Difference between revisions of "Sugar Labs/Current Events"

Revision as of 20:40, 13 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. Collect, Select, Reflect: I had a timely visit from Prof. Evangeline Harris Stefanakis this week. Stefanakis is the author of Multiple Intelligences and Portfolios: a Window into the Learner's Mind. We met to discuss ways in which we could further the support for portfolio assessment within the context of a Sugar deployment. Some of her observations include that a portfolio is not just a collection of work, but also a way of organizing that work into a presentation. (Note the obvious connection to the heated discussions on narrative and the Journal/datastore.) We discussed a number of simple scaffolds that we could add either directly to the Journal or build into a Portfolio Activity, for example, the inclusion of a "who am I?" section, where the learner is prompted to describe who they are across a multitude of prespectives: who am I as a linguist... as an artist... as a friend... We also discussed how we could enhance the use of tags by prompting the learner when their work is saved: What did you do? How did you do it? What did you learn? Is it portfolio worthy? Providing some structure—with multiple entry-points—helps bootstrap the portfolio process. We should consider different structures for different levels of development within the early, elementary, and middle-school years. A "Madlibs"-like format—that can be reauthored by a teacher or student—may be a reasonable place to start. Also, a scaffolding that encourages periodic review would also be beneficial to the learner. We plan to come up with a more tangible set of design criteria in the coming weeks. But it is helpful to discuss the Journal as a tool for reflection, not just as a replacement for the file system.

2. LiveCD/LiveUSB updates: Carolyn Meeks and Marco Pesenti Gritti continue to work on improvements to the bootable Sugar USB. Marco has a new Fedora-based LiveCD image (http://www.sugarlabs.org/~marco/sugar-livecd-1marco.iso) and is working on a CD that will launch a USB image (since many older machines are not configured by default to boot off of a USB drive). Sebatian Dziallas and Luke Macken have created an updated version of the Fedora/Sugar LiveCD (http://sdz.fedorapeople.org/olpc/sugar-spin.iso_ and has made a LiveUSB creator available (http://sdz.fedorapeople.org/olpc/liveusb-creator-3.0.zip)—you can run liveusb-creator on Windows XP to generate the latest Sugar spin on a USB key. Meanwhile, Carolyn continues to visit schools, testing builds, and gathering data as to the best ways to do simple, low-risk Sugar deployments in schools without the resources to buy dedicated laptops.

3. Roadmaps: David Farning is developing a community roadmap for Sugar (to complement the development roadmap -- see Release Roadmap). David has begun with a list of features that are important for the future growth of Sugar Labs: vision, distribution, deployment, quality assurance, and infrastructure. Please help us fill in the schedule in the wiki (Community Roadmap).

4. Blogs: The teachers in Uruguay are getting more active with their blogs about using Sugar in the classroom. Their goal is to share experiences (http://ceibalpuertosauce.blogspot.com/ is but one of many examples). Add you Sugar-related blog to the list (Community Blogs).

Community jams, meetups, and meetings

5. Sugar calendars: We've added the developer meetings to the Sugar meetings calendar; there is also now a Sugar Labs events calendar for meetings, meet ups, sprints, etc. For information about how to access these calendars, please see the Community page (Community Calendar) in the wiki.

6. Lima translation sprint: 20–21 October in Lima, Perú at 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.

Tech Talk

7. Sugar API: Marco Pesenti Gritti, speaking on behalf of the deployment team, has announced plans for refactoring and stabilizing our public API. Please join the discussion at the next developer meeting (irc.freenode.net #sugar-meeting Thursday, 16 October 2008, 14:00 UTC).

8. gconf: Simon Schampijer has been working on the transition to gconf. He will land it in the next days. He also fixed the 'Reset Registration with school servers' now completely #7764.

9. Upstream: Pyxpcom has been enabled in the Fedora 10 xulrunner thanks to Cristopher Aillon. Marco has synced the xulrunner olpc3 package and fixed the hulahop package accordingly to these changes. Simon has built the browse activity for fedora rawhide.

10. Sucrose 0.82 on Ubuntu: Morgan Collett has been working on the Sugar Ubuntu packages; they have been updated to the latest 0.82 release in the Sugar Team PPA. Some activities are still being updated at the moment, but should be up to date in the next few days. Installation instructions:

sudo -s
echo deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/sugarteam/ubuntu hardy main > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/sugar.list
apt-get update
apt-get install sugar sugar-emulator sugar-activities

A more up-to-date version of Sugar on Ubuntu is available if you add the repository for Sugar 0.82 as described here: http://sugarlabs.org/go/Community/Distributions/Ubuntu

Luke Faraone has been triaging Sugar-related bugs in Ubuntu's Launchpad. Along with Morgs, he is a driving force behind the the effort to get Sugar into the Ubuntu 8.10.

11. Sugar modules: There is time until 29 October to propose new modules, and new activities in particular, to be part of the 0.84 release. If you are an activity maintainer and would like to propose its inclusion please send mail to the Sugar list as per the instructions (Module Release).

12. Activity updates: There are updates available for:

Chat-48.xo

Browse-99.xo

Moon-8.xo

video-chat-9.xo

panorama-1.xo

Sugar Labs

13. 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-October-4-10-som.jpg).

Sugar in the news

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

15 May 2008

Sugar Labs/Announcing Sugar Labs

@@ Line 6: / Line 6: @@
 === Sugar Digest ===
-. 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].
+. Collect, Select, Reflect: I had a timely visit from Prof. Evangeline Harris Stefanakis this week. Stefanakis is the author of <i>Multiple Intelligences and Portfolios: a Window into the Learner's Mind</i>. We met to discuss ways in which we could further the support for portfolio assessment within the context of a Sugar deployment. Some of her observations include that a portfolio is not just a collection of work, but also a way of organizing that work into a presentation. (Note the obvious connection to the heated discussions on narrative and the Journal/datastore.) We discussed a number of simple scaffolds that we could add either directly to the Journal or build into a Portfolio Activity, for example, the inclusion of a "who am I?" section, where the learner is prompted to describe who they are across a multitude of prespectives: who am I as a linguist... as an artist... as a friend... We also discussed how we could enhance the use of tags by prompting the learner when their work is saved: What did you do? How did you do it? What did you learn? Is it portfolio worthy? Providing some structure—with multiple entry-points—helps bootstrap the portfolio process. We should consider different structures for different levels of development within the early, elementary, and middle-school years. A "Madlibs"-like format—that can be reauthored by a teacher or student—may be a reasonable place to start. Also, a scaffolding that encourages periodic review would also be beneficial to the learner. We plan to come up with a more tangible set of design criteria in the coming weeks. But it is helpful to discuss the Journal as a tool for reflection, not just as a replacement for the file system.
-I tried it out and got good and timely feedback regarding my copy (a Letter to the Editor):
+. LiveCD/LiveUSB updates: Carolyn Meeks and Marco Pesenti Gritti continue to work on improvements to the bootable Sugar USB. Marco has a new Fedora-based LiveCD image (http://www.sugarlabs.org/~marco/sugar-livecd-1marco.iso) and is working on a CD that will launch a USB image (since many older machines are not configured by default to boot off of a USB drive). Sebatian Dziallas and Luke Macken have created an updated version of the Fedora/Sugar LiveCD (http://sdz.fedorapeople.org/olpc/sugar-spin.iso_ and has made a LiveUSB creator available (http://sdz.fedorapeople.org/olpc/liveusb-creator-3.0.zip)—you can run liveusb-creator on Windows XP to generate the latest Sugar spin on a USB key. Meanwhile, Carolyn continues to visit schools, testing builds, and gathering data as to the best ways to do simple, low-risk Sugar deployments in schools without the resources to buy dedicated laptops.
-:'''What would Josh Billings say about Gov. Palin?'''
+. Roadmaps: David Farning is developing a community roadmap for Sugar (to complement the development roadmap -- see [[ReleaseTeam/Roadmap|Release Roadmap]]). David has begun with a list of features that are important for the future growth of Sugar Labs: vision, distribution, deployment, quality assurance, and infrastructure. Please help us fill in the schedule in the wiki ([[Community/Roadmap|Community Roadmap]]).
-: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 <span style="background: #FFCCCC"><del>Billings's</del></span> <span style="background: #CCFFCC">Billings'</span> folksy <span style="background: #FFCCCC"><del>charm. But</del></span> <span style="background: #CCFFCC">charm, but</span> gosh <span style="background: #FFCCCC"><del>darnit,</del></span> <span style="background: #CCFFCC">darn it,</span>
-:her problems include both what she don't know and what she knows
-:that ain't so.  McCain has shown reckless judgment in choosing <span style="background: #CCFFCC">her as</span> 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. (My apologies to those who were offended by the example that I used from the Peer Editing Exchange. In retrospect, I should not have mixed politics with my Sugar Digest postings. Please note that all of the opinions expressed in this blog are my own. Sugar Labs, as far as I know, has no official position on the US elections and is not affiliated with any particular party. Whatever the outcome of the US election this November, let’s hope that the new president makes learning and freedom priorities. --[[User:Walter|Walter]] 20:04, 6 October 2008 (UTC))
+. Blogs: The teachers in Uruguay are getting more active with their blogs about using Sugar in the classroom. Their goal is to share experiences (http://ceibalpuertosauce.blogspot.com/ is but one of many examples). Add you Sugar-related blog to the list ([[DeploymentTeam/Guide_to_community_outreach#Entries_on_blogs|Community Blogs]]).
-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?
+=== Community jams, meetups, and meetings ===
-. 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]).
+. Sugar calendars: We've added the developer meetings to the Sugar meetings calendar; there is also now a Sugar Labs events calendar for meetings, meet ups, sprints, etc. For information about how to access these calendars, please see the Community page ([[Community#Calendar|Community Calendar]]) in the wiki.
-:Sugar offers an excellent mode for discovery but no excellent way to
+. Lima translation sprint: 20–21 October in Lima, Perú at 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.
-:manipulate narratives. Both discovery and narrative are essential for
-:learning.—Bryan Barry
-:This statement seems to me both indisputable and damning; if true, it
+=== Tech Talk ===
-: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.
-. 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.
-. 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 (See a [[:Image:Formative-evaluation-of-olpc-project-nepal-summary.jpg|self-organizing map]] of the report).
-. 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.
-. 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 API: Marco Pesenti Gritti, speaking on behalf of the deployment team, has announced plans for refactoring and stabilizing our public API. Please join the discussion at the next developer meeting (irc.freenode.net #sugar-meeting Thursday, 16 October 2008, 14:00 UTC).
-=== Community jams, meet ups, and meetings ===
+. gconf: Simon Schampijer has been working on the transition to gconf. He will land it in the next days. He also fixed the 'Reset Registration with school servers' now completely #7764.
-. 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.
+. Upstream: Pyxpcom has been enabled in the Fedora 10 xulrunner thanks to Cristopher Aillon. Marco has synced the xulrunner olpc3 package and fixed the hulahop package accordingly to these changes. Simon has built the browse activity for fedora rawhide.
-. 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.
+. Sucrose 0.82 on Ubuntu: Morgan Collett has been working on the Sugar Ubuntu packages; they have been updated to the latest 0.82 release in the Sugar Team PPA. Some activities are still being updated at the moment, but should be up to date in the next few days. Installation instructions:
+ sudo -s
+ echo deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/sugarteam/ubuntu hardy main > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/sugar.list
+ apt-get update
+ apt-get install sugar sugar-emulator sugar-activities
-. 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].
+A more up-to-date version of Sugar on Ubuntu is available if you add the repository for Sugar 0.82 as described here: http://sugarlabs.org/go/Community/Distributions/Ubuntu
-=== Tech Talk ===
+Luke Faraone has been triaging Sugar-related bugs in Ubuntu's Launchpad. Along with Morgs, he is a driving force behind the the effort to get Sugar into the Ubuntu 8.10.
-. 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.
+. Sugar modules: There is time until 29 October to propose new modules, and new activities in particular, to be part of the 0.84 release. If you are an activity maintainer and would like to propose its inclusion please send mail to the Sugar list as per the instructions ([[ReleaseTeam#Module_release|Module Release]]).
 . Activity updates: There are updates available for:
-:Jukebox-2.xo
+:Chat-48.xo
-:ImageViewer-2.xo
+:Browse-99.xo
+:Moon-8.xo
+:video-chat-9.xo
+:panorama-1.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-Sept-27-Oct-3-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-October-4-10-som.jpg]]).
 ==Sugar in the news==