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

Feature: Hacking the XO laptop | Geek.com

Demonstrating a chat connection for XO laptops and other Linux-literate experiments with two little green laptops.

bobdc.blog: Free epub children's picture books: "I thought it would be nice to have some books appropriate to the XO's audience available, so I converted sixteen picture books from Project Gutenberg to the epub format, which is one of the formats that FBReader can read."

Epub books soon for One Laptop Per Child kids—and public libraries interested in laptop? :
Teleread.org says: "with FBReader available, the OLPC laptop will be a more promising machine for public libraries. Having been burned by the Gemstar and other machines with e-book formats that vanished from the mainstream, librarians should seriously consider trying out OLPC’s XO. It doesn’t come with all the gotchas that the Amazon Kindle does, including a terms of service agreement that might prevent libraries from lending the machines to patrons."