A couple of years ago, One Laptop Per Child embarked on a mission to "create educational opportunities for the world's poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning". Today, this vision is achieved through the learning environment "Sugar" and the laptop "XO". This talk will start with an overview of OLPC's mission and the XO before focusing more on Sugar. This environment centered around "activities", a model in between document and application centric interfaces, features an interesting data model and data sharing capabilities. However, most of the data produced on the XO stays on the XO and is not accessible to the other devices. I will describe how Semantic Web technologies can be employed to further share and interconnect the data and give an overview of use-cases being implemented on top of "SemanticXO", the Semantic Web toolkit for Sugar.

1. Embedding young learners
into the information society
Christophe Guéret (@cgueret)
and, among others, Victor de Boer, Stefan Schlobach,
Philippe Cudré-Mauroux, Anna Bon
OCLC meeting
Leiden, December 6, 2012
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2. What are we going to talk about?
The mission of One Laptop per Child (OLPC)
The learning environment “Sugar”
Data management issues within Sugar
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3. One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)
Based on the slides from Walter Bender
(walter@sugarlabs.org)

4. The numbers
2,000,000+ children with XOs
1,000,000,000 children w/o XO
$200 price and falling
0 deployment running Windows
150+ language projects
40+ countries
500+ Sugar activities

5. Our challenge: giving every child an
opportunity to learn

6. OLPC Antarctica

7. Our mission
Develop (and deploy) a
low-cost laptop in order
to revolutionize how we
educate the world's
children

8. Origins: Senegal in 1983

9. Going to scale

10. Price is only one factor

11. Very local collaboration

12. A culture
The context of human development is
always a culture and not an isolated
technology.
—Seymour Papert

13. Why do we care about learning?
Education is a fundumental human
right and a key to human social and
economic development.

14. What motivates learning?
Not carrots or sticks, but rather:
autonomy,
mastery, and
a sense of purpose.

15. Is a laptop a good tool for learning?
A laptop makes learning more flexible:
Children learn by teaching and actively
helping each other; the teacher is free to
focus expertise where it is needed.

16. OLPC principles
Child ownership
Young ages
Saturation
Connection
Free Software (Libre)

17. Additional requirements
Integration into studies
Teacher training
Community outreach and engagement
Core team which can appropriate the
project

18. How is the XO used for learning?
Learning is a verb: ergo, the OLPC strategy
includes engaging the learner in design,
problem solving, collaborative work,
integration of technology and creativity,
interdisciplinary work, decision making and
learning outside the classroom.

19. How is the XO used for learning?
Children engage in project-based
learning: a research topic, theme,
issue or challenge that allows children
to think critically, collaborate with
peers, teachers and the community to
express and form opinions.

20. What about evaluation?
Educational communities have come to
understand that standardized tests—while
important to stakeholders—is not the only
dimension for measuring impact.

21. What about evaluation?
Other factors such as
problem-solving ability,
critical thinking,
use of multiple sources of information,
reflection and communication skills
using multiple media,
team and individual work,
and self development
are the new dimensions to measure
impact.

22. An example from Uruguay

23. Solving problems

24. What is next for OLPC? XO 4.0
2 Watts
Sunlight readable display
Webcam
Touch-enabled (Q4 2012)
Accelerometer
Light sensor
Microphone
User-defined sensors

26. Sugar
Based on the slides from Walter Bender and Bernie Innocenti
(walter@sugarlabs.org, bernie@sugarlabs.org)

27. What is Sugar?
Sugar is a software for learning that
promotes creativity, collaboration,
reflection, and critical thinking.
The first user interface based on both
cognitive and social constructivism.

28. Learning to read

29. Reading ebooks
eBook server!

30. Learning to count with an Abacus

31. Everyone is a teacher and a
learner

32. Regardless of age

33. Activities
A Sugar Activity combines the old concepts of
“document” and “application” into a single object.
Activities can be easily shared between neighbouring
computers.

38. “View Source” button

39. Easy to change
def _calculate_position(self, radius, icon_size, index, count):
width, height = self.box.get_allocation()
angle = index * (2 * math.pi / count) - math.pi / 2
x = radius * math.cos(angle) + (width - icon_size) / 2
y = radius * math.sin(angle) + (height - icon_size -
style.GRID_CELL_SIZE) / 2
return x, y
def _calculate_position(self, radius, icon_size, index, count):
width, height = self.box.get_allocation()
angle = index * (math.pi / (6 + index / 12)) - math.pi / 2
radius = ((radius - _MIN_RADIUS) * (index * 1.1) / count) +
_MIN_RADIUS
x = radius * math.cos(angle) + (width - icon_size) / 2
y = radius * math.sin(angle) + (height - icon_size -
style.GRID_CELL_SIZE) / 2
return x, y

40. Network centric
Interface

41. Collaboration
No Internet needed
Peer-to-peer learning
1-click sharing

42. Easy activity sharing
No Internet needed
Peer-to-peer learning
1-click sharing

43. Journal
Full-text search
Auto-saved work
Assessment tool
Place of reflection
“Portfolio”

44. Sugar on an XO... or anything else

45. Connecting the XO to the data World

46. Data production/consumption
Data? What data?
Content of the Journal
Social interactions
External data useful for teaching
…
All best stored locally on the XO and served from it
Mainly used in mesh contexts
1-1 mapping between the device and a user

47. Data sharing capabilities
Essentially synchronous: an activity need to be shared
at the same time
No remote access to internal data
Limited internal data sharing across activities
Limited internal model for storing data

48. Data consumption capabilities
Web browser and activities with off-line data dumps
Data fetched has to be fitted into a Journal entry or in a
custom, sandboxed, solution

49. More flexibility with SemanticXO
Linked-Data based data management stack
Everything stored as triples
Use SPARQL for all data manipulations
Provide activity developers with an API to
Store graphs with labelled edges
Copy locally structured data fetched from the Web
Share graphs with other SemanticXO enabled devices
All operations are done either locally or remotely

50. Example: Hello world!
from semanticxo import graphstore
graph_store = graphstore.get_instance()
graph = graph_store.create_graph()
msg = graph.create_resource(category='Hello')
msg.add("message", "Hello world")
graph.add_share(util.public_uri())
graph_store.persist_graph(graph)
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51. Example: Spam the class room!
from semanticxo import graphstore, addressbook
from semanticxo.graphstore import GraphStore
gs = graphstore.get_instance()
graph = gs.create_graph()
msg = graph.create_resource(category='Hello')
msg.add("message", "Spam!")
contacts = addressbook.get_neighbours()
for host in contacts.itervalues():
remote_gs = GraphStore(hostname=host)
remote_gs.persist(graph)
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52. Status
SemanticXO is usable and used
Alternative Journal back-end
3 sample activities
Tested on a couple of XOs in a mesh
Some limitations
Won't scale much in its current state
Impossible to de-reference resources
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53. Idea: data sharing for libraries
Combine digital management with physical libraries
List of books to borrow,
ratings, quotes, ...
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54. The de-referencing issue
Edges of the graphs are attached to node with URIs
Two ways to get the data: ?
?
Send a SPARQL query
?
Access the URI asking for RDF
None of existing solution is really fit
=> work on the project “WikiReg”
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55. WikiReg
Research supported by VeriSign Inc.
Entity registry for poorly connected environments
Target functionalities
Work on-line and off-line
Use very few resources
Every node can contribute to describing any resource
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56. For more information
Blogs
https://worldwidesemanticweb.wordpress.com
http://semweb4u.wordpress.com/
Mails
Christophe.gueret@dans.knaw.nl
philippe.cudre-mauroux@unifr.ch
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