VideoChat - OLPC Activity
I am working on a really interesting OLPC XO/XS trial (all to be revealed soon!) where the main lynchpin demonstration is the VideoChat activity. We are certainly looking at the educational benefits, the interesting impact on truancy, and opportunities for disadvantaged kids, etc. However, the VideoChat offers a great way to provide support to remote kids including speech therapy, behavioural therapy, counselling, health services and of course distance education. So we have been working hard to get the VideoChat activity working. It now works online, but not with an XS (unless you disable Squid and have no firewall), so more work to go.
Anyway, I temporarily uploaded the xo to my website knowing I wanted to have it hosted elsewhere fairly quickly. Luckily one of the wonderful Telepathy guys (hi Cassidy!) offered to host it, so it’s all good. Thing is, in the 3 days I was hosting the 8mb file, I had 534 downloads. Woohoo! That is a lot of bandwidth in a very short time 
I guess it is of interest to a lot of folk out there.
Check out VideoChat. It is very cool but it still needs a lot of work including some prettying up!
Anyway, this is a short one. I have several blogs to catch up on, so sorry everyone!
October 2nd, 2008 at 11:39 am
Hi P,
A group of us XO’s found TeamSpeak(free as in beer voice chat client/server) more than 6 months ago. It is lightweight on an XS and XO. We regularly have 4 to 6 folks from all across the US and Canada chatting on it and have used it as a way to listen-in-on OLPC-related meetings.
-Kev
October 3rd, 2008 at 1:40 pm
Great idea Kev, i’m adding that to the “Essentials” list.
October 5th, 2008 at 4:33 pm
*The above link is interesting where software is being used in England to monitory Young People’s stress levels when in geographical locations -
The results intended to inform town planning ! -
- With Pia’s ongoing commitment to innovation, education, and being such a great facilitator and communicator, I hope that the above and following links are of future cross-fertilisation.
Southern Cross University at Lismore has a history of research into learning for young people.
There is an early childhood course starting in 2009.
here’s a link that reflects SCU’s ongoing philosophy:
http://discover.scu.edu.au/2008/issue9/index.php/news/?id=278
October 6th, 2008 at 3:56 am
I can’t find the up-to-date videochat.xo Will it be made available someplace?
October 12th, 2008 at 3:48 pm
@alan I’m just doing a new blog post with link, and putting it on wiki.laptop.org so check pipka.org in about 5 minutes