Posted on 10 May 2007 by Justin Hartman
The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project was setup to provide children, in the developing world, with new opportunities to explore, experiment and express themselves by creating a laptop with features created specifically for children.
This unique laptop, dubbed the XO, costs a mere $175 and is built from free and open-source software. The laptop sports a green casing, a liquid-proof keyboard and the Sugar operating system which is based on the popular Linux distro Fedora Core 6.
The OLPC project was founded by Nicholas Negroponte and globally the OLPC project is running a number of pilot projects, including in Africa. There are no official plans to bring the XO to South Africa yet however Antoine van Gelder, a South African developer contributing to the OLPC project, said that he hoped that a community of like-minded developers and educators would become involved in the project to get it adopted for use in South African schools.
In April the XO laptop made a very rare appearance at the Digital Freedom Expo in Cape Town and thanks to Tectonic and Twac I have included a demo video taken at the event so you can get a better feel for what all the hype is about.
For more information on the South African OLPC efforts visit the website at http://www.laptop.org.za/
– Justin Hartman
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Posted on 24 February 2007 by Nic Haralambous
The 5th World Summit on Media for Children is being held in South Africa this year. You may be asking what the 5WSMC is? Let me try and answer that question for you.
The Foundation is a not-for-profit public company incorporated in Victoria, Australia. The 5WSMC is organised by the Children and Broadcasting Foundation for Africa, in partnership with SABC, Icasa, and the Department of Communications and with support from Telkom and the MDDA. It was put in place to promote the values and goals of the World Summit. Some of these goals are listed below:
- To draw to the attention of key players in media globally the importance of children’s media issues.
- To encourage continental and global collaboration on the production of programme content.
- To ensure that media plays an active role in the social development of youth, with a focus on HIV and AIDS.
As I said, the above are just some of the goals of the foundation. visit the goals and objectives section of 5WSMC site to get the full list.
Participants in the summit include many child delegates who will benefit from various workshops taking place throughout the summit. Various youth parliaments will be given time to present and discuss various issues and according to the Agenda on the website Obesity, HIV/Aids and many other issues will be raised in regard to the media.
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