OLPC Rochester, NY

[FGrose]

See our wiki page at OLPC Rochester, NY.

We have an event scheduled on 26 March 2008 at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Register your interest on the wiki, or join this forum thread.

It would be great to start some university, college, or school chapters where students could collaborate on projects.

Don't sit back--join in!

[tsakshaug]

I am interested in working with this group
Please let me know how to do so

thanks

[FGrose]

Please attend the workshop event on Wednesday 26 March 2008, if possible.

Private message on this forum is also a great way to initiate contact.

Thanks for your interest!

[Sarah Elkins]

Frederick, you meant March 26, not the 28th as you said in your March 21 message, correct?

[FGrose]

Yes! Thank you for the alert. Wednesday 26 March 2008 is the day.

[Sarah Elkins]

Frederick, how did it go?

I used to live in Rochester, so I'm interested. :-)

[FGrose]

The workshop went well.

We had a peak attendance of about 18 people and some others dropped in and out throughout the afternoon.

There were 8 XO laptops present. Five from RIT's Laboratory for Technological Literacy's OLPC project team led by Professor Stephen Jacobs. The Laboratory is part of RIT's Center for Advancing the Study of CyberInfrastructure led by Professor Gregor von Laszewski.

Many thanks to Professors Stephen Jacobs, Gregor von Laszewski, and Elissa Weeden from RIT's Information Technology faculty for their XO laptops, and to K-12 Instructional Evaluator Eric Grace for helping to organize and administer the workshop.

Mr Ted Sakshaug, Instructional Technology Manager, from Wheatland-Chili School District attended and participated in a discussion of study plans for learning about collaboration technologies.

I will be updating the OLPC wiki pages with more information on the Usability Testing class project and other developments.

Thank you for your interest!

[cbryer10]

Hello,
I'm a XO owner south of you in Hornell, NY. What are the future plans for this group? Anything in the pipeline?

Later........
Chuck

[FGrose]

Hi Chuck,

See our wiki page at OLPC Rochester, NY Events section for an announcement from the Lab for Technological Literacy at RIT. They will be hosting a new OLPC user's group starting 22 January 2009.

[cbryer10]

Thats excellent news, I will plan on attending with my daughters and mine XO's. I hope anyone else in the area can come. It would be great to generate some interest in this part of NY.
Later........
Chuck

[FGrose]

Announcement Reminder: OLPC XO User's Meeting 22 January 2009

• 7:00 to 8:50 pm
• Room 1400, Building 70, RIT

The Laboratory for Technological Literacy at RIT is sponsoring an OLPC XO Laptop user's group in 2009.

All meetings will be held in B. Thomas Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences, Building 70, Golisano Auditorium, Rm 1400.

(See RIT Building 70 Google Map, or campus maps at http://inside.rit.edu/maps/.)

The Lab for Technological Literacy at RIT is supporting the OLPC project by raising awareness locally and conducting research and development activities.

Please join us at 7:00 pm - 8:50 pm, on the 4th Thursday of the month:

• 22 January 2009
  
• 26 February 2009
  
• 26 March 2009
  
• 23 April 2009
  
• 28 May 2009

[FGrose]

Hello again!

Next meeting: OLPC Rochester XO Interest Group
When: 26 February 2009, 7:00 - 8:50 pm EST
Where: RIT B-70, Auditorium CR 1400
(Those on Gmail should notice a Calendar smart link in the right sidebar.)

See the OLPC Rochester, NY wiki site, for the agenda and directions.

For the meeting, I've prepared an HP laptop with a bootable USB flash drive containing a Fedora10/Sugar on a Stick image. This will allow us to use the conference room projector to see a working Sugar environment on the screen.

I also have installed a VirtualBox virtual disc with some of the latest test releases of Sugar that will run in emulation on the Windows laptop.

I will use these in my demo/lesson on Etoys.

If Jeff, Bill, Karlie, or anyone else wants to take advantage of this facility, we could possibly share Journal entries via a USB drive (I don't think network collaboration will work with the security barriers and other sharing issues).

If you are interested, send me a note, and I'll try to verify a sharing method.

Hope you can all make the upcoming meeting. Invite some of your friends as well, there's lots to share!

--Fred

[ncarrol]

"If Jeff, Bill, Karlie, or anyone else wants to take advantage of this facility, we could possibly share Journal entries via a USB drive (I don't think network collaboration will work with the security barriers and other sharing issues)."


You might try copying Journal entries to USB and emailing, then loading from USB. However, note that this adds to the history information in the file header. Example:

http://www.olpcnews.com/forum/index.php?topic=4323.msg29086#msg29086

If an activity shares XO to XO (and the activity is on both XO's) then any current state can be stored on either XO (again the example of Memorise).

I thought this might be useful.

[FGrose]

Thanks for the suggestion! The problem right now with SoaS is that the Journal does not recognize/reveal a second USB drive in the tray. I can manually mount the device on a folder, and see the files, but I have not figured out yet how to register them in the running Journal.

[FGrose]

Re: Copying files to Journal

This page on the OLPC wiki, Copy to and from the Journal has the information.

One must figure out the MIMETYPE to use in order for the Journal to know which Activity to pass the instance to.

This can be determined by probing the file system
1. under /home/olpc/.sugar/default/datastore/<folder> (these folders hold the activity instances);
2. Create and Keep an instance of the desired type;
3. then search for the most recently created/changed folder;
4. and open the <folder>/metadata/mime_type file for the value.