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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. Tales from Peru. I spend a three exhilarating days in Peru this week. As is the case with most flights from the States, I arrived in Lima close to midnight on Wednesday. But I managed to get to the ministry of education for an early morning meeting with Victor Castillo, the pedagogical lead with the Peru one-laptop-per-child program. Peru has deployed hundreds of thousands of machines in some of the most remote regions in the country. Victor gave me an update about the program and briefed me on the IADB-sponsored evaluation. When I asked him what more the development community could do, he response was that he wanted less—fewer activities—because every time we add more, there is a need for more training, which is difficult given the remoteness of the schools. What Victor then explained was that he wanted a solid base of around ten activities from which the teachers and children would grow—"low floor no ceiling". Being able to "hide" additional activities behind the circle in the list view is a feature that he looks forward to when they upgrade their machines. The cleanliness and simplicity of the 0.86 toolbar was appreciated, as well as the ubiquitous presence of the Stop Button. But we do need to be vigilant not to overload Sugar with extraneous features. Less really is more.

1. Steve Levitt and Stephen Dubner are back in the news. Their new book, ''SuperFreakonomics'' is getting panned by the critics—the ''Boston Globe'' referred to it as ''[http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/11/01/the_freakonomics_duo_tackles_climate_change____and_discovers_the_limits_of_cleverness Sloppynomics]''. I haven't read it yet, so I won't pass judgment. However, I found the first book in the series, ''Freakonmics'', provocative but misguided. The chapter on nature vs. nurture was especially misleading. In it, the authors compared the academic performance—as measured by standardized tests—of children adopted into families with children born into the same families. Nature prevailed over nurture. Alas, there are any number of flaws and holes in their data analysis, but what was most damning was a throw-away comment at the end of the chapter: in life after school, there was no difference in performance between the two subject pools. So all they really demonstrated is that there is no correlation between standardized test scores and life skills. Given the penchant that we have for valuing that which we can measure instead of measuring that which we value, this would have been a provocative result, but not one picked up on by Levitt and Drucker.

I also talked with Oscar Becerra, who is leading the project in Peru. He voiced a concern about not introducing change for change sake, but nonetheless we agreed that Sugar 0.86 would be a positive step forward—one that perhaps could be made in conjunction with the introduction of the OLPC XO-1.5 machines. We also discussed using Sugar on a Stick as a way to reach more children sooner, as given budget constraints, it will take many years to reach the point where every child can be given a laptop.

What brought this to mind was that on the opposite page from the book review was [http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/11/01/a_way_to_improve_schools_one_instructor_at_a_time an article advocating for the use of standardized test data] to "measure the difference a teacher makes." Numerous studies "use a statistical analysis of standardized test results to measure the 'value added' that each teacher contributes each year." I am not opposed to trying to measure both student and teacher performance. If nothing else, it provides a forum for reflection, an important part of the learning process.

Thursday evening, I attened a meeting for Sugar community volunteers organized by Sebastian Silva [www.fuentelibre.org FuenteLibre] and Kiko Mayorga [escuelab.org Escuelab] at Escuelab's facility in Lima's Centro Historico. The Escuelab is in a beautiful space—labs on one floor, residence on another. I walked in to the sight of a roomful of machines running Sugar on Trisquel. The young son of one of the attendees was exploring Sugar for the first time. When he got to the Physics activity, I was transfixed. He was playing the activity like a musical instrument, a fluid dance of objects bouncing around the screen in unexpected configurations. Amazing.

The ''Globe'' reports that the Obama administration is considering using "value-added" studies as a component of metric for evaluating teachers and ting teacher pay to "what is happening in each classroom" as a central part of school reform. "Developing, rewarding, and retaining effective teachers" is a great goal. Let's just take care to measure the whole child and the whole teacher when we presume to measure effectiveness.

The meeting itself also had its surprises. More than forty people of diverse ?? crowded into the room; an animated discussion ensued (en español). There is passion and talent in the Sugar community in Peru and they are getting organized. Stay tuned.

2. We had a Sugar Labs oversight board meeting last Friday in which we reached consensus on a more formal set of rules regarding quorum and voting by the board: we require a minimum quorum of four members present in order to initiate a vote and a majority of all members (four) for a passing vote. We will accept votes by email. We also established a mechanism for oversight-board members and community members to raise discussion topics. Community members should email any SLOBs member with a topic suggestion before the start of a board meeting. The meeting chair will triage discussion-topic requests. To increase the likelihood that your discussion topic "rises to the top" of the queue, please include:

The next morning I went to visit a school in Chaclayo. As always, it is thrilling to see children using Sugar, even though in this case, it was Sugar from two-years ago. They were using Write, Record, Chess, and Paint. I gave a Turtle Art lesson, which was a treat for me. The one negative were the touchpads. They were jumping all over the place, which, in this old version of Sugar, caused the Frame to appear sporadically. It was really disruptive. More resent versions of Sugar don't have this problem. We need to get an upgrade to these kids.

# a link to existing discussion thread(s) on public mailing list;

# a ''brief'' summary of each option or alternative being proposed; and

# a rationale for why this issue needs to escalate to the oversight board.

I spent Saturday at the University of San Martin de Porres, host to the [http://fosd.libreusmp.org Fourth Freedom & Open Source Day]. I used the theme "turtles all the way down" in my talk, arguing both the need for freedom for education and education for freedom. I started my talk with a puzzle: 0, 1, 2, 720!. What comes next? For some people, this puzzle is pretty easy because they immediately make the connection between 720 and 6!. And since 6 is 3!, a quick series of substitutions lead you to: 0, 1!, 2!!, 3!!!, 4!!!!, … Why did I bring this up? I wanted to make a point about low-shelf vs high-shelf tools. We all have tools on our low shelf, easy to access. If 6!=720 is on your low shelf, this was an easy puzzle. If it is on your high shelf, you had to reach for the solution. If it wasn't on either shelf, you had to work even harder, or perhaps you gave up entirely. I went on to argue that computation should be on every child's low shelf.

The meeting [[Oversight_Board/Meeting_Log-2009-10-30|log]] and [[Oversight_Board/Meeting_Minutes-2009-10-30|minutes]] are available in the wiki. The next meeting is scheduled for Friday, 6 November 2009 at 15:00 UTC (10:00 EST).

I spent the rest of the day at working with the student group, Cixos-FIA (cixosfia.libreusmp.org). We did a 30-minute code sprint and wrote the stub of an activity. (Actually, it took 45 minutes, because I was using vi.) I installed emacs and then we really started making headway, enough to consider setting up our project in git. We installed git and then it was time to create a new project on Gitorious. When we went to push, we discovered that there was a firewall. So we installed tor, but there was a missing dependency, connect, for which we could only find the source, not a binary. We installed gcc, compiled it, and we were able to push [http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/cixos our project]. It was actually nice to encounter so many roadblocks, but persist and prevail.

=== In the community ===

2. There was an [[Oversight_Board/Meeting_Log-2009-10-23|Oversight Board meeting]] at the same time as I was visiting the school. Our next meeting will be this Friday (30 Oct) on #sugar-meeting at 14:00 UTC.

3. Christoph Derndorfer will be speaking about Sugar and OLPC at the [http://events.ccc.de/congress/2009/wiki/index.php/Welcome 26th Chaos Communication Congress (26C3)] in Berlin on 27–20 December. He would like to organize a meetup of European Sugar Labs / OLPC contributors and people who might be interested in working with us in the future.

3. Josh Williams has been making updates to activities.sugarlabs.org. You can check out his work at

4. We will be holding a Sugar Camp beginning next weekend in Bolzano at the TIS innovation center. We hope to make a lot of progress on 0.88 as well as build upon our various ties to the GNOME community, which also meeting in Bolzano.

Speaking of ASLO, 200,000 more activities have been downloaded in the two weeks since we hit the one-million-download milestone.

5. Thanks to the efforts of Josh Williams, Aleksey Lim, and David Farning, the new [http://activities.sugarlabs.org activities] site went on-line over the weekend. The new look is clean and also in compliance with Mozilla copy

===Sugar Labs===  

=== Sugar Labs ===

 

=== Community News archive ===

=== Community News archive ===