On Monday things cleared up when I spoke with Adam Holt from the OLPC Foundation, situated right across the street in Kendall Square. Yesterday I sent the check for the 15+15 Laptops to the foundation:
I was ensured that I will receive the laptops in 10 business days. Just in time, when I will be going to Austria.
iPressl bought 15 laptops today through the Give One Get One Program of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Foundation. Currently, there are only 5 OLPC laptops in Austria, therby increasing the number of OLPC laptops in Austria times four. High Schools in Vienna and one school in Carinthia, as well as KIMEKI will be and are working with the laptops. I am already envisioning many projects in collaboration with KIMEKI, as well as schools and kindergardens in Austria. The OLPC laptop is an incredible push in technology, it is an open source project and already has incredible cababilites with an endless number of things to come (see also the OLPC Wiki)!
Things to come! were decided at todays meeting with Erich Kucher, current Vorstand of KIMEKI, in Klagenfurt. Many new ideas were discussed, such as future steps for our project CINEATRIX. A brandnew idea might be the incorporation of MIT’s $100 Laptop into future projects and programs of our collaboration.
Cineatrix is a Kimeki, iPressl and MIT collaboration.
In collaboration with the MIT Edgerton Outreach program and iPressl in Austria in Europe, KIMEKI is working on a new project, Cineatrix.
The original idea stemmed from the knowledge that there is a new generation of children who are digital natives, kids who haven’t known a world without iPods and digital cameras, let alone a comfort level with computers.
An MIT student from Austria, Dipl. Ing. Daniel Pressl, is now working on a new idea for the project, Cineatrix. This will combine film, theatre and comics. There are two main thoughts to this program.
CINEATRIX: First and foremost, as a means of story-telling, children will be able to take movies, add special effects to the movies and be able to tell their stories in never imagined ways. The goal for the end of the course is every child will be able to bring a DVD home, to which they have contributed through filming, editing or storytelling.
KIMEKI: The second aim is that children, between 10 and 15 years old, get to teach their technological know-how in media and videography to children between 5 and 10. This extraordinary, media-pedagogical concept has proven to show great possibilities and a new way of learning for children and has been running for the past 4 years, in Austria.
We run parallel sessions in which the older children are trained on our particular hardware/software to do the filming, editing and other finishing stages, and have the older children then turn around and teach these same skills to the Storytellers, the younger children. Foto Compilation of Cineatrix in Austria, Fall 2007:
