Difference between revisions of "Sugar Labs/Current Events"

Revision as of 10:50, 6 October 2008

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.

Sugar Digest

1. Peer-to-peer editing: After my call last week for a social-networking site for peer-to-peer editing, I was directed by Joshua Pritikin to the Peer Editing Exchange.

I tried it out and got good and timely feedback regarding my copy (a Letter to the Editor):

What would Josh Billings say about Gov. Palin?

The great American humorist Josh Billings once said: "The problem

ain't what you don't know, it's what you know that just ain't

so." Governor Palin has ~~Billings's~~ Billings' folksy ~~charm. But~~ charm, but gosh ~~darnit,~~ darn it,

her problems include both what she don't know and what she knows

that ain't so. McCain has shown reckless judgment in choosing ^her as^ a

VP candidate. It may get him elected, but since we will live with

this decision long after the election, it weighs ominously on the

prospects of a McCain administration.

Alas, the Globe didn't publish my letter.

The workflow is reasonable, but ideally, it would be integrated into a blog tool chain where the "Publish" button us replaced with a "Send to Editor" button. What is the best free software blog tool?

2. Narrative: Bryan Barry and Michael Stone have initiated a discussion about inadequacies in the Sugar tool chain (See [1] and [2]).

Sugar offers an excellent mode for discovery but no excellent way to

manipulate narratives. Both discovery and narrative are essential for

learning.—Bryan Barry

This statement seems to me both indisputable and damning; if true, it

strikes to the core of the claim that Sugar is appropriate for learning.

—Michael Stone

I questioned the dichotomy between manipulating narratives and modes for discovery. When I think about Sugar, I think about its providing a scaffolding for discovering, expressing, critiquing, and reflecting. Manipulating narrative seems to cut across all of these area (as does collaboration). We don't yet support (natively) much in the way of organizing data to make an analysis or argument. But it seems overstated to say that these deficiencies mean Sugar is not appropriate for learning. There is certainly a paucity of lesson plans developed around Sugar to help teachers answer the question of how one best leverages the Sugar toolkit for learning. And undoubtedly, there is a dearth of readily packaged and categorized content. But I don't see these as fundamental flaws in Sugar as much as a place where more effort needs to be invested; Sugar is reaching a point of maturity where such investments make sense. Sugar is an appropriate component of what needs to be a larger learning ecosystem.

3. Trying Sugar at school: Caroline Meeks and I went to a computer lab at a Boston public school to see what constraints we might encounter in using some of the various LiveCD and LiveUSB efforts underway. Our goal of is to make it easy for teachers to try Sugar in situations where the school computers are locked down or cannot be reimaged. Another use case is for children to use Sugar at school and at home using a LiveUSB in cases where 1-to-1 solutions are not available: the USB key "becomes the Sugar computer".

They school had a room full of Compaq Pentium 4 "EVO" desktops with 256M of DRAM. We tried a variety of LiveCDs (with and without Sugar). Bottom line: we have a ways to go before we have a turnkey solution. We had trouble running most of the distributions we tried (with and without Sugar). Puppy Linux was the most promising in that it boot consistently and seemed stable running as a LiveCD.

Sebastian Dziallas has built a slimmer version of the Fedora/Sugar Live spin and is working on getting it integrated into a Windows-based installer. We look forward to trying it.

4. Nepal evaluation: A summary of a formative evaluation of OLPC Project Nepal is online. Uttam Sharma, a doctoral student at at the Department of Applied Economics at the University of Minnesota carried out the evaluation, which has suggestions for how to improve the Sugar/one-to-one laptop deployment process.

5. Pythagoras: There is a nice summary of the various approaches to exploring the Pythagorean theorem in TurtleArt, Etoys, and Dr Geo.

6. Sugar logo: I've updated the wiki with the new logo (thanks to Christian Schmidt). We had asked by OLPC to stop using the XO logo—a request we have complied with.

Community jams, meet ups, and meetings

7. Meeting schedule: I've set up a public Google calendar for scheduling Sugar meetings. Please see Meetings for links to the XML, iCal, and HTML versions of the calendar, or search for "Sugar Labs meetings" from the Google calendar interface. If you'd like write permission on the calendar, please send me an email.

8. Spanish book sprint: We'll be holding a translation sprint for the Sugar FLOSS Manual in Lima, Perú on 20, 21 October at the Universidad San Martin, Faculta de Ingeniería. (Av. La Fontana - Urbanización Santa Patricia - Distrito: La Molina) Please contact Rafael Enrique Ortiz Guerrero <dirakx AT gmail.com> for more details.

9. Traduction de la documentation: Samy Boutayeb reports that OLPC France has launched a French localize project.

Tech Talk

10. Gconf: Simon Schampijer has been working to moving to gconf to store the Sugar settings. Memory consumption looks good from a first glance. The old profile will be converted on update and the old profile API will be kept around during the transition phase.

11. Activity updates: There are updates available for:

Jukebox-2.xo ImageViewer-2.xo

Sugar Labs

12. 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-Sept-27-Oct-3-som.jpg).

Sugar in the news

21 Sep 2008	Groklaw – Interview with Walter Bender of Sugar Labs
17 Sep 2008	Bill Kerr – Sugar Labs
16 Sep 2008	Open Source – Sugar everywhere
28 Aug 2008	OLPC News – An answer to Walter Bender's question 22
20 Aug 2008	OLPC News – Sugarize it: Intel Classmate 2
08 Aug 2008	Investor's Business Daily – 'Learning' Vs. Laptop Was Issue
06 Aug 2008	OLPC News – Twenty-three Questions on Technology and Education
18 Jul 2008	Bill Kerr – evaluating Sugar in the developed world
28 Jun 2008	OLPC News – A Cutting Edge Sugar User Interface Demo
18 Jun 2008	PC World – OLPC Spin-off Developing UI for Intel's Classmate PC
17 Jun 2008	Datamation – If Business Succeeds with GNU/Linux, Why Not OLPC?
11 Jun 2008	LinuxInsider – The Sweetness of Collaborative Learning
06 Jun 2008	Bill Kerr – untangling Free, Sugar, and Constructionism
06 Jun 2008	Open Education – Walter Bender Discusses Sugar Labs Foundation
06 Jun 2008	BusinessWeek – OLPC: The Educational Philosophy Controversy
05 Jun 2008	Code Culture – The Distraction Machine
05 Jun 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

@@ Line 6: / Line 6: @@
 === Sugar Digest ===
-First, an aside: I introduced the concept of peer editing in the [http://en.flossmanuals.net/write_activity FLOSS Manual on the Write Activity] by referencing the late [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Murray_(writer) Don Murray], who taught generations of journalists how to write. He had three simple rules for great writing:
+. Peer-to-peer editing: After my call last week for a social-networking site for peer-to-peer editing, I was directed by Joshua Pritikin to the [http://peeredit.us/ Peer Editing Exchange].
-# revise
+I tried it out and got good and timely feedback regarding my copy (a Letter to the Editor):
-# revise
-# revise
-Revision is an essential part of the writing process and one of the easiest and most effective ways to revise is to share the burden of editing among your friends. Hand your writing to a friend, who will read it and make comments and suggestions. You return the favor by doing the same for your friend's writing.
+:'''What would Josh Billings say about Gov. Palin?'''
+:The great American humorist Josh Billings once said: "The problem
+:ain't what you don't know, it's what you know that just ain't
+:so." Governor Palin has <del>Billings's</del> Billings' folksy <del>charm. But</del> charm, but gosh <del>darnit,</del> darn it,
+:her problems include both what she don't know and what she knows
+:that ain't so.  McCain has shown reckless judgment in choosing ^her as^ a
+:VP candidate. It may get him elected, but since we will live with
+:this decision long after the election, it weighs ominously on the
+:prospects of a McCain administration.
-While riding my bike into Cambridge yesterday, it occurred to me that a simple peer-editing exchange for bloggers would be easy to set up; it could make a world of difference in the quality of the writing, while not in any way impinging upon the freedom and spontaneity that characterizes the blogshpere. In deed, I am of the opinion that one of the biggest differences between blogging and the mainstream media is the strong editorial tradition of the latter.
+Alas, the ''Globe'' didn't publish my letter.
-So why doesn't someone set up a social-networking site—ideally integrated with the popular tools such as Word Press—to enable bloggers to find a willing peer to suggest revisions before the publish button is pressed (a "Send to editor" button)? Such an exchange need not be symmetric—some people prefer the role of critic to creator; it would be a simple, powerful enhancement to the blogsphere. (Or does such a site already exist? Try the [http://peeredit.us Peer Editing Exchange].)
+The workflow is reasonable, but ideally, it would be integrated into a blog tool chain where the "Publish" button us replaced with a "Send to Editor" button. What is the best free software blog tool?
-. Open Minds: David Farning and I had the opportunity to attend the [http://www.k12openminds.org/ Open Minds] conference in Indianapolis this past weekend. It was refreshing to spend time with so many teachers passionate for learning and creating opportunities for their students. I tried to tune into discussions about the various roadblocks that inhibit the introduction of technology into schools and into classrooms. The list is pretty long and some of the items are formidable, but nonetheless, there are obvious needs and teachers and administrators who are fighting for change. There was lots of interest in Sugar—teachers and administrators are looking for an easy (and inexpensive) way to try it in their classrooms.
+. Narrative: Bryan Barry and Michael Stone have initiated a discussion about inadequacies in the Sugar tool chain (See [http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-October/008863.html] and [http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-October/008864.html]).
-A few specific outcomes from the conference: Nate Ridderman will be helping set up a Sugar classroom in an elementary school in Indianapolis that is doing a one-to-one laptop experiment; David and I will be helping set up a Sugar classroom in a Boston public school that trying to make use of some old Pentium IV desktop machines; we also discussed making Sugar available as part of the offerings from some hardware OEMs who focus on the education market, including [http://www.2gopc.com/ 2goPC] and [http://www.resara.com/ Resara] (who offer a thin-client solution).
+:Sugar offers an excellent mode for discovery but no excellent way to
+:manipulate narratives. Both discovery and narrative are essential for
+:learning.—Bryan Barry
-. LiveUSB: It seems that a LiveUSB offers the most simple way to experience Sugar on a preexisting hardware base, such as a school computer lab. (One advantage of a LiveUSB approach—where user data is stored in a disk partition—is that the same key can be used at school and at home, emulating the experience of a one-to-one laptop program, where the laptops go home with the children. The Fedora team has made progress on a LiveUSB this week (See Item 11 below) and we are also working to get "fresher" Sugar bits into the Ubuntu LiveUSB. However, there remains a problem in that many computers do not have boot-from-USB enabled in the BIOS. Steve Pomeroy suggested we look into U3, a proprietary method of launching applications from a USB key. This would provide a work-around for running Sugar on machines that are running Windows (alas, this accounts for the majority of hardware found in schools). Ben Schwartz pointed out that we could do the same thing using autorun.inf (See [http://www.exponetic.com/blog/blog/2006/07/07/autorun-an-executable-from-a-usb-key-in-windows-xp/ autorun an executable from a USB key in Windows XP]), launching an instance of Sugar in QEMU. Running Sugar in emulation requires a reasonably fast machine in order to give an acceptable experience. We need to do more testing in this arena, as it is a path of least resistance for teachers and parents who are interested in trying Sugar.
+:This statement seems to me both indisputable and damning; if true, it
+:strikes to the core of the claim that Sugar is appropriate for learning.
+:—Michael Stone
-. Teachers/developers: There was a productive discussion on the IAEP list this week about how to better engage teachers in the Sugar developer community. Rob Costello pointed out that only a small percentage of teachers would participate in the actual development process, building bridges to even that small group would be worthwhile. It was pointed out that the [[Patching Turtle Art]] (which is still incomplete) is far from meeting the needs of a teacher (or anyone else new to the community). Bill Kerr wrote up some questions that I tried to answer in the wiki (See [[Talk:Patching Turtle Art]]):
+I questioned the dichotomy between manipulating narratives and modes for discovery. When I think about Sugar, I think about its providing a scaffolding for discovering, expressing, critiquing, and reflecting. Manipulating narrative seems to cut across all of these area (as does collaboration). We don't yet support (natively) much in the way of organizing data to make an analysis or argument. But it seems overstated to say that these deficiencies mean Sugar is not appropriate for learning. There is certainly a paucity of lesson plans developed around Sugar to help teachers answer the question of how one best leverages the Sugar toolkit for learning. And undoubtedly, there is a dearth of readily packaged and categorized content. But I don't see these as fundamental flaws in Sugar as much as a place where more effort needs to be invested; Sugar is reaching a point of maturity where such investments make sense. Sugar is an appropriate component of what needs to be a larger learning ecosystem.
-* Where do you find things (Python files, source code)
+. Trying Sugar at school: Caroline Meeks and I went to a computer lab at a Boston public school to see what constraints we might encounter in using some of the various LiveCD and LiveUSB efforts underway. Our goal of is to make it easy for teachers to try Sugar in situations where the school computers are locked down or cannot be reimaged. Another use case is for children to use Sugar at school and at home using a LiveUSB in cases where 1-to-1 solutions are not available: the USB key "becomes the Sugar computer".
-* Which things do what? How does one know which Python files have to be tweaked?
-* Who do you communicate with? (Who are the maintainers and how do you content them?)
-* How do you program more advanced stuff in Python, e.g., using lambda?
-* What is FOSS etiquette, how do you go about learning to be a member of this community?
-I repeat here my answer to Bill's last question:
+They school had a room full of Compaq Pentium 4 "EVO" desktops with 256M of DRAM. We tried a variety of LiveCDs (with and without Sugar). Bottom line: we have a ways to go before we have a turnkey solution. We had trouble running most of the distributions we tried (with and without Sugar). Puppy Linux was the most promising in that it boot consistently and seemed stable running as a LiveCD.
-"Start by asking questions... welcome to the community!"
+Sebastian Dziallas has built a slimmer version of the Fedora/Sugar Live spin and is working on getting it integrated into a Windows-based installer. We look forward to trying it.
-Bill also wrote more generally about what it means to join a community, summarizing James Gee from his book <em>What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy</em> (2003), drawing a distinction between knowledge and being part of a community of knowledge:
+. Nepal evaluation: A summary of a [http://blog.olenepal.org/index.php/archives/321 formative evaluation of OLPC Project Nepal] is online. Uttam Sharma, a doctoral student at at the Department of Applied Economics at the University of Minnesota carried out the evaluation, which has suggestions for how to improve the Sugar/one-to-one laptop deployment process.
-# we learn to experience the world in a new way: see, feel and operate on;
+. Pythagoras: There is a nice [http://patricioacevedo.blogspot.com/2008/09/logo-la-etoys.html summary] of the various approaches to exploring the Pythagorean theorem in TurtleArt, Etoys, and Dr Geo.
-# we gain the potential to join a new social group, a new club;
-# we gain the resources that prepare us for future learning and problem solving in a new domain and perhaps related domains.
-=== Community jams, meetups, and meetings ===
+. Sugar logo: I've updated the wiki with the new [[Logo|logo]] (thanks to Christian Schmidt). We had asked by OLPC to stop using the XO logo—a request we have complied with.
-. Sugar meetings: The deployment team will be meeting on Wednesday at 14 UTC (10 EST) on irc.freenode.net (channel: #sugar-meeting). The oversight board will be meeting on Friday at 14 UTC (10 EST), also on #sugar-meeting.
+=== Community jams, meet ups, and meetings ===
-=== Tech Talk ===
+. Meeting schedule: I've set up a public Google calendar for scheduling Sugar meetings. Please see [[Community#Meetings|Meetings]] for links to the XML, iCal, and HTML versions of the calendar, or search for "Sugar Labs meetings" from the Google calendar interface. If you'd like write permission on the calendar, please send me an email.
-. Release candidate: For those of you with OLPC-XOs, Michael Stone has released a candidate build (766) that incorporates Sugar .082. It is well worth the hassle of updating from 652 or 711.
+. Spanish book sprint: We'll be holding a translation sprint for the Sugar FLOSS Manual in Lima, Perú on 20, 21 October at the Universidad San Martin, Faculta de Ingeniería. (Av. La Fontana - Urbanización Santa Patricia - Distrito: La Molina) Please contact Rafael Enrique Ortiz Guerrero <dirakx AT gmail.com> for more details.
-. Tricks: Michael also posted a list of "idioms" that he relies on in order to make his software-development efforts more predicable and robust (See [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Mstone/Tricks Mstone Tricks]).
+. Traduction de la documentation: Samy Boutayeb reports that OLPC France has launched a [http://olpc-france.org/wiki/index.php?title=Accueil#Projets French localize project].
-. Sugar control panel: Simon Schampijer speed up control panel start up in 0.84. The next issues he want to tackle are better localizations in the panel for the available languages and switching to gconf (if tests show it is worth it).
+=== Tech Talk ===
-. Bugsquad: Simon had also setup the Sugarlabs Bugsquad, the quality assurance (QA) team for Sugar. The squad will triage bugs, set priorities, verify usability and test cases.  Furthermore it does coordinate testing, does testing itself and help setting up bug infrastructure, i.e., trac components (See [[BugSquad]]).
-. Sugar Live CDs: Greg Dekoenigsberg reports progress on a Fedora Live CD/USB  based on rawhide/F10. He has a LiveCD for Fedora 10 devel (Rawhide) that allows a Sugar 0.82 boot option via GDM. Activiites are still missing, but Greg says that we will close this gap quickly. There is also a kickstart file that can be used by any Fedora user to generate such an
-image trivially (See [http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Anaconda/Kickstart#Chapter_1._Introduction for some background on Fedora kickstarts Introduction for some background on Fedora kickstarts]). Also, see [https://fedorahosted.org/liveusb-creator liveusb-creator] for help on making a Windows-bootable LiveUSB for Fedora.
-Bryan Kearney built a virtual image for the Sugar rawhide package. To use it: (1) download [http://sugar.s3.amazonaws.com/sugar-rawhide.tgz sugar-rawhide.tgz]; (2) uncompress the .tgz file; and (3) run the command:
- virt-image sugar-rawhide.xml
-. Telepathy goes upstream: In their newest release (2.24), GNOME announced "the inclusion of an instant messaging client based off the Telepathy communications framework." Whereas Sugar uses Telepathy, this means that there will likely be many non-Sugar users, adding to the community of support for the project. This is a big step towards longer-term stability, support, and general acceptance of all of our efforts. Congratulations!
-. Activity updates: There are updates available for:
-:Terminal-18
-:Write-60
-:Calculate-25
-:PlayGo-5
-:Moon-7
-:Measure-21
-. ImageViewer: Sayamindu Dasgupta wrote a new Activity to let you view images from the Journal. It supports zoom and rotation as well. Download it from [http://dev.laptop.org/~sayamindu/bundles/imageviewer/ImageViewer-1.xo ImageViewer-1.xo]; the source is in git ([http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/sayamindu/imageviewer-activity;a=tree | imageviewer-activity;a=tree])
-. DrGeoII: Hilaire Fernandes announced a new DrGeoII release with macro-construction and Smalltalk scripting, plus tons of bugs fixes. The new DrGeoII distribution is based on an universal one-clic distribution for GNU/Linux, Windows and Mac OSX (Please visit [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/DrGeo DrGeo web page] to learn more). Hilaire is also discussing with the Etoys team the possibility of adding DrGeoII to the Supplies flap.
+. Gconf: Simon Schampijer has been working to moving to [http://www.gnome.org/projects/gconf/ gconf] to store the Sugar settings. Memory consumption looks good from a first glance. The old profile will be converted on update and the old profile API will be kept around during the transition phase.
-. Etoys project sharing: Daniel Ajoy inquired about uploading Etoys projects to the Internet. While the "core" Etoys team doesn't have a world-writable project-sharing site, they do recommend tools for setting up regional sites. To set up your own server, the simplest thing is to set up the [http://swikis.ddo.jp/SuperSwiki2/3 SuperSwiki2 server].
+. Activity updates: There are updates available for:
-. Debian jhbuild: The Debian team has done a thorough job of documenting the process of building a Sugar environment on a Debian GNU/Linux distribution (See [[DevelopmentTeam/Jhbuild/Debian]]).
+Jukebox-2.xo
+ImageViewer-2.xo
 === Sugar Labs ===
-. 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-September-20-26-som.jpg]]).
+. 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-Sept-27-Oct-3-som.jpg]]).
 ==Sugar in the news==