• a 100M activity containing most of the Spanish Wikipedia, with illustrations, math fontification, and templates

• scripts that support generating a new version from the latest articles, from heuristics defining the most popular titles, with only a few hours of work

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…

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.

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…

Update : Now It Can Be Told — this winsome creation comes from Winona of the Weecast.

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:

laptop distribution | other xo pics

And, finally, here are some quaint turn-of-century sugarlabs for your delectation.

Noting ages to four significant figures is going to be all the rage soon, mark my words.