Saturday, July 14, 2007

Review squads, wiki party, curriculum jams

Flamenco, wine, and a marzipan-and-spun-sugar-covered wizard cake in honor of Noah (coderanger)'s birthday. Sound like 1cc? What if I said we were simultaneously demoing, coding, on irc, wiki-editing, and sending out letters to educational organizations? Work at OLPC really does go 24/7; SJ and I left the office at 4:30am and there were still multiple people working when we walked out the door.

This weekend sees the inaugural run of the Review Squad, a dedicated group of adolescent testers who are going through the content in our library releases. There's also a wiki cleanup party (join us!) which will march, Style guide in hand, into the chaos that is currently wiki.laptop.org. (As of this moment, the style guide is composed mainly of thing SJ wrote in response to my naively flat-footed wiki-mangling.) We're also angling to change the wiki stylesheet into this gorgeous one from OLPC Austria, which, to Eben's great delight, uses his icons.

Also ramping up hot on the heels of the Game Jam comes the Curriculum Jam, where educators and local students will design and test classroom activities (not .xo activity bundles, but actual things that students and teachers in the classroom would do with the laptops). The Curriculum Jam will be a distributed one, with local Jams planned to run simultaneously in Boston, Vancouver, and Manila - and possibly Bangkok, one of the universities in Mexico, and Chicago as well. Teachers will collaborate with their compatriots on the other side of the world to create and test curricula; a team of Bangkok schoolchildren might test the lesson plans developed in Boston, a Mexican art class might turn out drawings that Canadian first-graders write stories about. We're looking for local participants and organizers in all the locations - contact me if you're interested. If your location isn't listed above and you'd like a Jam in your town, you should definitely contact us, and we'll work together to make it happen.

2 comments:

Boris Dieseldorff said...

That really is a gorgeous style sheet.

nikki said...

*drools*

It's so pretty...