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I know you said you can't afford OLPC computers. You could try just asking people to donate them, and see if you get any.

I used to have an OLPC and I gave it to a school in India. Before I handed it over, I bought a $10 USB keyboard, a USB mouse, and I installed a program called "Typing Turtle". Also, I bought an an SD card, and installed a copy of Wikipedia for Schools on it (this is a collection of Wikipedia articles, vetted to remove any vandalism, and indexed so you can use them as pure static web pages, offline).

If you follow my other suggestion and use Handspring Visor PDAs for students, and you get a handful of OLPC computers, maybe you can use the OLPC computers for test stations.

Be sure to get an external, USB keyboard and mouse for any OLPC laptops you get. The built-in keyboard sucks, and the built-in trackpad really sucks.

steveha

Problem solved. ... not that I disagree with you, I'm just ruining your particular example.

Given that WP is a constantly-edited and updated resource, freezing it at a point for optical storage is slightly problematic, as some articles will contain errors. Also as pointed out, the images are an essential part of the encyclopedia but to store those would ramp up storage costs considerably.

A group in the UK tried this, with the Wikipedia for Schools project, where they chose a few thousand articles that covered the National Curriculum (the standard list of topics to be taught in school). From there they had to manually check and edit every single article, changing media and internal article links to make them available locally, checking for accuracy, and removing external links. As you can appreciate, a Herculean effort and not probably one that could be repeated easily, given that it was a charity behind the project, receiving no government funds. That's the sort of direction I think a local copy of WP should go, a fully-checked subset of the main body of work. Read more here: http://schools-wikipedia.org/

Perhaps built-in solar makes more sense, in more places, than the hand-cranked power

Perhaps it does, perhaps it does! If, that is, you can build the device such that it can run off of built-in solar. That's the real trick, isn't it.

A simple four-function calculator trivially can run of a little photocell, and this has been true for decades. So why didn't OLPC simply put a little photocell on the XO-1? Because a little cheap photocell doesn't produce anywhere near the needed power needed by an XO-1.

And, the hand-cranked power is a particularly irritating straw man. A long, long, time ago, when OLPC was just an idea, they thought about a hand crank, and even made a mockup of what it might look like. But it was never made. Reasons: 0) some kids live in places with a decent electrical grid, so there is no need to add the cost of a generator to every single laptop; 1) an external generator can be trivially replaced if it breaks, without the laptop itself needing to be repaired; 2) a crank built-in to the laptop adds mechanical cranking strain on the laptop, necessitating the laptop being made sturdy in otherwise-needless ways; and 3) little kids are not known for their arm strength, so a generator that could be operated by leg muscles was deemed better. OLPC announced that a pull-cord generator would be the human powered generator, but as far as I can tell from a few quick Google searches just now, the pull-cord generator is still vapor.

I recently sent my XO-1 to India for use by the Bharti Integrated Rural Development Society
(B.I.R.D.S.) and I looked into a solar array for it. I found one for about $200 that should operate an XO-1 continuously and charge the battery in about an hour. I also found lots of other solar arrays that cost way more than that. So, the most affordable solar array I found cost more than the XO-1. As I understand it, the B.I.R.D.S. school has electrical power only when they run their generator, which is a few hours a day, so my hope is that the XO-1 will be useful just with the generator power. (Conveniently, the power supply on an XO-1 accepts any AC from 100 to 240 Volts, at 50 or 60 Hz, so they should be able to just plug it in with a plug adapter.)

Note that TFA says "...the I-slate is the first of a series of electronic notepads being built around a new class of low-energy-consumption microchips under development...". So, one of the reasons the OLPC XO-1 isn't powered with a little solar array is that it was developed half a decade ago, and the new ultra-low-power chips are, well, new.

Isn't it enough to say "This is a cool new technology and I'm excited about it" rather than talking about how much better it is compared to a half-decade-old technology?

P.S. I put an 8 GB flash card in the SD card slot on the XO-1. On the card I put a copy of Wikipedia for Schools, which takes up about 4 GB; then I put some health and medical books and a bunch of classic fiction books (for students to read when studying English). I updated the OS on the OLPC to the latest build, and installed a typing tutor program (Typing Turtle) from Sugar Labs. I found a public-domain copy of The Elements of Style and a few other free textbooks. Finally, I put a few books on Python Programming. I haven't had any email back from B.I.R.D.S. telling me anything, so I have no idea how it's working out.

I have to say, an XO-1 loading books straight off an SD card is a pretty nice book reading platform! And with the backlight off, to read books in monochrome, battery life should be pretty good. I'm hoping they will find the XO-1 to be useful.

steveha

http://paganizingfaithofyeshua.netfirms.com/no_1_original_saviour_gods_orisis.htm

http://schools-wikipedia.org/images/803/80360.jpg

http://www.uned.es/geo-1-historia-antigua-universal/1isis_and_baby_horus_mary_and_baby_jesus.jpg

Some here: http://schools-wikipedia.org/wp/a/Automated_teller_machine.htm

1. http://schools-wikipedia.org/wp/b/Battle_of_the_Somme.htm clearly states it was in WW1. I'm not sure why that shows up in their WW2 list, but that looks to be some kind of index, possibly based on the fact that WW2 is mentioned as a "related" subject. Even if it is a blooper, it's an indexing mistake, and it's incorrect to claim they "have the Battle of the Somme taking place during World War II" when the article explicitly does not state that.

2,3. Not covering everything you consider important makes it total crap? (Wikipedia does have an article on it - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Kursk - FWIW, not sure why they didn't select it too.)

4. Again, that it doesn't cover everything doesn't equate to "total crap" to me. And issues such as relative importance of what should be covered, and factors in WW2, sound very much to be something that there will be differing opinions. Why should I take the opinion of an anonymous poster on Slashdot as authoritative? I mean:

The great American lesson of WWII is that self reliant industrial capacity wins wars and if any lesson about the war is relevant to the USA today, it is that one.

Is it? Says who? (Also remember that Wikipedia is an international project, so it is not solely concerned with looking at things from an American viewpoint - though I admit that may be something that is disliked, because people tend to prefer teaching versions focused on their own country. Similarly here in the UK, where the history that is taught is almost entirely focused on British history.)

5. Whatever the sexuality of certain Nazis (sources?), there is plenty of evidence regarding their treatment of homosexuals, e.g., in concentration camps (which bit are you referring to when you say "the argument that the Nazis were more anti-gay than anti-jewish").

Possibly you mean "Wikischools is total crap, because of one indexing blooper, and the rest of it doesn't fit into my personal viewpoint of what I think is important".

I just reviewed the section on World War II.

on World War II

1) These retards have the Battle of the Somme taking place during World War II, when it was rather an affair of World War I.

2) The battle of Smolensk has an article, but the battle of Kursk does not? Kursk was only one of the largest tank battles of all time and the last great offensive in the east... but I guess that's not important.

3) Richard OConnor gets a write up, but not Alan Brooke, Ike, or, Zhukov?

4) The economic underpinnings of the war are not touched on at all. Indeed, the whole history of World War II takes place against a backdrop of the economics of the powers involved, and provides the basic narrative of the struggle. For Americans, where's the talk about how 100 years of protectionism left the USA standing with enough industrial capacity to build 25 aircraft carriers, a bunch of battleships, cruisers, countless destroyers, tens of thousands of aircraft, tanks, guns, and still have enough capacity left over for a speculative bet on the atomic bomb. The great American lesson of WWII is that self reliant industrial capacity wins wars and if any lesson about the war is relevant to the USA today, it is that one.

5) The article about Nazism is, well completely wrong. Given that the head of the SA was a homosexual, and that was known to Hitler and co for some time, its hard to make the argument that the Nazis were more anti-gay than anti-jewish, although granted, Hitler did use Rohm's gayness as one of many charges against him.

All in all, if this is what open source history is, I'd say its crap.

More seriously, for a checked version of Wikipedia that's been compiled specially for use in schools:

http://schools-wikipedia.org/

Maybe the way forward is to keep the main Wikipedia as the lawless land it's always painted to be, but work more on spin-off encyclopaedias targeted to a specific audience or area of knowledge. I'm thinking for example of the SOS Schools Wiki project, which delivers a fully-checked general set of articles covering all areas taught in the UK's National Curriculum (the govt-mandated list of subjects that should be taught in all schools). The subjects and knowledge are so general and broad that it'll only ever need minor revisions, and is of course useful for anyone wanting to acquire a 'baseline' level of knowledge, no matter where in the world they live.

Leave WP to concentrate on disputes over whether episode lists should be in scope and instead grab all the brilliant general knowledge that has already been created and do something wonderful with it. What would have cost a school hundreds or thousands, in the form of twenty heavy, expensive books that can only be used by one person at a time can now be used by an infinite number of people, all on one DVD-ROM.

It's not so much "verified" as it is "cleaned up": "This list of articles was then manually sorted for relevance to children, and adult topics were removed... SOS Children volunteers then checked and tidied up the contents, first by selecting historical versions of articles free from vandalism and then by removing unsuitable sections"

From the http://schools-wikipedia.org/ home page:

This list of articles was then manually sorted for relevance to children, and adult topics were removed.

and

Wikipedia is not necessarily a childsafe environment, has "adult" content.

What exactly are the "adult" contents that were removed? Does this mean things like historical articles referencing war and dictators. I was half thinking about finding a copy for myself to download, but I don't know what the criteria is for censoring an encyclopedia.

well, let's see what googles, shall we ...

Wikipedia for Kids:
http://schools-wikipedia.org/
Article on Wikipedia for Kids:
http://www.marrowbones.com/commons/technosocial/2007/12/wikipedia_for_kids_teaching_a.html
NASA for Kids:
http://www.nasa.gov/audience/forkids/kidsclub/flash/index.html

and yes, if you want kids books, ask a librarian at the library, imho