Technology Review: Blogs: TR Editors' blog: Laptop Training Begins in Peru: "As teachers converge, One Laptop per Child takes a big leap from pilot program to large-scale national execution."

Bashuki Journal - OLPC: "
The One Laptop Per Child group is piloting its little green computers in grades 2 and 6 at Bashuki schoo roughly 30 km east of Kathmandu at the top of a very steep ridge.
"Most of the teachers walk over an hour to reach the school. It is a poor school and most of children belong to the Tamang indigenous group, one of the historically disadvantaged groups in Nepal."

Story Jam New York - OLPC: "UNICEF, the world's leading children's organization will be holding an open Storytelling Jam and Hackathon from Friday March 28 through Sunday March 30. The three-day event will be hosted at UNICEF's headquarters in Manhattan, NY.

The focus of this event is to build and implement free and open-source tools for collecting stories, as well as gathering and spreading the stories themselves. Work will be done on a variety of platforms, from mobile phones to the One Laptop per Child's XO machine."

Our Stories - OLPC: "Our Stories (http://www.ourstories.org) is a joint project involving OLPC, UNICEF, Google, and others to facilitate children telling their own stories and those of their communities around the world. The basic format will be 3-5 minute audio recordings with geodata, and optional text and images; these will be visualized on maps of the world, and shared publicly over local and global networks."

MediaShift Idea Lab . XO Laptop Turns Kids into Media Creators in Uruguay | PBS: "How did a lower-middle class rural Uruguayan fourth-grader learn to take video of a cow giving birth and share it with so many people across the globe?.
"Villa Cardal is a rural town of around 1,300 residents in the department of Florida, Uruguay. Last May it became the unlikely destination for dozens of technology correspondents from major media outlets around the world after the One Laptop Per Child project chose it as a testing site for for their XO computer, formerly called the $100 laptop. (Each laptop actually cost the Uruguayan government $205.)"

TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home: "What you can read with the XO

E-book advocate site TeleRead has a nice inventory of sources of full-text books compatible with the XO laptop, either using its Web-browser software or the installable FBReader and Opera.

Maybe in the summer I'll get to load up some classics from Project Gutenberg and take them to the beach or one of western Virginia's great parks... to read with the sunlight-compatible XO screen.

Exploring the neighborhood(s)

A school teacher near my old Western Massachusetts hometown has a column on MassLive (The Springfield Republican newspaper) about his XO and mentions not finding others to chat with...

It's not as if I really need another technology gadget in my life. We already have a desktop computer, a laptop, a few digital camcorders, two digital cameras, a handful of MP3 players and a digital voice recorder or two. I use most of them, regularly. Really, I do. I didn't really need this XO.

There are, however, two reasons why I took the plunge with this project...

And his reasons are pretty similar to mine.

He's already found a few other XO donors in his area, but is looking for more. Surprise: I've found them! My XO isn't lonely anymore: I've started using a "jabber" connection set up by a gentleman in Rhode Island that lets me share documents, chat sessions and other activities with a colorful crowd of XO users around the world (see the image).

My "neighborhood" now shows not only local Wifi antennas here in Radford, but other XO owners and the activities they are sharing. (Each XO looks like an O atop an X, shared documents look like documents, chats are word balloons, etc.)

Note: I also just stumbled on this very nice list of keyboard shortcuts for the XO