OLPC Lending Library
&
Drupal Content Management System

Presentation:Education Technology Advisory CommitteeSan Francisco State UniversityDecember 2009

Sameer Verma, Ph.D.Associate ProfessorInformation Systems DepartmentSan Francisco State UniversitySan Francisco, CA 94132 USA

hint hint: underlying message

Collaborative Commons: A Big Picture View

the OLPC story

Somebody is finally thinking of the children!

To create educational opportunities for the world's poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning. OLPC Mission Statement,It's an education project, not a laptop project. Nicholas Negroponte

far and wide

Multiple hats...

July 2007

The first time I actually saw the OLPC XO laptop.

1.4 million + See Google Maps

Deployments worldwide

Also see: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Property:Number_of_manufactured_laptops

Sabbatical leaveResearch agendaTeaching perspective

travels

Jamaica

Resident artist in Khairat, India

Khairat school is India's first pilot site.See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_India

Khairat school is India's pilot site.See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_India

Bhagmalpur project

Location:Village: Bhagmalpur

District: Jaunpur, Uttar Pradesh

Railway Station: Shahganj

Bus Stop: Banuwadeeh

School: Classes: 1 to 8 class

Children: 1087

Teachers: 11

Internet: none

Computers: none

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Bhagmalpur

What's a laptop?

Under a tree...

OLPC Headquarters (1CC)
1 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Little green machines...

CostElectricityNetworksContentLanguagesPedagogyAgeSecurityTheftAppropriateness...

The challenges

Cost

US $140 at the factoryMy Lenovo Thinkpad cost me > US $2500

Electricity

Non-traditional sources...

Yo Yo Charger

http://www.potenco.com/products

Hand Crank Charger

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Peripherals/Hand_Crank

Pedal power

OLPC Afghanistan http://www.olpc.af/images/HPM/dscf1324.jpg

Solar Panel

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Product_News#Solar_Panels

5 Watt/14Volt panel

Moo power...

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Cow_Power

Networks

Offline technologyRise of the SneakernetsHigh Capacity Solid-State Storage

Content

Open content standards (SCORM, IMS-CP)

Creative CommonsEnglish Wikipedia < 4GB1.6 million books from the Internet ArchiveMoodle in tight spaces (yes, that Moodle)

Language Diversity

Example: India has 28 states and 7 union territoriesThe Constitution of India recognizes 22 languages

1. Assamese2. Bengali3. Bodo4. Dogri5. Gujarati6. Hindi7. Kannada8. Kashmiri

9. Konkani10. Maithili11. Malayalam12. Manipuri13. Marathi14. Nepali15. Oriya16. Punjabi

17. Sanskrit 18. Santhali 19. Sindhi 20. Tamil 21. Telugu 22. Urdu

Languages

Afrikaans, Amharic, Arabic, Armenian, Aymara, Bahasa Indonesia, Bahasa Melayu, Basque, Bengali, Bengali (India), Bislama, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (China), Chinese (Hong Kong), Chinese (Taiwan), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dari, Dutch, Dzongkha, English, English (South African), English (US), Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, French (Canada), Friulian, Fula, Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hausa, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Igbo, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Khmer, Kinyarwanda, Korean, Kreyol, Macedonian, Malayalam, Maltese, Marathi, Marovo, Mongolian, Nauruan, Nepali, Norwegian, Norwegian Bokml, Papiamento, Papua New Guinea Pidgin (Tok Pisin), Pashto, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Punjabi, Quechua, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Sindhi, Sinhala, Slovak, Slovenian, Solomon Islands Pidgin, Sotho, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Templates, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Uyghur, Vietnamese, Walloon, Wolof, Yoruba, pseudo L10n

Approx. 90+ languages

Tutorial:http://opensource.sfsu.edu/node/452

Translate:http://translate.sugarlabs.org/

Pedagogy

http://www.sugarlabs.org/

Constructivism, Constructionism, Social Media, ...

school...to go

not that different...

Educational device or trojan horse?

Surprise! Its a REAL computer. It can do REAL computer things!

OLPC San Francisco Bay Area

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_SanFranciscoBayArea

http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/olpc-sf

OLPC-SF Deployments

Exchange of ideas, plans, content, enthusiasm...

DeploymentsAfghanistan (Carol Ruth Silver)

Jamaica (Sameer Verma/Univ. of the West Indies)

Madagascar (June Kleider)

India (Humaira Mahi & Sameer Verma/SFSU)

Senegal (Drew and Lick-Wilmerding Schools)

South Africa (EduWeavers)

San Francisco (Starr King Elementary)

OLPC-SF resident expert

OLPC-SF and SF State University

In the quad...

On the student union...

OLPC-SF at SFSU Downtown Center

OLPC-SF and SF State University

Meets once a month at SFSU Down Town Center.See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_SanFranciscoBayArea

IMSA (student association) helps with organizing meetings, donation drives, translation jamshttp://imsa.sfsu.edu/

Engineering student started OLPC SF XO Repair CenterSee http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_SF_Repair

Internships?

Volunteers?

Course projects?

More...

hidden agenda

OLPC Lending Library

New! http://opensource.sfsu.edu/olpc

Library Media Services has 10 XO laptopsLoan to students, staff and faculty

HSS 127

You get:XO Laptop

Charger

Instructions

Join the community!

the Drupal story...

it began with a meeting with Jonathan Rood in 2000...

Home-grown portals - circa 2000 CE

Homegrown Linux + Apache+ MySQL + PHP portal

the push for Drupal

Drupal-based siteshttp://opensource.sfsu.edu (all things FOSS)

http://is.sfsu.edu (Departmental needs)

http://imsa.sfsu.edu (Student organization)

http://bie.sfsu.edu (Federal Grant)

http://southasia.sfsu.edu (Campus institute)

http://cob.sfsu.edu/blog (Dean's blog)

Analysis of CMS/Portals

Varut Aphaisuwan's study and graduate thesis

Weighted scoring model

Three contenders (Drupal had the highest score)

Drupal's growth

OSCON 2005 - Presentation by Dries Buytaert, founder of Drupal

Parallel efforts?Creative Arts

BSS Computing

Recent eventsKevin O'Brien

Bay Area Drupal Camp hosted at SFSU by IMSA (http://imsa.sfsu.edu)

Community of Practice

Drupal Community of Practice http://drupal.sfsu.edu

Meets once a month

A platform to share initiatives, techniques, code

Solve similar problems

Different solutionsCentrally hosted

Multi-site

Locally hosted, but centrally supported?

putting 2 and 2 together

Purpose of these projectsSupply-based or Demand-driven?

Solving SFSU problems/opportunitiesDemand driven

Tinkering with codeDiscovery-based

IntroductionsSupply, meet Demand. Demand, meet Supply.

Map of projects

Note the common underlying technologies

Commons

Software: Free and Open Source

Content: Creative Commons

Infrastructure is commodityHardware, Networks

Virtualization

Cloud

Collaborative

A commons has limited scope without collaboration

Collaboration keeps the commons alive.Sharing ideas

Massive feedback loops

Unless it flows freely, collaborative frameworks don't scale.

Brown bag it!

Fostering a collaborative commons on campus

Food and ideas go well together Host a Brown Bag session today!