Changes

This page is updated each week (usually on Monday morning) with notes from the Sugar Labs community. (The digest is also sent to the community-news at sugarlabs.org list, blogged at [http://walterbender.org/ walterbender.org], and archived [[Sugar Labs/Current Events/Archive|here]].) If you would like to contribute, please send email to [[User:walter|walter]] at sugarlabs.org by the weekend. (Also visit <span class="plainlinks">[http://planet.sugarlabs.org planet.sugarlabs.org].</span>)

This page is updated each week (usually on Monday morning) with notes from the Sugar Labs community. (The digest is also sent to the community-news at sugarlabs.org list, blogged at [http://walterbender.org/ walterbender.org], and archived [[Sugar Labs/Current Events/Archive|here]].) If you would like to contribute, please send email to [[User:walter|walter]] at sugarlabs.org by the weekend. (Also visit <span class="plainlinks">[http://planet.sugarlabs.org planet.sugarlabs.org].</span>)

=== Sugar Digest ===

=== Sugar Digest ===  

1. During yesterday's developer meeting on IRC we spontaneously declared that Aleksey Lim (alsroot) is Sugar Labs "Volunteer of the Month". Some quotes from Aleksey's peers: "Now that we have alsroot fixing bugs, maybe we don't need any other people"; "We passed a tipping point a few days back when alsroot was fixing faster than I was able to report them." Many kudos to Aleksey!!

1. At the urging of Yama Ploskonka, I went to Washington to the Interamerican Development Bank (IADB) to attend a [http://www.iadb.org/news/detail.cfm?Language=English&id=5654 seminar], “Reinventing the Classroo: Social and Educational Impact of the Incorporation of Technologies” as part of an ICT for education program.  

2. There has been a great deal of negative press about One Laptop per Child of late—much of it based on misinformation and poor fact-checking. I decided to respond to one [http://www.undispatch.com/node/8859 blog], a particularly disheartening one by Alanna Shaikh on a UN Foundation-sponsored site:

:The stated workshop objectives were: (i) Understand development experiences and case studies national projects for the integration of Information Technology and Communication in education systems, (ii) Discuss how these projects impact on student learning and in developing countries, and (iii) Share about challenges of evaluation and monitoring initiatives at national and regional levels.  

:I am writing in response to Alanna Shaikh's 9/9/09 article, "One Laptop Per Child - The Dream is Over".

My objective was to catch up with people leading the various efforts in the region in order to acquaint them with what we are doing at Sugar Labs.  

:Not only is the dream not over, the OLPC project has created an opportunity for the pursuit of more dreams by many more people.

I missed the opening remarks, but was able to attend the panel discussions: one about implementations and one about “lessons and challenges.”

:I was Nicholas Negroponte's partner in founding One Laptop per Child. As Nicholas has elegantly stated in his response to Ms. Shaikh's blog, we spawned the netbook market, which is bringing the price of computing within reach of millions more people. In addition, we launch a free software initiative, Sugar Labs, that is putting educational software into the hands of children.

It seems that still too many people see ICT as a goal of rather than a means to learning, but it was nonetheless great to get a clearer picture of the various projects in the region.  

:Sugar Labs (www.sugarlabs.org) is an independent outgrowth of OLPC. We are a global community of volunteers—teachers and software developers—whose mission is to bring the advantages of the Sugar learning platform to children everywhere, on any computer. Sugar was designed specially for children and offers a better alternative for young learners than traditional “office-desktop” software. Indeed, nothing in our children's future has anything to do with office work from 30 years ago.

Miguel Brechner, director of LATU and the force behind [http://www.ceibal.edu.uy/ Project CEIBAL] in Uruguay, gave a passionate talk about all that they have accomplished. The bottom line: It is possible, so what are the rest of you waiting for? Among Miguel's “Lessons from Uruguay” was a detailed break down of the total cost of ownership across four years: US$ 276. This includes the cost of the laptop, connectivity—every child in Uruguay gets free Internet access ($31/child/year), servers, spares, maintenance, logistics, delivery, operating costs, et al. Uruguay has already distributed 380,000 laptops to more than 2000 schools and trained more than 18,000 teachers. They have 500 support teachers and 1500 support volunteers helping with training and deployment. In terms of evaluation, there has been little opportunity to report any longitudinal assessments of impact of the deployments are relatively recent, but the early indicators are worth noting:

:Ms. Shaikh is mistaken in her assertion that OLPC has abandoned  “the special child-friendly OS.” More than 99% of the OLPC laptops in the hands of children run Sugar. Governments prefer Sugar because of its superior quality, openness, built-in collaboration, easy internationalization and localization to indigenous languages, and unbeatable price (free).

* There is an increase in self-esteem ;

* There is an increase in interest in learning.;

* There is a dramatic drop in repeated grades;

* There is an increase in basic skills to use computer;

* There is an increased trend to collaboration and sharing ;

:Sugar on a Stick, our latest initiative, allows children fortunate enough to have access to a computer at school, in the community, at home (or only the occasional access to a computer in an Internet café) to benefit from Sugar with a simple USB stick, which costs less than US $5. Sugar on a Stick runs on netbooks, but it also runs on hand-me-down computers, typical of those found in schools, that can only limp along running Windows.

220,000 homes now have computers through Project CEIBAL. Computer penetration in the the poorest households exceeds the  national average.

:We invite you to contact us as we will be pleased to answer any of your questions about Sugar, the free learning platform used in schools every day in countries around the world.

Jorge Pedreira , deputy minster of educational Portugal described Magalhães , which is being deployed nationwide in Portugal. It is a project of inclusion that is leaning heavily on telcom industry partnerships to provide subsidized laptops and connectivity. There is an emphasis on ICT training and school administration enhancements through ICT. For the elementary-aged students, there is a local spin the Classmate PC. They have reached 370,000 students with a dual-boot machine: Windows XP and Caixa Mágica. (Sugar runs on their hardware—I made sure to show the  deputy minster at the coffee break.) Their strategy is: ICT changes education and thus society and this project is a way to get ICT into the classroom .  Pedreira made the point that we need to assess assessment as the children have  new competencies that are not part of the standard metrics.

3. We will be holding the Oversight Board election this month. Details to follow soon.

Alicia Banuelos, Rector at La Punta University described the San Luis Digital Project in San Luis, Argentina. San Luis is a wealthy province—wealthy enough to self-fund a comprehensive program that includes connectivity and computing throughout the community. For the younger children, they have instituted 1-to-1 computing also using Classmate PCs (~7000 computers) running Windows XP. She reported some improvements in language and math scores—she emphasized that the improvement was in both rural and urban schools. She also mentioned that every child is learning chess. Not sure how that impacts the control, but what out Viswanathan Anand.

Simon is also looking for help with testing. We need testing plans for each new [[0.86/Feature_List|feature]] that landed in 0.86. We are looking for someone or a group of people to arrange the testing plans (many of which are contained in Trac tickets) on a wiki page so that testers can test them.

2. Simon Schampijer and our amazing release team are in the final phase of the [[0.86/Roadmap#Schedule|0.86 release cycle]] for more details—the release is scheduled for Friday. Please test and please report any issues you find. The BugSquad is still available to triage bugs.

Once we have the 0.86 packages in the distributions, we will announce it on the mailing list. You are welcome to report bugs you find in [http://trac.sugarlabs.org our bug tracker]. Of course we welcome any efforts to form testing teams and/or to arrange for testing days. Please use the mailing list to coordinate those efforts, so that as many people as possible can join in the fun.

Note that we are now hosting our bug tracker at http://bugs.sugarlabs.org

=== In the community ===

=== In the community ===  

5. The Uruguay National Public Education Administration Council of Early Childhood Education and Primary Public Relations announced a [http://www.uruguaypiensa.org.uy contest], "Uruguay of Ideas" directed towards school students and teachers to blogs about ideas for Plan Ceibal, the Uruguay OLPC/Sugar deployment.

3. [http://softwarefreedomday.org Software Freedom Day] is 19 September. There are celebrations from [http://groups.fsf.org/wiki/Boston_Software_Freedom_Day Boston] to [http://softwarefreedomday.org/teams/SFD_Bogota Bogata] to [Melbourne, Sat 19th September

http://www.softwarefreedomday.org/melb Melbourne].

6. There will be a Sugar/OLPC meeting in Buenos Aires on Saturday, 26 September. It will be held at the headquarters of the American Open University, Montes de Oca 745 from 9:00 to 13:00.

4. Donna Benjamin reports that [http://open-edge.info  Open Edge 2009]: The Australian Open Education Forum is 9 October at [http://open-edge.info/our-venue-sceggs SCEGGS] in Sydney.  

===Sugar Labs===  

 

 

 

===Sugar Labs===

 

=== Community News archive ===

=== Community News archive ===