Changes

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 archived [[Sugar Labs/Current Events/Archive|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 archived [[Sugar Labs/Current Events/Archive|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. It was busy week: Simon, Aleksey, Sascha, and Tomeu have been working around the clock on putting the finishing touches on the new 0.86 release of Sugar while Gary has been trying to keep pace with testing and documentation. It is looking great. I kept busy too: chasing a few more bugs in Turtle Art; writing a grant proposal with help from David, David, and Caroline to the Wal-Mart foundation (seeking support to run teacher workshops and do outreach); meeting with a team from Babson who will help us develop a plan for how to present Sugar to school districts; a panel at the Harvard Kennedy School to a gathering of entrepreneurs in technology and development, ‘Beyond Mobile: The Next Generation of Technology for Empowerment’; an article in [http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20090918110925298 Groklaw] (with lots of help from Sean); and a presentation at Software Freedom Day.

1. While [http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-September/008746.html the decision panel debates] whether or not Sugar Labs should be a GNU/Linux distributor, I thought it would be worthwhile surveying the GNU/Linux distribution's plans regarding Sugar Release 0.84.

 

I did have a chance to do some reading: Bahktiar Mikhak posted a link to an old paper by Seymour Papert, [http://www.papert.org/articles/ComputerCriticismVsTechnocentric.html "Computer Criticism vs. Technocentric Thinking"]. He wrote it almost 30-years ago and I had last read it more than 10-years ago, but it is still relevamt today.

 

 

Another gem: "If you ask, 'What does a LOGO practitioner need to know?' the answer goes beyond the ability to use and teach LOGO. The practitioner needs to be able to talk about LOGO, to criticize it, and to discuss other people's criticisms." .replace('LOGO','Sugar')

 

2. I have a bit more to report regarding last week's meeting at the Interamerican Development Bank. The afternoon discussion ended on an interesting note: what if anything should we be doing regarding curriculum development? Again Papert: "Science as inquiry rather than as answers". More concretely, when we first set up the teacher workshops in Peru we challenged the teachers on the first day to come up with a way to enhance something from the national curriculum by using Sugar to be presented on the final day of the workshop. We didn't give them a curriculum—they already had that from the ministry of education. Rather, we wanted them to engage in a process of inquiry. They rose to the challenge and engaged in a collaborative discussion of discovery throughout the week-long event.

 

Papert's version: "Using the computer not as a 'thing in itself' that may or may not deliver benefits, but as a material that can be appropriated to do better whatever you are doing (and which will not do anything if you are not!)"

 

A final word from Papert: "Do Not Ask What LOGO Can Do To People, But What People Can Do With LOGO." .replace('LOGO','Sugar')

3. A few of us were on IRC Friday evening discussing with Rubén Rodríguez Pérez his effort to port Sugar to Trisquel. By the time I got to the venue for the Boston celebration of Software Freedom Day, I had gotten this email:

* Alexsey Lim has been using jhconvert to maintain "official" repositories for a number of distributions, e.g., 0.86 was packaged for Mandriva's development repository and will be in the next release, 2010.0, scheduled for 2009-11-03. Alexsey has compiled [[Development_Team/Packaging|a table of the various packaging efforts]].

* David Van Assche has been relying on jhconvert for openSUSE rpms as well.

* Peter Robinson reports that 0.86 is already in rawhide and hence will be in the soon to be released Fedora 12 beta.

* Jonas Smedegaard reports that the plan for Debian is to maintain: (a) the newest upstream branch (currently 0.86); (b) newest stable branch (currently 0.84; soon to be 0.86); and possibly (c) additional older stable releases. "In other words, the plan is to track at least head of development and head of stable. And to leave a trail behind of all stable releases for others to spawn off from if they so choose."

* Rubén Rodríguez Pérez has 0.86 running on Trisquel (See [http://trisquel.info/en/trisquel-sugar Trisquel-Sugar]).

:Hello everybody,

All of these distributions come with the core (Fructose) activities; some, such as openSUSE, come with many additional (Honey) activities pre-packaged. Activities.sugarlabs.org (ASLO) can be used by all distributions to add 100s of addition activities. The updater in the Sugar Control Panel will automatically update the activities installed on your distribution to the latest versions.

:The Sugar+Trisquel beta is ready for testing, many thanks to Aleksey Lim and everyone in the #sugar and #fsfsys channels who helped us to get it. The current release is a fully free live CD based in Sugar 0.84, running on top of Trisquel-edu 2.2.1 LTS "Robur" (which is itself Hardy based). We will soon build one with Trisquel 3.0, for better hardware support.

2. Sdenka Salas, a teacher who is working with Andean children from Aymara and Quechua communities, wrote a book in April about using Sugar in the classroom. She recently completed the English-language version. She has kindly made it available for download (See [http://www.scribd.com/doc/20189623/The-XO-Laptop-in-the-Classroom The XO Laptop in the Classroom]).

:We are very excited with this collaboration, as it will be a new and fully libre way to distribute Sugar, and also a powerful tool to include in our educational operating system Trisquel Edu.

3. Kludge of the week: I was recently asked for a copy of one of my talks. I give all of my talks using the presentation features of Turtle Art and I still haven't gotten around to writing the export function from Turtle Art to .odp (Open Office presentation). For this particular request, I didn't think that the HTML exported from Turtle Art was adequate. So I wrote a one-line Python call to save screen shots into the Journal, loaded it into the programmable brick and added that brick to the "next slide" trigger. The result: a copy of each slide of my talk automatically saved to the Journal. You can see [[File:Desktop-Summit.pdf|the results]] in the wiki.

:It is a work in progress, but stable enough to be used and get some tests. The artwork is also a proof of concept and can be easily changed. We would be pleased if you send us your impressions and advices.

4. There is a nice write up of the recent Sugar Day in Argentina (See [

 

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/ReunionSeptiembre2009 Reunion Septiembre 2009]).

:Known bugs in this release:

 

 

 

 

 

4. Bryan Berry announces on behalf of the Karma team that KARMA 0.1 has been released. See [http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2009-September/019339.html] for details.

 

===Sugar Labs===  

===Sugar Labs===  

6. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:File:2009-Sept-12-18-som.jpg|SOM]]).  

5. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:File:2009-Sept-19-25-som.jpg|SOM]]).  

 

=== Community News archive ===

=== Community News archive ===