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[clew]

I've been noodling around trying to figure out who's producing third-world¹ 'content' suitable for schools. A few experienced third-world educators are unimpressed by the XO-as-textbook because there aren't a lot of local textbooks, in print or online, and teaching the kids normative Anglo material is less than ideal.

The laptop.org Content http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Contributing_content page has contact people, and the outlines of libraries, but nothing I can see how to help.
The Project Gutenberg has plentiful material for children, but it's mostly normative-Anglo (and some is really historically.... slanted). The Distributed Proofreaders exist to scan, proofread, and reformat public domain works to provide them to Project Gutenberg. When I asked on DP, a DP-moderator (with an XO! There is much overlap of temperament and interests) assumed that because OLPC knows about PG, it knows about DP; one could send DP volunteers physical books to get them scanned and prepped.

But my unscientific survey of acquaintances suggests that a lot of people know about PG who don't know about DP. And getting copies of old books, in foreign languages, and guessing which would be useful to schools, is hard.

¹ My favorite of the approximate names -- because we're all in the third world (from the sun).

[Kelly73]

What I'm curious about is what kinds of universal activities, rather than those tailored to a specific country or language, could be developed.  Is this the correct thread for this question?

[xoring]

I think it is the correct thread.

However, as I voiced on the blog comments, I think we need to pressure OLPC with responsibility of identifying these needs. As Bryan Berry of OLE Nepal pointed out, the vast majority of programmers do NOT have the proper skills to identify the needs of students nor the method required to alleviate that need. What we need is for OLPC to identify those needs and task the programmer-community to develop software according to educator-specified criteria.

Failing that, we need to find educators in the community who can identify these needs and develop criteria for addressing them. Everyone agrees that the XO is missing two major things: content and documentation. This Forum has helped to address the lack of documentation. I haven't yet seen a project or solid plan which addresses the lack of content.