1. Aotearoa
  2. OLPC Friends
  3. in Testing

Tabitha Roder

When did you first become involved in One Laptop Per Child project?

My first experience of an XO was when Martín Langhoff was using the Memorize activity to teach me some Spanish words and on various flights showed me some of the other activities. By June 2008 I was a regular user of the XO and by November 2008 was coordinating a weekly testing session in Wellington, New Zealand.

What drew you to the project?

I am an educator and it did not take much convincing for me to see the benefits OLPC and Sugar bring to education, particularly for children in developing countries and remote locations. I have been involved in the Moodle community since about 2003 so am well familiar with the social constructivist approach. Both OLPC and Sugarlabs are well grounded in solid educational theory and are very easy to get passionate about and contribute to.

What is your role in OLPC today?

Coordinating the volunteer efforts in New Zealand to bring maximum benefit to the OLPC and Sugarlabs community, as well as raising awareness wherever possible. Offering support to deployments as well as testing for developers, hosting events and presenting at conferences, and assisting New Zealand schools to trial Sugar. I was also on the Sugarlabs Sugar on a Stick (SoaS) decision panel (established September 2009) to investigate how SoaS should be treated by Sugarlabs, exploring questions like "should Sugar Labs be a GNU/Linux distributor, rather than just an upstream producing Sugar releases" and should Sugar Labs be neutral about distributions containing Sugar and refuse to endorse one over another".

Where is your home town?

I grew up around the Auckland region of New Zealand, but have lived away from there for 3 1/2 years, now located in Wellington, New Zealand's capital city.

Where in the world do you live now?

New Zealand

What other education or software projects have you been involved in?

Moodle - an open source (distributed under GPL) learning management system.

What are your plans from here?

Keep spreading the word. Keep New Zealand as a top testing centre. Help NZ primary schools trial Sugar. Get Sugar translated into Maori and other pacific languages. Help pacific region deployments and any other deployments where possible.

Is there something else you want to add?

This is a project worthy of the time that the volunteers contribute. If you don't already support it, you should consider it. There are not many projects that have such a huge impact for so many of the next generation. Thanks for the interview Brenda.

Tabitha

* Twitter - tabitharoder
* Identi.ca - tabitha
* Sugar wiki - http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/User:Tabitha
* IRC http://webchat.freenode.org tabs (usually on #olpc, #olpc-au and #sugar)
* Website - http://tabitha.net.nz

Tim Clicks

When did you start being an OLPC volunteer? July 2009

How did you start being an OLPC volunteer? I had heard about OLPC as the “$100 laptop project” in 2007. I heard you could only get them overseas. Later on I took the open source plunge and installed Ubuntu, then this other software project I was involved with were experimenting with the OLPC computer. That made me search the web and I found the Wellington testing group page on the internet. I thought I would contact them and see where it goes. For the first two weeks I learned about how the machine worked. I was lucky enough to be given an XO to take home. I was hooked.

What is the other software project you are involved in? Sahana (relief in Sinhalese), a project aimed at enhancing coordination in emergencies, particularly in developing countries and locations with weak networks and computer power. There are some nice synergies between the aims of the two projects. I thought I would learn about how OLPC computers have been overcoming the same issues of connectivity and power in developing countries.

What are your plans from here? I really want to help bring Sugar into New Zealand schools. I don’t think it is fair that students need to be impaired because their school couldn't afford the latest software and I feel that the Sugar project could bridge that gap.

Is there something else you want to add? I would really encourage people to learn more about Sugar, and Sugar on a Stick. I would like the laptop.org.nz website to become the go to place for New Zealanders wanting to extend the education opportunities available for their children.

Because Sugar runs on almost all computers that are in use today - I would like to see it being promoted to let children whose families cannot afford the latest gadgets. Sugar could easily rejuvenate a 2nd hand computer. This sounds much more sensible than throwing it out.

DSC04578

Thanks to Tim McNamara for participating in this interview. You can find out more about Tim and his contact details:

* Twitter or Identi.ca - timClicks
* Sugar wiki - http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/User:TimClicks
* IRC http://webchat.freenode.org timClicks (usually on #sahana, #olpc, #olpc-au and #sugar)
* Facebook http://facebook.com/timClicks

Syndicate content