Difference between revisions of "Sugar Labs/Current Events"

Revision as of 13:50, 24 February 2009

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. (Also visit planet.sugarlabs.org.)

Sugar Digest

1. I have spent much of the past two weeks finalizing the details of a proposal to the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). We are proposing to create hubs of international collaboration, leverage the diverse capabilities of partner institutions, to conduct a longitudinal study of the Sugar program on a global scale. Drafting this proposal is a first step towards to goal of rallying universities around the world to address some of the challenges I raised in a blog entry last year “A page from the Hilbert playbook”. What attracted me to this particular program, Partnerships for International Research and Education (PIRE), is that it encourages international collaboration. Sugar is global and to understand its impact, one needs to work globally.

2. I finally heard from the Free Software Foundation (FSF) that Sugar is listed in their directory of free software projects. I hadn't ever noticed that on their homepage they say, "Free software is the foundation of a learning society – where the tools we all use are free to share, study and modify." Is the tip of their hat to learning new? In any case, it is great to see them acknowledging the synergy between free software and learning.

Community jams, meet-ups, and meetings

3. Mike Lee has posted some great photos from the DC Learning Club meeting, where they tried booting SoaS on a variety of netbooks (See http://www.flickr.com/photos/curiouslee/sets/72157614277170318/).

Help Wanted / Help Received

4. It is dizzying trying to floow the pace of the activity leading up to the release of 0.84. Simon Schampijer and the release team are engaged in a testing sprint. You can join them on irc.freenode.net, #sugar. Interwoven with the testing of 0.84 is a flurry of work on Sugar on a Stick (SoaS)—indeed, much of testing is happening in that environment: Thanks to the hard work of Sebastian Dziallas and the SoaS team, Sucrose 0.83.6, the 0.84 Release Candidate 2, has find it's way into Sugar on a Stick (http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/snapshots/1/Soas-200902231225.iso). Aleksey Lim has been chasing down bugs seemingly across every package. And Sayamindu Dasgupta and the localization team have been very patiently updating the translations.

5. Christian Marc Schmidt has been making great progress on the new static website (See http://www.christianmarcschmidt.com/projects/sugarlabs/betasite). We are still seeking more screenshots of the work of children using Sugar, i.e., "authentic" Sugar images.

Tech Talk

6. Lionel Laské has been looking into the use of Mono as a Sugar resource, opening up to us the .NET community. Please see his post, “Mono on Sugar for dummies”, on the French .NET community site (http://www.techheadbrothers.com/Articles.aspx/developper-mono-xo).

7. S. Page, in reminding us, "Don't bet against the browser", posted a link to a Pippy-like tool for Javascript (See http://billmill.org/static/canvastutorial/).

8. Sascha Silbe "finally managed to get Linux working" on his phone, so he couldn't resist installing Sugar. See [1], [2], [3], and [4]). Sascha says, "No, it isn't really usable - only 64MB of physical RAM [5,6] means swapping ~30MB to SD just to start Sugar (no activities running). Sugar isn't touchscreen-"compatible" as well (there are no "plain" movements, just clicks and drags)." But it looks great.

Sugar Labs

9. Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see SOM).

Community News archive

An archive of this digest is available.

Planet

The Sugar Labs Planet is found here.

Sugar in the news

14 Feb 2009	OLPC Learning Club – DC – Learning Learning on a Stick
05 Feb 2009	xcoonomy – Sugar Beyond the XO Laptop: Walter Bender on OLPC, Sucrose 0.84, and “Sugar on a Stick”
26 Jan 2009	Linus Magazine – Sugar Defies OLPC Cutbacks
19 Jan 2009	Feeding the Penguins – The status of Sugar, post-OLPC
16 Jan 2009	OLPC News – Sugar on Acer Aspire One & Thin Client via LTSP
12 Jan 2009	Bill Kerr – thoughts about olpc cutbacks
07 Jan 2009	Ars Technica – OLPC downsizes half of its staff, cuts Sugar development
06 Jan 2009	OLPC News – An Inside Look at how Microsoft got XP on the XO
30 Dec 2008	OLPC News – Sugar Labs Status at Six Months
22 Dec 2008	The GNOME Project – Sugar Labs, the nonprofit behind the OLPC software, is joining the GNOME Foundation
16 Dec 2008	Feeding the Penguins – Sugar git repository change
14 Dec 2008	NPR – Laptop Deal Links Rural Peru To Opportunity, Risk (Part 2)
13 Dec 2008	NPR – Laptops May Change The Way Rural Peru Learns (Part 1)
09 Dec 2008	SFC – Sugar Labs joins Conservancy
31 Oct 2008	Linux Devices – An OLPC dilemma: Linux or Windows?
10 Oct 2008	Feeding the Penguin – Sugar on Ubuntu
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

9 Dec 2008	Sugar Labs/Sugar Labs joins the SFC
15 May 2008	Sugar Labs/Announcing Sugar Labs

@@ Line 6: / Line 6: @@
 === Sugar Digest ===
-. Kathleen A. Madigan, the founder of the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence, wrote a polarizing opinion piece in the ''Boston Globe'' this weekend ([http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2009/02/14/a_repackaged_education_proposal/ “A repackaged education proposal”], Opinion, Feb. 14) Madigan demonstrates that she values what she can measure rather than measure what she values. It is of course no surprise that a Hirschian, “standards-based reform" will lead to higher scores on standardized tests. But while Madigan assets that higher scores are a “success", she does not present any supporting evidence that there is a correlation between standardized test scores and achievement in the “real world.” In fact, many universities are dropping standardized tests from their admissions requirements precisely because they find little correlation between high scores and high achievement. Madigan's characterization of Darling-Hammond's “critical thinking and problem-solving” approach as antithetical to “academic content” and “specificity” is unsubstantiated. Undoubtedly, having basic facts readily at hand—on the "low shelf”—is important, but how you use those facts is equally as important. We can achieve and measure such a balance. A portfolio assessment that measures the whole child will tell us more about our children, their teachers, and our schools and closing the “knowledge gap” through authentic problem-solving can keep learning relevant. Further, since much of life in “the real world” outside of the classroom involves wrestling with open-ended problems, re-instating the arts—for which there seems to be no part in a Madigan standards-based school—should be part of any reform package that aspires to develop life-skills in our children.
+. I have spent much of the past two weeks finalizing the details of a proposal to the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). We are proposing to create hubs of international collaboration, leverage the diverse capabilities of partner institutions, to conduct a longitudinal study of the Sugar program on a global scale. Drafting this proposal is a first step towards to goal of rallying universities around the world to address some of the challenges I raised in a blog entry last year [http://walterbender.org/?p=6 “A page from the Hilbert playbook”]. What attracted me to this particular program, [http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2009/nsf09505/nsf09505.htm Partnerships for International Research and Education (PIRE),] is that it encourages international collaboration. Sugar is global and to understand its impact, one needs to work globally.
-. Several different discussion threads this week have prompted me to write about the relationship between Sugar Labs and free software.
+. I finally heard from the Free Software Foundation (FSF) that [http://directory.fsf.org/project/sugar/ Sugar] is listed in their directory of free software projects. I hadn't ever noticed that on their homepage they say, "Free software is the foundation of a learning society – where the tools we all use are free to share, study and modify." Is the tip of their hat to learning new? In any case, it is great to see them acknowledging the synergy between free software and learning.
-A question arose during a discussion about Sugar on a Stick (SoaS): Is SoaS a product of Sugar Labs? While it is an important part of our strategy to get Sugar into hands of more children, it is on par with other such efforts, such as Sugar on Fedora or Sugar on Debian. Sugar Labs “central” exists as a forum for the community to reach consensus on its goals. The heavy lifting is happening in the leaves, both upstream with those packaging the GNU/Linux distributions and downstream with those packaging Sugar for deployment on specific hardware or doing a Sugar deployment. Our product is the support of those efforts.
-An article on [http://www.olpcnews.com/people/negroponte/better_open_source_code_just_w.html OLPC News] posed the question: Is free software better when written just by volunteers? The motivation for asking the question was a remark by Nicholas Negroponte, “Almost all the cutbacks were in engineering staff related to the in-house support of Sugar, which is far better done in the community. In fact, paying people to do it from within created a degree of control that was unsuitable for real open-source development.” While the premise from which this question is being posed is itself flawed (only a small fraction of the OLPC engineering staff had ever been working on Sugar) the real confusion lies in a more fundamental misunderstanding. Apparently it cannot be said too often: ”Free as in speech, not as in beer.” The power of free software (software libre) is that it can be “used, studied, and modified without restriction.” There is a residual in that it enables the community to play an important role in development, but it does not directly follow that <em>all</em> development can be done entirely by a volunteer effort. The professional resources that Red Hat made available during the development of Sugar were necessary in the creation of Sugar and the development of Sugar ”products” will require dedicated in-kind contributions from industry and from the organizations doing major deployments.
-One essential role played by the community is that of critic (what Mr. Negroponte describes as [http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/jan/29/nicholas-negroponte-olpc counterproductive in-fighting]). But it is anything but counterproductive—it is one of our great strengths. While we have had our differences, we have learned from each other and Sugar is the better for it.
 === Community jams, meet-ups, and meetings ===
-. There will be a Family XO Mesh Meetup on Saturday, February 21st, 2009, 10 AM to 1 PM at
+. Mike Lee has posted some great photos from the DC Learning Club meeting, where they tried booting SoaS on a variety of netbooks (See
-Gallaudet University, Washington, D.C. 20002.
+http://www.flickr.com/photos/curiouslee/sets/72157614277170318/).
-. Michael Stone reported on some ”awesome” deployment meetings (See [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Deployment_meetings/20090203 Feb 03 deployment meeting minutes] and [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Deployment_meetings/20090210 Feb 10 deployment meeting minutes).
+=== Help Wanted / Help Received ===
-. Minutes from the Friday the 13th meeting of the Sugar Labs oversight board are posted [[Sugar_Labs/OversightBoard/Meeting_Minutes-2009-02-13|in the wiki]].
+. It is dizzying trying to floow the pace of the activity leading up to the release of 0.84. Simon Schampijer and the release team are engaged in a testing sprint. You can join them on irc.freenode.net, #sugar. Interwoven with the testing of 0.84 is a flurry of work on Sugar on a Stick (SoaS)—indeed, much of testing is happening in that environment: Thanks to the hard work of Sebastian Dziallas and the SoaS team, Sucrose 0.83.6, the 0.84 Release Candidate 2, has find it's way into Sugar on a Stick (http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/snapshots/1/Soas-200902231225.iso). Aleksey Lim has been chasing down bugs seemingly across every package. And Sayamindu Dasgupta and the localization team have been very patiently updating the translations.
-=== Help Wanted ===
+. Christian Marc Schmidt has been making great progress on the new static website (See http://www.christianmarcschmidt.com/projects/sugarlabs/betasite). We are still seeking more screenshots of the work of children using Sugar, i.e., "authentic" Sugar images.
-. Simon Schampijer and the release team would appreciate more feedback regarding the upcoming Sugar Release 0.84 (See [[BugSquad/TriageGuide#How_to_get_up_to_speed|the Triage Guide]]). Also, Tomeu Vizoso is trying to organizing more direct feedback for 0.86 would like to propose the next Sugar release (0.86). He is proposing that one point person be designated in each deployment area to be the point of contact between the global and the local Sugar communities. This person would ”coordinate tasks where direct communication between individuals is not practical” (See [[DeploymentTeam/Places|deployment feedback]]).
-. OLPC will not be issuing a major software release this spring (9.1), but is proceeding with an update to last fall's 8.2 release. Chris Ball has announced ”the first in a series of signed candidate builds leading up to the release of 8.2.1.”  For those of you using XO laptops, the 8.2.1 release team would appreciate your help testing (See [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Friends_in_testing#Preparation 8.2.1 preparation]).
-. Christian Schmidt is looking for pictures from projects children and teachers have created with Sugar to use as illustrations for the new Sugar Labs website.
 === Tech Talk ===
-. Wade Brainerd has continued to develop the [[ActivityTeam|Actvity Team]]. He and Bernie Innocenti have set up an RSS feed ([http://git.sugarlabs.org/events.atom events.atom]) to make it easier to track changes in the git tree.
+. Lionel Laské has been looking into the use of Mono as a Sugar resource, opening up to us the .NET community. Please see his post, “Mono on Sugar for dummies”, on the French .NET community site (http://www.techheadbrothers.com/Articles.aspx/developper-mono-xo).
+. S. Page, in reminding us, "Don't bet against the browser", posted a link to a Pippy-like tool for Javascript (See http://billmill.org/static/canvastutorial/).
-. Simon, Tomeu, and Marco (Presenti Gritti) have been busy pushing out new releases:
+. Sascha Silbe "finally managed to get Linux working" on his phone, so he couldn't resist installing Sugar. See [http://sascha.silbe.org/photos/dsc04708.jpg [1]], [http://sascha.silbe.org/photos/dsc04709.jpg [2]], [http://sascha.silbe.org/photos/dsc04710.jpg [3]], and [http://sascha.silbe.org/photos/dsc04711.jpg [4]]). Sascha says, "No, it isn't really usable - only 64MB of physical RAM [5,6] means swapping ~30MB to SD just to start Sugar (no activities running). Sugar isn't touchscreen-"compatible" as well (there are no "plain" movements, just clicks and drags)." But it looks great.
-* [http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/glucose/sugar/sugar-0.83.7.tar.bz2 sugar-0.83.7.tar.bz2]
-* [http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/glucose/sugar-toolkit/sugar-toolkit-0.83.6.tar.bz2 sugar-toolkit-0.83.6.tar.bz2]
-* [http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/glucose/sugar-artwork/sugar-artwork-0.83.4.tar.bz2 sugar-artwork-0.83.4.tar.bz2]
 === Sugar Labs ===
-. Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:Image:2009-February-7-13-som.jpg|SOM]]).
+. Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:Image:2009-February-14-20-som.jpg|SOM]]).
 === Community News archive ===