[IAEP] [Olpc-open] G1G1 (was Re: [Community-news] OLPC News (2008-09-29))

[forster at ozonline.com.au]

Some good suggestions have been made on the list about getting higher recognition of the OLPC/Sugar in educational circles.

Colleague, Roland Gesthuizen, and I were able to display three XO's at ACEC2008 last week http://www.acec2008.info the Australian Council for Computers in Education biannual conference.

There was strong interest and high recognition "is that the one with the hand crank?" There were inquiries from two Australian Universities wanting to buy class sets for research as well as teachers wanting to buy one. I was able to tell them that the G1G1 program would run again but not whether it would be available in Australia. The last G1G1 was not.

It seems that there is a lot of unmet potential to engage educators in developing activities and lesson resources and to participate in discussions. It would be good if teachers, schools and universities had a clear process for obtaining laptops.

Roland was able to put together a lab of XO's at the ICTEV2008 conference earlier this year by borrowing just about every XO in Australia. The VITTA2008 conference http://www.vitta.org.au/conferenceinfo is in November. It would be good if we could get enough XO's to run a lab session. Maybe there could be a conference set that could be shipped round the world as required?

Tony Forster