10,579
edits
Changes
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
Line 6:
Line 6: − + − + − 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 [http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-August/007838.html]). 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 − + − 4. Constuctionism: The discussion around a succinct definition of Constructionism has heated up again (Please see [http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2008-August/001481.html]). 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+ − [http://learning.media.mit.edu/projects.html] (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 [ftp://www.rohrmoser-engineering.de/pub/XO-LiveCD/XO-LiveCD_080812.iso]). 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 [http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/cscott/firefox-activity;a=summary]).+ − +
Sugar Labs/Current Events (view source)
Revision as of 22:35, 25 August 2008
, 22:35, 25 August 2008→What's new
=== Sugar Digest ===
=== 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 [[Sugar_Labs/Oversight_Board_Candidates_August_2008|candidates list]]). Polls close on 31 August 2008.
1. Vote early and often: There is one more week to cast your ballot in the Sugar Oversight Board election. The Selectricity server was (unexpectedly) down for maintenance this past weekend; if you had trouble accessing the server, please try again.
2. 0.82: Simon Schampijer reports that Sucrose 0.82 has been released (Please see [[ReleaseTeam/Releases/Sucrose/0.82|Sucrose 0.82]] for details and documentation). Many thanks to the release team and our community contributors. They've done a great job.
2. Minsky on learning: On the flight to Austin this weekend, I was rereading Marvin Minsky's ''The Emotion Machine''; I came across this inspiring quote: "We like to think that a child's play is unconstrained—but when children appear to feel joyous and free, this may merely hide from their minds their purposefulness; you can see this more clearly when you attempt to drag them away from their chosen tasks. For they are exploring their worlds to see what's there, making explanations of what those things are, and imagining what else could be; exploring, explaining and learning are among a child's most purposeful urges and goals. The playfulness of childhood is the most demanding teacher we have. Never again in those children's lives will anything drive them to work so hard."
=== Community jams and meetups ===
3. Book sprint: We are in the midst of a week-long book sprint, with the goal of creating manual for Sugar. Please follow our progress at http://en.flossmanuals.net and feel free to create an account and help with writing, illustrating, or editing.
Please also see [[ReleaseTeam/Roadmap/0.84#Goals|0.84 Goals]].
4. Ceibal Jam: Pablo Flores is spreading the word about the upcoming Ceibal Jam in Uruguay (30 August and 6 September). Ceibal Jam is a social movement independent of voluntary and open membership, which seeks nuclear everyone who has an interest in contributing to the development of software with potential usefulness for the Plan Ceibal, is an effort to develop local capacity to create new applications and modify Existing to address the specific needs of the Uruguayan reality. On the occasion of this second jam, introductory workshops will be conducted to programming for computers XO Plan Ceibal, targeted audiences with different levels of knowledge, while also submitted development projects under way and will form groups to work during the days in different proposals programming (Please see http://www.mediagala.com/rap/foro/viewforum.php?f=15). The meeting is sponsored by the Catholic University of Uruguay, Larrobla & Associates and Artech (Additional information is available at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Ceibal_Jam).
5. Learning Content: On Sunday, 31 August, at 4PM, OLPC will be hosting a public meeting to discuss (Please see http://olpcphysics.eventbrite.com):
* Great teachers have great content they've spent their lifetime developing—how can they contribute to OLPC/Sugar?
* How can engineers help teachers get set projects into motion?
* How can we together help with the transition from paper and pencil to Sugar and computing?
* What learning strategies are OLPC working on?
Presentors:
* Caryl Bigenho, longtime teacher and senior OLPC support volunteer
* Brian Jordan, OLPC Intern, author of Physics Activity (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Bjordan)
* David Cavallo, OLPC VP Learning
===Tech Talk===
6. Watch out your teeth! Simon Schampijer and the release team are happy to announce the final release of Sucrose 0.82 (See http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-August/007911.html). Sucrose 0.82 is the latest version of the Sugar learning platform, consisting of Glucose, the base system environment; and Fructose, a set of demonstration activities. Sucrose is released every six months; the new release contains many new features, improvements, bug fixes, and translations.
There are extensive release notes (Please see [[ReleaseTeam/Releases/Sucrose/0.82|Sucrose 0.82]]). Also, please refer to the roadmap for our next release ([[ReleaseTeam/Roadmap#Schedule|Roadmap Schedule]]) and join in the discussion of the upcoming 0.84 release ([[ReleaseTeam/Roadmap/0.84|Roadmap 0.84]]).
Many people contributed to this release, including those who helped with testing, documentation, translation, contributing to the wiki, outreach to education and developer communities. On behalf of the community, we give our warmest thanks to the developers and contributors who made this Sugar release possible.
I'd like to give special thanks to Simon for managing our most well organized release to date. He has set the bar high for future Sugar release managers.
7. Embedded Sugar: David Farning has been leading a discussion about building an embedded-Sugar community. A group of developers have been assembled to port Sugar to the beagleboard (http://beagleboard.org/). They plan to use the Open Embedded toolkit (http://wiki.openembedded.net/index.php/Main_Page), which is both a cross-compiler and an embedded package-management system. The team will be using http://elinux.org/BeagleBoardSugar as a point of collaboration as well as the beagleboard mailing list (http://groups.google.com/group/beagleboard?hl=en).
8. Measure 19: Arjun Sarwal has release a new version of the Measure activity (http://dev.laptop.org/~arjs/Measure-19.xo); please send Arjan feedback as there are extensive changes and enhancements.
=== Sugar Labs ===
=== 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]]).
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-16-22-som.jpg]]).
==Sugar in the news==
==Sugar in the news==