On Mon, Apr 24, 2017 at 01:03:09PM -0500, James Simmons wrote: > I'd rather the children used Linux myself (that's all I use at home) but > realistically I don't see it happening, unless the kids do it themselves.
This is what is so exciting about Sugarizer: One of the platforms it targets, Android, is in many signifcant respects the most widely used Linux distribution on the planet. There's no need to sneak it into schools, or to cajole it into the hands of children. What's more, at least a couple of the original goals for the OLPC XO--ubiquity through low cost and aggressive power management--have been brought to fruition and continue to be pursued by the Android market. We don't have to fight a strong current the entire way, we may be able to row along with it, just enough to steer towards our own goals, That said, Android is heavily fractured and very consumer oriented, and works pretty directly against the concept of general-purpose computing embodied by form factors like traditionally-conceived desktops and laptops. The complexity of the development and production environment, and the limitations from its heavy focus on centralized, network-based services is fraught, at least as I see how they interact with goals like empowering individual learners and supporting their autonomy. Nor is it as free (as in freedom) as I'd like. Thus, I don't endorse the wholesale abandonment of Sugar on other platforms. Even so, it seems to offer a more tractable and more palatable path than do some other, more proprietary consumer-orientated platforms that, at the very least, elso encourage a centralizing, passivating dependence amongst their customers. These other OSes may offer benefits from being still in widespread use, in part no doubt due to a certain level of regulatory capture, but Android is where the growth is at. My understanding is that Sugar, like the constructionist approach behind it, is meant to support open-ended learning. I see a dichotomy pushed in a few of the discussions here, setting everyone else against developers. This flies in the face of the possibilities that at least some Sugar learners will indeed *become* developers, that some *should* become developers, and that the rise of future Sugar developers from the broader pool of Sugar learners demonstrates constructionism at its best. Not every learner should have to become a developer, no, but those that do should be able to use Sugar on their way. If that is to happen, we should keep that path as clear as we can and in my mind that includes Sugar running on general-purpose computing platforms that can host some, if not all, development activities. Maybe someday web+mobile platforms will be self-hosting, and it will be routine to build systems from the kernel on up in web browsers. Until that happens, though, I'd like to think that a Sugar learner will not be limited in their ability to move smoothly from introductory activities all the way through to running Develop or Terminal (or, on the XOs, OFW) or activities yet to be developed or incorporated into the broader Sugar platform, from whence they have access to the entire computing stack, without limit. -- D. Joe _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep