Changes

=== Sugar Digest ===

=== Sugar Digest ===

1. Herramientas pedagógicas: Both Carla Gomez Monroy and María del Pilar Sáenz have drawn attention to the efforts of Telmex to prepare—and share—pedagogical materials for one-to-one computer and the use of Sugar. There is a wiki overflowing with guides, manuals, and lesson plans (See [http://www.mochiladigitaltelmex.com.mx/olpc/index.php/Herramientas_pedag%C3%B3gicas Herramientas Pedagógicas]). This is a great addition to the growing body of materials for teachers, parents, and children. It complements materials being prepared in Uruguay, Peru, Nepal, et al. Please link additional materials to the growing list on the deployment page in the wiki ([[DeploymentTeam#Deployment_guides.2F_Sugar_manuals|Deployment Guides and Sugar Manuals]]).

1. Planes, trains, and automobiles: While everyone else has been preparing for SugarCamp, I've been traveling across Europe, fulfilling some prior commitments. "If it is Monday, this must be Tampere." I had a chance to attend a gathering of the Indo-German Business Forum (http://pratham.de/?p=12) sponsored by Pratham e.V. in Düsseldorf and garnered a lot of interest in the use and support of Sugar in the subcontinent. (Pratham's goal: "Every child in school… and learning well.") I also had a chance to address the free software community at a meeting in Bolzano, Italy, where my theme was the why—not just the how—of Sugar and free software: the appropriation of knowledge within the context of a critical dialog is a powerful model for both learning and software development. I'm in Finland now, fulfilling my obligations as a visiting faculty member at the University of Tampere. I taught a class on journalism and open systems. (In a life before Sugar, I was the running a program at MIT called "News in the Future".) The gist of the program was discuss: our many mistakes from the past and the opportunities afforded by open communication, open knowledge, and open media—concepts that my generation seems to struggle with, but are second nature to the youth of Finland and probably youths everywhere.

2. El Aula Telmex: Another public resource being sponsored by Telmex is Classroom Telmex ([http://www.aulatelmex.com El Aula Telmex]). This site is not Sugar specific, but as it grows it may too be an interesting resource for curricular and extracurricular activities.

3. Scratch Scratch?: Bill Kerr started a discussion thread about a change in the Scratch license (See [http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2008-November/002414.html Scratch license] and [http://scratch.mit.edu/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=76772#p76772 Scratch Forum]). The gist of the thread is that the right to modify Scratch has been removed from the license. We eagerly await clarification the Scratch team.

2. Regional Sugar Labs have been a topic of discussion on each stop in my travels (and also in my recent trip to Peru). A distributed project—we chose to name Sugar Labs, plural deliberately—where there is a local sense of ownership and associated entrepreneurship feels like the right course for us as an organization. Sugar Labs "central" is the community itself, which would be responsible for setting clear goals and maintaining any necessary infrastructure needed by the project as a whole, while the regional labs would use the own means to make Sugar relevant to their local communities. But what is the "business model" for a successful Sugar Lab? It seems that some necessary conditions for success would be:

4. Making a Squeak: Meanwhile, the Squeak/Etoys team continues to wrestle with various up-steam distribution managers regarding inclusion "main". Squeak (which also underlies Scratch) and Etoys are free software, but it seems that there remains some confusion up stream regarding accessing and modifying the source of a "loose and late binding process". I am sure we will manage to work through these issues in order to ensure ready access to a great learning environment.

* a university connection as a local human resource

* a local pilot user group to learn from

* a local passion or sub-goal that provides a rational for the work.

5. SVG: Bill has written a nice tutorial on using SVG in the classroom (See [http://billkerr2.blogspot.com/2008/11/inspired-by-svg.html "Inspired by SVG"]). Meanwhile, I've just about finished the conversion of Turtle Art to SVG: I am hoping an SVG rebase will make it easier to maintain, localize, and modify.

What are other considerations? And are these initial "conditions" correct?

=== Community jams, meet-ups, and meetings ===

3. The impact of Sugar: We need to be able to communicate the impact of Sugar on learning. Some measures are beginning to come in from the field, e.g., the report from Peru I cited last week, however, more concrete numbers and stories of how Sugar has positively change individual lives would be of great value to the project. The audience of these communications are the free software community, educators, educational researchers and activists, philanthropies that can help support the efforts of these groups, and organizations that want to build products or service on top of Sugar (either for or not for profit). Put your stories in the wiki or share them on the mailing lists.

6. SugarCamp: While not all of the details are in place, we will be holding a Sugar Camp in Cambridge the week of 17 November. We've reserved a room at the Cambridge Innovation Center—courtesy of Open Learning Exchange (OLE) beginning at noon (EST). The ''tentative'' schedule is to hold a Sugar sprint Monday and Tuesday, followed by lightening talks about new features beginning on Wednesday. A Sugar planning meeting will be held at the end of the week. See [[Sugarcamp|SugarCamp]] for details as they are finalized.

4. In a related thread, Babu Ram Poudel, deputy director of the department of education in Nepal has posted a white paper entitled "On Using Digital Curriculum and OLPC in Nepal" in order to initiate discussion. I've asked them to post the paper in a public place so that the Sugar community can provide feedback.  

7. Network Manager: Simon Schampijer kept on working on the integration of NM 0.7 in sugar. He finished loading and saving of the connections, we still use the old profile format but will later probably switch to use gconf and gnme-keyring and the WPA part. He is preparing patches now for review and will keep on working on the open issues like the Frame device and auto-connection to saved connections on startup.

=== Community jams, meet-ups, and meetings ===

 

 

Marco also spent time discussing (with Gary Martin, Greg Dekoenigsberg, and Eduardo Silva) how to better handle activity upstream releases.

9. Testing meeting: Mel Chua organized a "great" testing meeting. The [[TestingTeam|Testing Team section]] of the wiki is starting to come into focus.

6. First National Volunteer Network Support Plan Ceibal: On November 15 there was the first national meeting of the  registered volunteers (RAP) for Plan Ceibal, the Sugar/OLPC deployment in Uruguay. The meeting was attended by 300 volunteers, with representatives from 17 departments around the country. The citizens of Uruguay are very active in their efforts to ensure that their national project is a success. It is great that the project is so open to the volunteer community.

10. LiveCD: Wolfgang Rohrmoser has made a new version of the XO-LiveCD. You can download it from: [ftp://rohrmoser-engineering.de/pub/XO-LiveCD/XO-LiveCD_081106.iso XO-LiveCD_081106.iso]

7. [[SugarCamp|Sugar Camp]] is underway in Cambridge.

This release is based on the ext3 image of the stable 8.2 branch, Build 767. The CD contains many activities, including all of the "G1G1" bundle. Further information is available in the PDF document: [ftp://rohrmoser-engineering.de/pub/XO-LiveCD/XO-LiveCD_081106.pdf XO-LiveCD_081106.pdf].

8. [http://www.mashupcamp.com/mountain-view-november/ Mashup Camp Mountain View] will be held on 17–19 November.

=== Sugar Labs ===

=== Sugar Labs ===

9. Self-organizing map (SOM): Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see http://sugarlabs.org/go/Image:2008-November-8-14-som.jpg). It is great that the peak in the center of the image is a cluster of "Sugar", "Work", "Make", and "Think".

 

 

13. Self-organizing map (SOM): Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:Image:2008-November-1-7-som.jpg]]).

=== Community News archive ===

=== Community News archive ===