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Line 3: − + − + − snow, hence a lot of reflecting. Looking back, I came across a − [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7094695.stm quote] from 2007: − "change equals risk". At the time, I was speaking out against − incremental change to a global educational system that was failing to − meet the needs of our children. The ''status quo'' was failing – and is − still failing – and we embarked upon a path to do something about − it. We developed a deployable model of one-to-one computing enabling − us to advocate for a pedagogy of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructionism_%28learning_theory%29 constructionist learning], where "learning can happen most effectively − when people are also active in making tangible objects in the real − world." − Over the course of four years, we've put Sugar into the hands of+ − almost two million children. Our goal has been to give them a+ − "learning platform" – one that encourages them to be expressive with − knowledge, to collaborate, and to reflect. − While we have had impact in the formal setting of the classroom, with+ − Sugar, there is an opportunity for using Sugar in an informal setting − − learner has more of an opportunity to dig more deeply into areas of − personal interest. In Caacupé, for example, there has been extensive − use of Saturday learning clubs. In Rwanda, informal time for the − computer is being allocated at the end of the school day. − We have not been advocating "anything goes"; nor have we been anti+ − teacher. Rather, we have been encouraging "guided discovery", where − the teacher has an active role in steering the learners towards − "powerful ideas" and engaging the learners in reflection and a − critical dialogue about their work. Sugar facilitates this dialogue by − providing tools, e.g., the Journal, in support of reflection. − Our interventions are guided with a goal in mind –+ − [http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2006/06/allocation-vs-markets-ancient-struggle.html the empowerment of individual competitive and cooperative opportunity]. − :"It would take wit, insight and incredible perspective for many of them to pull back and admit: "Wait... I am prescribing the very thing I should hate. What I really ought to want are genuinely liberal markets, in which the state ensures that all players get to know and negotiate and play the great creative game from a level playing field. Yes, that will mean some "allocating" to raise up poor children to be ABLE to compete well. And yes we must allocate to take into account the needs of generations yet to come. But the thing I am devoted to is not allocation, ''per se''! The thing I am dedicated to is giving all people (including those yet to come) a fair chance to play." —David Brin+ − + − A theme I have taken up repeatedly since we started Sugar Labs is+ − sustainability. We have not been interested in resilience in the usual − sense of trying to sustain the ''status quo''. Rather, we are trying to − give children the capacity to grow and adapt so that they can thrive − in a changing and challenging world. − − Looking forward in 2011, we have any number of technical challenges: − Python introspection, GNOME 3.0, etc. in order to advance the utility, − stability, and maintainability of our product. A recent GNOME camp − attended by Simon Schampijer and Tomeu Vizoso suggest that these are − achievable goals. We have some refactoring to do in order to better − support accessibility. Lots of minor patches in service of deployments − are being submitted by the Dextrose team (a combined effort of some of − our deployments, community members, and Activity Central employees. We − have several efforts to revitalize the Sugar-on-a-Stick and Virtual − Sugar projects, as accessibility to Sugar remains our biggest − technical challenge. (Indeed, a recent marketing survey conducted by a − team of Sloan students suggested that while 90% of those surveyed − recommend Sugar to others, only 33% of those who then try to download − Sugar are successful.) − − Meanwhile, we continue to debate core issues regarding Sugar as it − relates not just to usability, but also to how Sugar impacts − learning. Towards that goal, we face social and organizational − challenges: working with deployments; working with teachers; working − with end users. Claudia Urea's [[olpc:Spanish_Chat | weekly learning chat]] has been a model − that I hope we can scale up in coming months. Pablo Flores is also − working on various models of community outreach. − − Sugar is as much a service as a product. As a community we have not − put as much effort into that aspect of our offering. I am hopeful that − a large portion of our services will be offered by our growing number − of local labs. But we need to ensure adequate support for those − efforts. − 2. A few weeks ago I was at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). The+ − small, inexpensive, connected device was ubiquitous. We have to think − about what role these devices may play in learning and if or how Sugar − (or some derivative of Sugar) will be part of the mix, i.e., are there − aspects of Sugar that we should be exporting into the context of − Android? Perhaps the biggest challenge is how to bring the spirit of − appropriation to these platforms which are first and foremost tools of − consumption. − === Help wanted ===+ − 3. Chris Leonard is looking for help with translations. "Just about+ − every language (besides Spanish) has some strings that need work. − Please consider volunteering some time and effort to improve the − localization in your favorite language. Recruiting new localizers is − also a very valuable contribution." See − http://translate.sugarlabs.org/ − === In the community ===+ − 4. We are in the process of rethinking our wesite design and also the+ − collection of tools we use for communicating with the Sugar − community. Please add your suggestions to − [[Blogs#Possible_tools_for_a_new_community_site|possible tools for a − new community site.]] − 5. The [http://www.federacionciclistauruguaya.com.uy/ Tour of Uruguay]+ − will be taking place in late March. The Sugar Labs-affiliated − [http://www.slipstreamsports.com/ cycling team] will be one of the − teams participating. We should do something − with the community involving the physics of cycling (e.g., − [[Activities/TurtleArt/Using_Turtle_Art_Sensors#Bicycle_trip_computer|odometer]]) − and maps (e.g., get every child to − document the part of the race that goes through their town or village) − and whatever other ideas people have. − === Tech Talk ===+ + − 6. I've been tardy in acknowledging the release of os860 from OLPC. It+ − is the latest "official" release for the XO-1 and XO-1.5 laptops. The − release is based on Fedora 11 and contains the latest Sugar 0.84 − (including many backported patches from more recent Sugar releases) − and the GNOME desktop. See − [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_notes/10.1.3 release notes]. − Many thanks to everyone Simon Schampijer, Martin Langhoff, and the+ − OLPC Association team, who led a group of testers, translators, − documenters, developers and others!! − A few selected highlights (from Simon's release notes):+ − * We have significantly improved collaboration when XO-1.5 is used with no Access Points available ("under a tree"). The Neighborhood View now shows three default Ad-hoc networks (for channels 1, 6, and 11) in user-friendly icons, and XOs will auto-connect without user intervention. This behavior is similar to the "mesh" behavior on XO-1.+ − * You may now share Journal entries with another learner using a USB drive or SD card. The user experience is: Martin wants to give a picture he has been drawing to Simon. He plugs in his USB drive and copies the Journal entry on the drive. Simon plugs in Martin's drive in his laptop. The entry will be shown with Martin's XO color on the drive. Simon copies Martin's entry into his Journal.+ − * We have added support for USB2VGA adapters. You can now connect an XO to a projector over a USB2VGA adapter and project what is on your XO screen onto a screen or for many people to see.+ − + − * In this build certain activities are protected from being deleted by accident. In the activity list in the home view the erase option is disabled for those. Protected activities are: Browse, Terminal, Log, Write, ImageViewer and Record. Note that the user can still install newer versions of these activities. − − 7. Tom Gilliard (satellit) has been making steady progress on Sugar − images for use in virtual machines. In particular, he is getting much − better (more stable and consistent) results on MAC hardware. See − [[Emulator_image_files#Other_virtual_machines|other virtual − machines]]. Line 147:
Line 53: − <gallery>+ − + − + − File:2011-Jan-8-14-som.jpg|2011 Jan-8th-14th (21 emails) − − </gallery> − +
Sugar Labs/Current Events (view source)
Revision as of 18:32, 23 February 2011
, 18:32, 23 February 2011→Sugar Digest
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 [[Archive/Current Events|archived 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 [[Archive/Current Events|archived 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. While shovelling snow I have been reflecting on Sugar – a lot of
1. Hats off to Simon Schampijer and Sascha Silbe who have released Sugar 0.92. While primarily a maintenance release, there are some new feature of note; for example, better handling of Sugar Journal objects when copied to/from removable media. Release notes coming soon.
2. Last week, I was in Lima, where Claudia Urrea, Kiko Majorga, Sdenka Salas and I ran some workshops for teachers and teacher trainers: 1000 teachers on Monday
and 25 teacher trainers and curricula development specialists on Tuesday and Wednesday. The theme was ostensibly robotics: Peru is distributing robotics kits to all of the schools. We walked through lots of different approaches to using Sugar to interact with the physical world, through sensors and software (Turtle Art, Scratch, Etoys, Measure). We had them build sensors, calibrate them, and then program some activity with them. They made great progress and had lots of fun. Sugar enthusiasm abounds!
They are in the process of migrating to 10.1.3 as well as distributing machines to high-school students running Fedora with Open Office installed. (These machines will also include Scratch and the GNOME version of Turtle Art, which has undergone a great deal of refactoring.)
as well, where, unconstrained by the "official" curriculum, the
3. Other activities: I connected Sebastian Silva and Somos Azucar up with a group at the US Dept. of State who is interest in English-language learning. They are going to develop tools for a pilot in Colombia. When he returns from paternity leave, he can give us an update. Also, I have been contacted by three commercial companies who are interested in working with Sugar: UK company that makes class-participation tools has ported their system to Sugar and is looking for help with pilots (they may do a pilot in Peru); a Korean company is interested in porting some Sugar apps to Android – interesting in light of the [http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2011-February/012564.html ongoing discussion] on IAEP list; and a Canadian company that has been making constructionist-like learning tools for more than 30 years. Also, OLPC France is working on a new activity to let children build stories; this is a request from a foundation in France who wants to deploy this activity in several schools by the end of April.
4. Stefan Unterhauser (dogi) has a preliminary version of Sugar running in the “Cloud”. He is using VNC to push the output of Sugar running in a VM to a browser. It works remarkably well and may well be the easiest way to demo Sugar to potential users.
<gallery>
File:Sugarinbrowser1.png
</gallery>
5. Raul Gutierrez Segales (now working at Collabora) and I have been working on extending Sugar-collaboration to GNOME, using Turtle Art as the test case. It is quite exciting to be able to work transparently between the GNOME desktop and a Sugar instance. We'll be pushing out an RPM and a new version of the .xo file in a few days.
We've been doing a lot of refactoring of the code with some unexpected results: since you can share bitmaps and since you can now use the camera as a sensor, you can write a video broadcast system in Turtle Art – it takes all of three blocks (well, 7 blocks if you want it to work well). Meanwhile, Tony Forster and Guzman Trinidad have been cranking out great science and engineering projects using sensors and sounds.
Part of the refactoring effort has been to make it easier to plug new devices into Turtle Art. At present, there are plugins for the camera, audio sensors, and RFID tag readers. There are plugin projects to support Arduino, Lego WeDo, Lego NXT, and the GoGo board.
6. Belated thanks to Laura, Alex, Parul, and Julie, the MIT marketing team that did an analysis of Sugar Labs. Their final presentation can be found at https://sites.google.com/site/marketlabsugar/
===Help wanted===
7. One recommendation from the marketing team is to add more pictures to the website that show kids using Sugar. Please send candidate favorite pictures to the Sugar Marketing team.
8. Sebastian Silva posted this call for volunteers:
:We've started a good friendly relationship with one of the more interesting deployments of OLPC in Colombia, specifically in Medellín. They are looking for a volunteer that will help them with English. We think this is a great opportunity for a Sugar volunteer to work in a Deployment and engage the Maureen Orth deployment with the rest of the community.
===In the community===
9. We had a preliminary brainstorming session regarding what types of projects we might do in conjunction with the SugarLabs cycling team's participation in the Tour of Uruguay at the end of April. Read about it here: [[Vuelta_a_Uruguay|Vuelta a Uruguay]].
===Tech Talk===
10. Tom Gilliard (satellit) has been making steady progress on Sugar images for use in virtual machines. In particular, he is getting much better (more stable and consistent) results on MAC hardware. See [[Emulator_image_files#Other_virtual_machines]]. The Trisquel image is particularly compelling.
11. Fred Grose has been working on SoaS-remix: a bundle of edit-liveos.py and supporting scripts to make testing and use of Sugar on a Stick easier. See [[Sugar_on_a_Stick/Sugar_Clone]].
12. Yioryos Asprobounitis announced a new version of Sugar running in Puppy Linux.
See the full announcement here: [http://ftp.cc.uoc.gr/mirrors/linux/XOpup/Announce_XOpup-2.html]
===Sugar Labs===
===Sugar Labs===
on the IAEP mailing list.
on the IAEP mailing list.
[http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:2011-Feb-12-18-som.jpg] (70 emails)
File:2011-Jan-22-28-som.jpg|2011 Jan 22nd-28th (43 emails)
[http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:2011-Feb-5-11-som.jpg] (78 emails)
File:2011-Jan-15-21-som.jpg|2011 Jan 15th-21st (46 emails)
[http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:2011-Jan-9-Feb-4-som.jpg] (88 emails)
File:2011-Jan-1-7-som.jpg|2011 Jan 1st-7th (15 emails)
Visit our [http://planet.sugarlabs.org planet] for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments.
Visit our planet [http://planet.sugarlabs.org] for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments.
== Community News archive ==
== Community News archive ==