, Software Freedom Day is only just over 4 weeks away, and I’ve had some awesome ideas I want to blog. All will happen in the next few days, but last night I went to another Girl Geek Dinner in Sydney, which was awesome. About 80 women who love technology, great cheese and chocolate, talks and networking. It was a really fun night, and a huge thank you to Damana who organises the events!

Some highlights:

• Fountain of Chocolate - now I’m not really a chocolate sort of girl, but when you throw strawberries in the mix, I’m totally there! Plus lovely cheeses, champagne and other nibblies made it really nice! Thanks Thoughtware!
• A talk on Agile programming, presented in Agile format, that left me a little confused. So Mary in about 45 seconds explained what they meant. Thanks Mary, you rock!
• Mary winning the sparkly girly Microsoft shirt in a competition where you sat down if you weren’t geeky enough. Her putting it on and the girl sitting next to me saying “I really wish I was more geeky, I LOVE Microsoft!”. I made the introduction figuring Mary probably would grow tired of it fairly quickly (seeing she is a Linuxchix gal) and the other girl told us that if she could sleep with any man (but her husband to be) it would be Bill Gates. Mary and I were a little stunned at that one The girl was very enthusiastic about big trends and also fangirls Google, so we had a very interesting and fun discussion after the fact, but I’m still a little stunned. I mean my picks would be Trent Reznor or Jet Li, but I guess it takes all sorts. Also, to be fair she was pretty nervous, and a really interesting person nonetheless
• Quote of the night, in reference to Ruby on Rails:
  Question: I’ve heard that Ruby on Rails doesn’t really scale when you starting getting thousands or tens of thousands of users?
  Answer: There are loads of large successful Ruby on Rails implementations. For example, Twitter!
  FAIL!

I’m looking forward to the next one, which will be at Tech Ed. That will be quite weird but hey I’ve been invited onto a panel about women in technology there, so it should be interesting