Sugar Labs/Current Events

What's new

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 and blogged at walterbender.org.) If you would like to contribute, please send email to walter at sugarlabs.org by the weekend. An archive of this digest is available here.

Sugar Digest

1. Elections: The US presidential election is not the only opportunity to organize for change. The polls are open for the Sugar Labs oversight board (The list of candidates can be found at cnadidates list). Polls close on 31 August 2008.

2. 0.82: Simon Schampijer reports that Sucrose 0.82 has been released (Please see Sucrose 0.82 for details and documentation). Many thanks to the release team and our community contributors. They've done a great job.

3. 0.84 goals: Marco Pesenti Gritti has begun a discussion thread about our goals for the 0.84 release (Please join the discussion, which is archived at [1]). The list currently includes:

• Next generation journal
• File sharing
• Group view/bulletin board
• Collaboration scalability
• Responsive UI
• Stable activities API
• Official Sugar LiveCD
• Compatibility with desktop applications
• Maintain Add-On Applications Installs and Data During OS upgrades
• Quality and reliability

Please also see 0.84 Goals.

4. Constuctionism: The discussion around a succinct definition of Constructionism has heated up again (Please see [2]). While there is consensus that Sugar Labs should not be advocating just "one right way" to learn, a concise explanation of the learning opportunities exposed and enhanced by the Sugar learning platform would go a long ways towards getting more educators engaged in the discussion. We also would benefit from documenting some tangible results from the field that can serve as exemplars.

This second wave of discussion began with Seth Woodworth dredging up the Media Lab's Future of Learning group's definition of Constructionism [3] (this is the group founded by Seymour Papert):

We are developing "Constructionism" as a theory of learning and education. Constructionism is based on two different senses of "construction." It is grounded in the idea that people learn by actively constructing new knowledge, rather than having information "poured" into their heads. Moreover, constructionism asserts that people learn with particular effectiveness when they are engaged in constructing personally meaningful artifacts (such as computer programs, animations, or robots).

The above definition does not sufficiently distinguish Constructionism from "open-ended discovery" for the casual reader. Bill Kerr followed up with a discussion of Cynthia Solomon's book, Computer Environments for Children, in which she discusses four models of learning:

• Suppes: Drill and Practice and Rote Learning
• Davis: Socratic Interactions and Discovery Learning
• Dwyer: Eclecticism and Heuristic Learning
• Papert: Constructivism and Piagetian Learning

Martin Langhoff hit the nail on the head when he asked, "How do we make this useful for teaching?"

What does Sugar offer in terms of affordances that can make a positive impact in (and out of) the classroom? The key in my mind is that Sugar facilitates collaboration (and critique); reflection (through the Journal); and discovery, through its clarity of design and roots in FOSS.

Community jams and meetups

5. Book sprint: The FLOSS Manuals Sugar/XO book sprint begins Sunday in Austin, TX (Details are available at DocumentationTeam/BookSprint).

Tech Talk

6. LiveCD: Wolfgang Rohrmoser reports an updated version of the XO LiveCD (Please download it from [4]). This release is based on Joyride 2282; it demonstrates many new Sugar features and updated activities.

7. Firefox: C. Scott Ananian has made Firefox 3 available via software-update (Please see [5]).

Sugar Labs

8. Self-organizing map (SOM): Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see Image:2008-August-9-15-som.jpg).

Sugar in the news

20 August 2008	OLPC News – Sugarize it: Intel Classmate 2
8 August 2008	Investor's Business Daily – 'Learning' Vs. Laptop Was Issue
18 July 2008	Bill Kerr – evaluating Sugar in the developed world
28 June 2008	OLPC News – A Cutting Edge Sugar User Interface Demo
18 June 2008	PC World – OLPC Spin-off Developing UI for Intel's Classmate PC
17 June 2008	Datamation – If Business Succeeds with GNU/Linux, Why Not OLPC?
11 June 2008	LinuxInsider – The Sweetness of Collaborative Learning
06 June 2008	Bill Kerr – untangling Free, Sugar, and Constructionism
06 June 2008	Open Education – Walter Bender Discusses Sugar Labs Foundation
06 June 2008	BusinessWeek – OLPC: The Educational Philosophy Controversy
05 June 2008	Code Culture – The Distraction Machine
05 June 2008	BusinessWeek – OLPC: The Open-Source Controversy
27 May 2008	The New York Times – Why Walter Bender Left One Laptop Per Child
26 May 2008	Ars Technica – OLPC software maker splits from X0 hardware, goes solo
22 May 2008	BetaNews – Linux start-up Sugar Labs in informal talks with four laptop makers
16 May 2008	OSTATIC – OLPC's Open Source Sugar Platform Aims for New Hardware
16 May 2008	PCWorld – Bender Forms Group to Promote OLPC's Sugar UI
16 May 2008	MHT – Bender jumps from OLPC, founds Sugar Labs
16 May 2008	News.com – Sugar Labs will make OLPC interface available for Eee PC, others
16 May 2008	Feeding the Peguins – The future of Sugar
16 May 2008	Sugar list – A few thoughts on SugarLabs
16 May 2008	xconomy – Bender Creates Sugar Labs—New Foundation to Adapt OLPC’s Laptop Interface for Other Machines
16 May 2008	BBC – '$100 laptop' platform moves on
15 May 2008	OLPC wiki – Dual-boot XO Claim: OLPC will not work to port Sugar to Windows.
16 May 2008	Softpedia – Bender Launches Sugar Labs for Better Development of OLPC's Sugar UI

Press releases

15 May 2008

Sugar Labs/Announcing Sugar Labs