OLPC wireless mesh demo image from OLPC web site
I subscribe to OLPC's informative Community News, which consists of a weekly (or fortnightly?) plain-text summary of progress on One Laptop Per Child, written in a chatty but rigorous way by Walter Bender, with a nice "give credit when credit is due" tone. Most of the news relates to technical and operational developments. Today's also had this paragraph about work being done by the Commonwealth of Learning relating to wikis.
"The Commonwealth of Learning (COL) hosted an annual conference about collaborative production of learning materials in Vancouver, Wednesday through Friday. Attendees included Merrick Schaefer of UNICEF, Murugan Pal of CK12, Erik Moeller of Wikimedia and Open Progress, and Joel Thierstein of Connexions; who are all working towards a global collection of CC-BY and locally-developed works. We set immediate goals for sharing materials across these projects; and identifying collections. COL offered broad support across their network of teachers and volunteers, especially in Nigeria. Erik and Brion Vibber from Wikimedia discussed how MediaWiki is planning to support asynchronous and offline editing; and 'live' off-line snapshots that people can edit. The Wikipedia 0.5 static snapshot was released last week; it can be downloaded via torrent. A child-friendly selection of topics is being developed; but still written at a high language level. A proper kid's-encyclopedia is still in the future."
Find out more about the Commonwealth of Learning.
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