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Line 7: − + − 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.+ − The ''Globe'' reports that the Obama administration is considering using "value-added" studies as a component of metrics for evaluating teachers and tying 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.+ − 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:+ − * 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. − + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + − 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.+ − 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.+ − 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 copyright.+ + + + + + + − 6. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:File:2009-October-24-30-som.jpg|SOM]]).+ +
Sugar Labs/Current Events (view source)
Revision as of 14:30, 16 November 2009
, 14:30, 16 November 2009→What's new
=== Sugar Digest ===
=== Sugar Digest ===
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.
1. I am writing this update today while waiting to see if I will called to jury duty. I was originally supposed to report last week, but a deferment was granted since I was in Bolzano. I am not sure why I had never been called before—both my wife and children have served several times. But unlike the airport in Rome, there is at least a place to sit and plug in my laptop and get on-line while I wait, so here it goes.
I was in Rome overnight in transit from Bolzano, where we held a week-long [[Marketing_Team/Events/Sugarcamp_Bolzano_2009|Sugar Camp]]. Bolzano is in South Tyrol, in the Italian Alps. The autonomous regional government is a user of free software and is exploring ways in which they can engage the FOSS community more deeply. They have a regional development organization, [http://www.tis.bz.it/ TIS], that fosters FOSS projects in the region, provides infrastructure and support, and an annual Free Software Week. It was in the context of [http://www.freesoftwareweek.org/ Free Software Week] that we came to Bolzano.
Rather than meet at TIS, we (Simon Schampijer, Tomeu Vizoso, Dave Farning, Sean Daly, Stefan Unterhauser (Dogi), Carlo Falciola, Adam Holt, Christian Vanizette, and I) spent the week at [http://www.cts-einaudi.it/ CTS Luigi Einaudi], a technical school a short walk from the city center. We were given a comfortable room with Internet access, just upstairs from the school's coffee bar and next door to where the [http://live.gnome.org/ZeitgeistHackFest2009 Gnome Zeitgeist team] was meeting. Over the course of the week, we interacted with teachers, students, developers, and a variety of people in the region who have an interest in Sugar.
We had a busy week. My typical day was to get up at 6:00, go down stairs for an early breakfast with David, who would have already been up for at least an hour, take a 20-minute walk to the school, arriving at 8:00, in time for the first expresso of the day. We'd write code, discuss ideas, brainstorm, and write more code until 20:00, at which point we'd make a plan for dinner—usually a pizza or some knudel and the local weizenbier or a glass of lagrein. Somehow or other, we would never manage to get back to the hostel until after midnight. Pizza, Python, and friends, surrounded by the Dolomites—not a bad way to spend the week.
We made progress on the roadmap for 0.88, having [[File:Ideas_0.88_0.90.pdf brainstormed on a number of topics]]. The themes that rose to the top were: a simplified collaboration model; resolution of some outstanding issues regarding the Home View, e.g., how to best launch new verses resume activities; and some changes to the Journal—possibily the incorportation of versions and a better integration of the Journal into the activity workflow, e.g., making it possible to modify the description field while the activity is open. Other themes include accessibility and testing.
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).
Simon organized the discussions through the week. He kept us focused and productive. He also got some hacking in, spending time working through many of the issues associated with providing global support for spell-check. In doing this, he'll have laid out the framework for providing other global services.
Tomeu spend most of his week being interrupted by people asking him questions. (Five minutes of Tomeu time usually was enough to keep me busy for a few hours.) But he did manage to make progress on his work on Python interspection. This work will lead to a much more efficient use of Python modules in Sugar.
David and Dogi (working with Bernie and Aleksey from afar) did an overhaul of some of our back-end systems, which had been becoming stressed as more and more people are using Sugar. (For example, we've already surpassed 1.5-million downloads from activities.sugarlabs.org. It was just a few weeks ago that we reached the 1-million milestone.) They have also stream-lined the process for setting up local mirrors. We encourage you to set up a mirror in your region. (Argentina and Paraguay have recently set up mirrors.)
Carlo help us in drafting [[a set of guidelines]] by which third parties might work with Sugar Labs in establishing various value-added services to the Sugar user community. We will be discussing these guidelines over the next few weeks. We also spent time with Patrick Ohnewein from TIS to discuss opportunities specific to South Tyrol.
Sean and Christian discussed a number different opportunities regarding marketing. One idea that emerged is ''The Sugar Journal'', along the lines of ''The Perl Journal'', which would include articles written by teachers, developers, and other community members.
For my part, I spent most of the week sketching out some ideas. I coded up a [http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xb44q3_color-selector-2_tech color selector] for both the control panel (it has changed a bit since I made the screencast) and the initial start screen and started coding up an activity toolbar widget for accessing the journal detail view from within an activity (as opposed to as you exit an activity), and I learned a bit more about Cairo (it uses a display list) from Tomeu in my efforts to refactor the turtle graphics with in Turtle Art.
We had a series of really good discussions with the [http://live.gnome.org/GnomeZeitgeist Zeitgeist] team. Their work definitely has long-term implications for the Journal and they expressed interest in making their work relevant to our needs.
We also got some help on the Record activity from Daniel Siegel, the author of [http://projects.gnome.org/cheese/tour Cheese] diagnosed the problems we are having with Blueberry (apprently there is a Cairo bug in Fedora 12) and on the OLPC XO 1.5 hardware (there is a missing driver).
2. Before heading to Bolzano, I made a quick trip to the West Coast to give a keynote that the QT Developers Day conference. Lots of enthusiasm for Sugar and lots of work being put into Qt on small-footprint devices.
3. Eric Bachard has announced [http://eric.bachard.free.fr/news/2009/11/ooo4kidsactivityxo-is-available.html the availability of the Sugar port of OOo4Kids] (Open Office for Kids). A .xo bundle should be available for download from [http://activities.sugarlabs.org activities.sugarlabs.org] soon.
4. We had a Sugar Labs oversight board meeting last Friday in which we discussed mailing list policies. The meeting [[Oversight_Board/Meeting_Log-2009-11-13|log]] is available in the wiki. The next meeting is scheduled for Friday, 20 November 2009 at 15:00 UTC (10:00 EST).
5. The Spanish-language version of Sdenka Z. Salas Pilco's guide to using Sugar in the classroom is available on the wiki (Please see [[File:La_Laptop_XO_en_el_Aula.pdf]]).
=== In the community ===
=== In the community ===
6. OLPC Germany will meet in Hamburg on November 22. Please see [http://wiki.olpc-deutschland.de/wiki/Mitgliederversammlung/2009 Mitgliederversammlung 2009]. Everyone interested in OLPC and Sugar is invited!
7. OLPC-San Francisco and OLPC NYC are planning community summits on November 21. Please see [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_SanFranciscoBayArea/OLPCSF_Community_Summit_2009 OLPC SF Community Summit 2009].
=== Tech Talk ===
=== Tech Talk ===
8. Sebastian Dziallas announced that after considering input from the various teams involved in Sugar Labs and the Sugar on a Stick creation, we're shifting the release schedule as follows:
:2009-11-17 Fedora 12 Final Release
:2009-11-29 Image Gold Master Creation & Upload
:2009-12-08 Sugar on a Stick (Blueberry) Public Release
Please consider Sugar on a Stick V2 to be in freeze.
=== Sugar Labs ===
=== Sugar Labs ===
9. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past two weeks of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:File:2009-Oct-31-Nov-6-som.jpg|SOM]] and [[:File:2009-November-7-13-som.jpg|SOM]]).
=== Community News archive ===
=== Community News archive ===