10,579
edits
Changes
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
Line 5:
Line 5: − It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies. They are not here to worship what is known, but to question it. --Jacob Bronowski+ + − + − Two things brought me to Tel Aviv: the Shaping the Future conference on educational technology and the possibility of a Sugar deployment in the Negev.+ − The conference, sponsored by CET [http://cet.org.il] was very stimulating. I hung out in the policy track to try to get an insight into the government decision-making process. Not sure I came away with any new ideas, but I did make some new friends, including former governor Bob Wise from West Virginia. The governor knows Idit Harel, whose MamaMedia group contributed some early apps [http://www.mamamedia.com/] to Sugar. He is presently President, Alliance for Excellent Education [http://www.all4ed.org]. I was impressed by his pragmatism.+ − − CET itself is quite impressive in the degree to which they mix deep thinking about pedagogy with practical development of learning materials. Many thanks to my hosts, Gila, Avi, and Cecelia. They will be involved in whatever ends up happening in the Negev. It is looking as if it will be an Android tablet deployment, so they are hoping to pull together a team to help the Sugar community to accelerate its efforts to get Sugar (or a Sugar-like experience) running on Android. Stay tuned. − − − − At the OLPC AU office, we spent several days brainstorming about ways to add value to the overall program in Australia, which goes beyond distributing hardware and software to providing training, support, and sharing of resources. It is a program with great potential. − − One highlight was meeting Ian Mackie, who is deeply invested in the prosperity of the indigenous peoples of Australia. He is excited about the prospects of getting local language support into Sugar. I have connected him with Chris Leonard. − − I also got to spend some time with a former student, Vadim Gerasimov, who is working for Google in Sydney. Vadim is helping me with a GDrive webservice for Sugar. We have a command-line version working and I hope to have it integrated into Sugar in short order. − − − − 3. I neglected to mention that Sugar Labs has received about 200 USB keys from the Recycle USB program [http://www.recycleusb.com] run by Nexcopy [http://www.nexcopy.com]. My plan is to distribute these keys (with Sugar installed) on Turtle Art Day, which is scheduled for 12 October. − + − + − * XSCE now runs on the XO-1.5,XO-1.75 and XO-4. − * Modular Architecture: cleanly integrate extendable services. − * XSCE runs on the XOs' current OS 13.1.0 (we discovered some wrinkles with 13.2.0 which push its use off to the next release) − * Moodle is Back! − * Content filtering via openDNS.com − * Script for formatting of SD cards, and integration into system for content sto − rage and memory extending swap file (does not work on XO4's) − − Since then, there has been another School Server code sprint (hosted by Jerry Vonau) documented here [https://www.facebook.com/UnleashKids]. − + − +
→Sugar Digest
== Sugar Digest ==
== Sugar Digest ==
"Dr. Ambedkar believed that ... to escape from oppression, they had to ... ‘educ
ate, agitate and organize’ their way to emancipation." --Ramachandra Guha
1. It has been a long while since my last post. Too much travel. I started writing this post sitting at the gate in Tel Aviv, waiting for my flight to New York to depart. (My second overnight flight in three days.) Since then, I have also been to Sydney and back (for the second time in two months).
1. Just for fun, taking inspiration from a conversation with Manuel Quiñones, I added a new sample program to Turtle Art. The [https://git.sugarlabs.org/turtleart/mainline/blobs/raw/master/samples/sensors-record.tb sensor-record.tb project] lets the user draw a picture with the mouse (or touch) and generates on the fly a Turtle Art project that will reproduce the drawing. Silly, but fun nonetheless. It comes bundled with the Version 185 of Turtle Blocks. (I still have the goal to recreate all of Sugar in Turtle Art.)
2. I also finally got around to writing a variant of [[Activities/Turtle_Confusion|Turtle Confusion ]] based on flags. [[Activities/TurtleFlags|Turtle Flags]] uses a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallery_of_sovereign-state_flags database of national flags] from the Wikipedia to present programming challenges. The first flag is Peru, which is red and white stripes. But things get more challenging from there.
3. [http://www.spiritualityforkids.com/ Spirituality for Kids] is a website that attempts to help children "understand the benefits of human dignity, tolerance, connecting to self, community, and the world, they are better equipped to become conscious leaders in their homes, schools and communities." I've worked with them to convert some of their material into a series of Sugar activities (See [http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4679]). Two caveats: (1) the activities contain some rather large OGV videos, so be prepared for long download times and make sure you have plenty of available disk space. (I had broken the original activity up into 6 parts to address this, but may have to break it up even further.); and (2) the content is English only at the moment. I am working with them on packaging their Spanish-language videos.
I met up with Claudia Urrea and Gonzalo Odiard in Sydney. We spend five days with Rangan Srikhanta and the OLPC AU team. The first day we visited a school in the outskirts of Sydney that is using Sugar. I was thrilled to see the children engaged in problem solving, using the computer as a tool, working in small groups in the classroom, each group self-directed. No babysitting with rote-learning games.
2. During my blogging hiatus, Google Summer of Code began. Our Google Summer of Code students are Kalpa, Marion, Rahul, Suraj, Akshit, Anna, Casey, and Erik. We have a group meeting every Friday at 13:00 EST on #sugar-meeting. Please join us.
=== In the community ===
=== In the community ===
4. The RIT Center for Media, Arts, Games, Interaction & Creativity (MAGIC) is pleased to announce that a student-led project entitled “Sky Time” has been selected for inclusion in the White House Champions of Change event on July 23rd in Washington, D.C. [http://foss.rit.edu/skytime-whitehouse].
4. It is official: International Turtle Art Day will be on October 12. Pacita Peña and Cecilia Alcala will be hosting an event in Caacupé and there will be other events around the world sharing ideas and resources. More details soon.
=== Tech Talk ===
=== Tech Talk ===
5. A few months back, George Hunt announced the release of XSCE 0.3 [http://schoolserver.org/0.3]:
5. I've been working in enhancing the intra-Sugar statistics gathering mechanism in order to "make learning visible" to the child and classroom teacher. We landed a patch to Sugar a while ago to record activity launch times (previously, just the most recent launch time was recorded). With these new data, it is possible to not just make visible which activities have been used, but also, how often each instance of an activity has been used. I've modified the [[Activities/Analyze_Journal|Analyze Journal activity]] to reflect these changes and Gonzalo Odiard and I are working on a [[Features/Classroom_management|classroom management system]] to facilitate sharing of these data between the learner and the classroom teacher. This is very early in the effort: comments and feedback most welcome.
6. We are making much progress on the road to the Sugar 0.100 (1.0) release. Daniel Narveaz and Manuel Quiñones continue pushing forward on the HTML5/Javascript support [http://developer.sugarlabs.org/web-architecture.md.html]. Suraj has been blogging about his efforts [http://surajgillespie123.wordpress.com/2013/07/08/gsoc/]. I spent the weekend writing my first JS Sugar activity [http://people.sugarlabs.org/walter/ConnecttheDots-1.xo]. Lots to learn.
6. Daniel Drake got married this week in Nicaragua! Congratulations and best wishes for a joyful union. The festivities did not deter Daniel from announcing the release of OLPC OS 13.2.0 for XO-1, XO-1.5, XO-1.75 and XO-4. Details of new features, known issues, and how to download/install/upgrade can all be found in the [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_notes/13.2.0 release notes]. Many thanks Daniel, who lead the release process and to all contributors, testers, up-streams, and those who have provided feedback of any kind. This is by far the best OLPC/Sugar release yet! (Also, there is a really nice article about what else Daniel has been doing in Nicaragua [http://www.laprensa.com.ni/2013/07/24/reportajes-especiales/155871-isla-maestros?movil here].)
=== Sugar Labs ===
=== Sugar Labs ===
7. Please visit (and contribute to) our planet [http://planet.sugarlab.org].
7. Please visit (and contribute to) our [http://planet.sugarlabs.org planet].
== Community News archive ==
== Community News archive ==