Posted on August 12th, 2008 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.
I encountered a man the other day, gray haired, dressed in light colors, stretched out in meditation, touching his toes. Two small white bags (tools?) were by his side. He was down between the train tracks at Kendall, and I considered his relaxed pose, envying his form.
I was with a friend; we were the first into the station, and all was quiet. It was almost 10pm. People began to filter in. I wondered at this minor feat of calm, at how he knew the timing of the trains. Had he just finished work on the tracks? I squatted opposite him, up on the platform, saying “Sometimes you really wish you had a camera–” I noticed he was holding tightly to the third rail.
An odd thing for a subway worker to do. And no uniform… “Talk to him!” I was already halfway to the teller’s station. There was noone there, the machine tellers dominant, but a T worker (yes, /that/ was a uniform) was walking out of a service door nearby. “There is a man down on the tracks — holding onto the rail”
He ran to the subway’s emergency phone. I started dialling 911. The meditator was meandering down the tracks into the tunnel, bags in hand, not rushed but with intent. Now there were dozens of people, all watching him, many idly. I stayed on the phone, offering voice updates and a description for a third time. After a minute, something made him return to the end of the other platform and climb up. He made it outside before the police filtered in; impressive as the police station was only 2 blocks away.
I hurried outside to see if he was still there — a small crew had surrounded him, with an ambulance close by. They talked for minutes. I headed back to my friend, and we caught the next train home…
Posted on July 2nd, 2008 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.
See the latest from an active Peruvian OLPC school in Ferreñafe. Peru is on course to become OLPC’s largest deployment, and is working through language issues in Spanish, Quechua and Aymara.
Posted on June 26th, 2008 by metasj.
Categories: Rogue content editor.
hi sj. i drew a cartoon for you. i’ll show it to you someday. it has you, broccoli, and a kewpie.
Posted on June 7th, 2008 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.
The OLPC community Week in Review is back. It’s currently just a slice of what is going on around the community — missing large facets from IRC channels, mailing lists, and wiki updates, code commits, and community media. Updates referencing any of these information channels are welcome. Please take a look and add any notes from the week to it.
Posted on June 2nd, 2008 by metasj.
Categories: Glory, glory, glory, international, poetic justice.
Chris Ball, a Mad bio-savvy artisan, and Wade Brainerd all spent part of the past two weeks getting a disk-conserving wikireader onto the XO that supports browsing and simple searching over a 100-fold compressed set of articles.
The result :
There is also a short blacklist of pages and images that need improvement which will change over time. A whitelist of unpopular but crucial pages will surely build up, and the process will find a way to learn from the subject-specific wikireader efforts to produce smaller uncompressed collections. The same idea and scripts can provide a roughly Britannica-sized collection for every major language; or a multilingual cover of the 200 smallest languages; expect an English one soon for comparison.
While this reader (which has to unzip each page as it is requested) is slower than browsing html, it is still a pleasure to use. The real lack, shared with other readers to date, is that comments and editing don’t yet work…
Posted on May 18th, 2008 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.
Some of the great projects that are currently underway in the OLPC world began with personal connections between an enthusiastic volunteer and a school or developer working directly with schools and teachers in a deployment region. A few that come to mind are the blogging project in Uruguay that Greg Smith has helped facilitate as well as his work with server development for Nepal’s school trials last month; and the Spanish-language educators list (olpc-sur@lists.laptop.org) that Yama Ploskonka has recently gotten off to a very active start.
As part of an ongoing effort to increase direct connections between the communities and schools interested in and implementing OLPC, we are holding a long week of grassroots events in early June. There will be an unconference for general grassroots organization, a week-long bootcamp for people interested in becoming advisors for local user groups (both in Cambridge), and a weekend-long grassroots jam in Manhattan.
Bootcamp admission is by application, and the event is targeted at active community members; limited support is available or travel (and crash space) for the bootcamp, for people who cannot otherwise afford to come.
Please take a look at the event pages above, and sign up for those you are interested in joining, whether or not you can attend.
Posted on May 18th, 2008 by metasj.
Categories: Glory, glory, glory, Uncategorized, international.
OLPC is having a flag day of sorts on Tuesday — a media event at the Media Lab with attendees from many countries where we are working, and presentations from a few of the government officials responsible for country deployments. It is unfortunately not open to the public, but I will do my best to publish summaries and link to any raw materials from the events on the blog; and to pass on any comments and questions you may have for country implementers and teachers.
Some of the country representatives will be in town for the rest of the week, for a project and learning workshop; stay tuned for points of interest for the community that come up. I am particularly looking forward to finalizing details of the educational blog project underway in Uruguay, with help from Greg Smith and Tarun Pondicherry, and the WebJournal project that Robson Mendonca will be working on this summer in Brazil with Juliano Bittencourt.
If you have projects you’d like to see pursued more actively, or data you would like to see from countries and schools, leave a comment here…
Posted on May 8th, 2008 by metasj.
Categories: indescribable.
comes… wikipe-tan. enlightening newspapers everywhere.
Noone knows where sugar-tan comes from, but the Raelians like her.
Update : Now It Can Be Told — this winsome creation comes from Winona of the Weecast.
Posted on May 8th, 2008 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.
It’s springtime in Cambridge, and there is change in the air. Walter Bender, my mentor and OLPC’s longtime president, resigned last month and is looking for new ways to support the project’s educational mission.
A storm of discussion followed recent statements about OLPC pursuing XOs that could dual-boot Linux and Windows, with flame wars about being subverted by Microsoft, OLPC’s educational focus, and the reported uselessness of proprietary tools and systems for learning. A lot of useful conversations were started, some of them spawning a new mailing list focused specifically on education; but in the short term there was a lot of smoke that had nothing to do with education at all. I have been dismayed by the willingness of many people to exaggerate what is known about how the world and education work, in order to fit their preferred narrative…
Leslie Hawthorn commented astutely it is precisely the failure of a grand, sweeping narrative that has been most distracting from a new and wonderful global meme — something which needs swift repair.
Meanwhile, Nepal has started their second laptop deployment, to much fanfare and colorful reception. Some photos from the weekend’s unwrapping, care of Ties Stuij:
And, finally, here are some quaint turn-of-century sugarlabs for your delectation.
Posted on April 4th, 2008 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.
It has been a long day, punctuated by passionate expositions and the occasional insightful aside. I had a few good ideas about physics and human interactions with the world around them… as well as about memebrand implementations. now I need to learn to draw key elements such as space elevators and lasers and metaconcept maps, so that I can spice up my posts a bit.
