Samuel "SJ" Klein, One Laptop per Child's community content director, will speak on the progress of the worldwide effort towards delivering low-cost exploratory computation to millions of children in developing countries. The project was just showcased in the new book, Design Revolution: 100 Products That Empower People.
To date, nearly one million laptops have been deployed around the world, typically in the remotest of locations with little or no electricity, or internet access. Empowering learning through information accessibility will be the focus of SJ's talk along with the market-changing innovations in the platform's hardware and software.
SJ will also show a working prototype of One Laptop per Child's brand new XO-1.5 laptop, which uses a newer, faster processor and has more onboard memory. The XO-1.5 now dual boots into Gnome desktop as well as the child-friendly Sugar Learning Platform. Both are based on Fedora 11.
The OLPC Learning Club DC and HacDC will announce their joint effort to launch an XO Lending Library and describe local activities that support OLPC and Sugar Labs. Please join us if you want to talk about redesigning education access throughout the world for the 21st Century.
Where: HacDC
1525 Newton Street NW, Washington, DC
in the church sanctuary
When: Tuesday, September 8th, 7:30pm
And for those itching to know what the new laptop looks like, we haven't seen them yet! But we do know what cosmetic changes were made so we altered an existing photo:
Turning over the new laptop, one will see that the battery latches are now in green plastic. Opening the lid will reveal that the screen rotation and power button are in green plastic as well (left on photo illustration). The new laptop carries forward the recent simplification of the trackpad and has a slightly thicker keyboard housing.
It is not known if these laptops will be made available in an offer like the Give One Get One program, but when steady quantities are available late this year, they can be acquired through the grant process of OLPC's Contributor's Program if you have a unique project idea.
If you miss this opportunity to see SJ and the laptop, they are scheduled to appear at the Learning Club's Saturday, September 19th meeting at 10am at the Arlington Career Center. There will be another more detailed announcement on the OLPC Learning Club DC blog about that meeting.
Thanks for this write-up, Mike. wish I could be there too, but it's a long drive for me. I know that you were concerned that XO-1.5s would be hard to identify in the field from XO-1s, but I think that the green buttons should help.
Conversely, I'm glad to see what appears to be significant advances "under the hood" with a faster processor, more RAM and a duel boot with Fedora 11.
Here's hoping that OLPC will do better this year with their G1G1 program than in 2008. Since the plastic enclosure is apparently unchanged (save for those green colored touches mentioned above,) here's also hoping that OLPC will eventually make replacement motherboards and other upgraded parts available to vendors so that XO-1 owners can upgrade to 1.5 on their own.
Benjamin, Don't hold out hope for a G1G1 again this year. All reports we've heard is that OLPC will not be trying it again.
Nor will OLPC put any effort in making the XO-1.5 hardware backward compatible with the XO-1. In fact, so far not even the XO-1.5 software (Fedora 11 or Sugar) will work on the XO-1.
http://www.olpcnews.com/forum/index.php?topic=4454.0
Great Job OLPC and i hope you can distribute more of that great laptop to the third world countries who needs most....