OLPC - communities and collaboration

International School on Mind, Brain and Education

Erice, July 16th 2008Bastien Guerry

Motivation and complexity

Misunderstandings?

Truth and relevance

Communities and openness dimensions

Communication: private vs. public

Content: proprietary vs. free

Gouvernance: cathedral vs. bazaar

Openness complexity: the model...

... the reality

Collaboration & motivationThe example of translation

Education and « free culture »

● Build sustainable communities● Use collaborative tools● Share content on the web

On all this points: educators can efficiently learn from the open source community...

Goals of the OLPC France community

● Host a repair center

● Give support to the implementation in french-speaking countries

● Gather (french-speaking) developers around specific projects

● Promote free pedagogical materials on the XO

● Let primary school teachers know about the XO, and work with developers

Ideas for OLPC France / LaMAP

● Spread LaMAP ideas and practices among open source developers so that they can figure out useful activities with the XO

● Build censors on the XO to explore the environment

● Develop a lab-book

● Develop a teacher-oriented activity to access LaMAP pedagogical content

● Create inquiry-based activities focusing on discovering the laptop itself