Hello, I work with the <snip>; a non-profit organization that does history presentations on the middle ages for schools, libraries and museums in the Pacific Northwest.  We do demonstrations and lectures on historical arms, armor and combat of the middle ages and renaissance (Western Martial Arts). I have been hearing about the concept of a sub $200 laptop for education for quite a while (Ballmer among others) and I find if a fascinating concept.  So first of all kudos to your group at MIT. I was wondering if you were planning on having any sort of educational materials already loaded on the laptops.  Our organization has in the past been asked to be part of educational materials, and we are working towards publishing classroom materials of our own in the next two years. If your group were interested in a few sample history lessons as demonstrations of what your laptop could do; perhaps we could supply you with something both historical and visually interesting. If you have some interest I can be contacted at <snip>

According to the OLPC Timeline, this email dates to before the XO was announced with Nicholas Negreponte and Kofi Annan Unfortunately, OLPC didn’t have Sj yet, so their response was less than thrilling.

Red Hat is our partner and is working on software. The participating countries will also provide their own software. Best wishes, <snip (name removed)>

I could understand brushing me off at such an early phase in OLPC’s development.  But the reply was a bit silly all the same. :)

This is a great example of content that needs to be on the XO.  I found this .svg (scalable vector graphics) file over at wiki commons, which is a great source for educational images.  It’s where I found the images for the Dinosaur eBook actually.

The translation for this image shouldn’t be too hard either.  While IE doesn’t display .svg file in a web page (I had to reformat this to jpg) good browsers do, like firefox and the Browse activity on the XO.  If you don’t have firefox, I highly suggest you download it.  And if you download it from the link to the right > I make a couple bucks.  Firefox is free to you of course, as software should be.