Re: [IAEP] 70 minute interview with Bryan Berry on XO deployment in Nepal
I've transcribed a large portion of this interview on my blog: http://billkerr2.blogspot.com/2009/04/olpc-nepal-project-overview.html might be handy if you don't have 60 minutes to spare On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 3:49 AM, Bill Kerr billk...@gmail.com wrote: excellent interview, well worth listening to this gave me a clearer impression of the challenges facing an xo deployment than anything else I have seen, read or heard - although much of it is nepal specific I suspect that much of it would also apply to other developing countries too excellent questions from Randall covering a wide range of topics and Bryan was more than happy to provide comprehensive responses - with an infectious enthusiasm On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 10:03 PM, Costello, Rob R costello.ro...@edumail.vic.gov.au wrote: don't know if this has been flagged but just ran across this : 70 minute interview with Bryan Berry on XO deployment in Nepal http://twit.tv/floss66 Rob *Important - *This email and any attachments may be confidential. If received in error, please contact us and delete all copies. Before opening or using attachments check them for viruses and defects. Regardless of any loss, damage or consequence, whether caused by the negligence of the sender or not, resulting directly or indirectly from the use of any attached files our liability is limited to resupplying any affected attachments. Any representations or opinions expressed are those of the individual sender, and not necessarily those of the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] karma and mozilla education
Hi, was wondering if any of the people behind the Karma project have been already in contact with the Mozilla Education team: http://commonspace.wordpress.com/2009/02/01/why-mozilla-education/ May there be some synergy? Regards, Tomeu ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Experiences with Soas2-200904231400.iso Snapshot
Hi James, Thanks for testing! We do have a Boot Helper CD iso on the wiki page. I personally think we shoudl recommend that people start with that then see if they can change thier BIOS so we have more first time success. On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 5:46 PM, James Simmons jim.simm...@walgreens.comwrote: I tried using the latest snapshot with Smolt and have posted two hardware profiles on the hardware page. Both are older computers that cannot boot off a USB stick directly. I had first tried using the latest boot CD and while this seemed to boot OK I had no network access. I am assuming that this is because the OS on the CD is different than the one on the stick. I was able to resolve this using a boot diskette. I can't find the reference on the Wiki to this product, but it's a free as in beer diskette that lets you choose what device to boot from even if the BIOS doesn't support it. The problem with this diskette is that it will not recognize USB ports that are not connected to the mother board directly. So I can boot using the USB 1.1 ports on the front of my computers but not the 2.0 ports on PCI cards in the back of the computers. This was very slow but it did give me network access. One thing I didn't realize was that Smolt requires you to have a stick for each hardware profile you create. Once I figured this out I bought more sticks and redid my profiles in the Wiki. The first stick let me create a hardware profile and send it to the server, but Browse would not come up. I worked around this by saving the Terminal buffer to the Journal using the clipboard, then reverting the OS to the Beta while not overwriting home. I used the Beta to create the Wiki table entry. Before reverting I tested the snapshot and verified that networking and sound worked. I did not test Read Etexts because without Browse working I was unable to download it. The second stick went better. Everything worked, and I was able to download Read Etexts and View Slides and try them out. Read Etexts has a text to speech function that I wanted to test, and as in previous weeks the text highlighting lagged way behind the spoken words. This doesn't happen on every computer, but it does happen on both of mine. An HP Vectra at work does not have this problem. I want to add the profile for this machine to the Wiki but we use a special configuration script to set up a proxy server at work. I can do this for Mozilla on Linux but I don't know how to make this work with Browse, etc. in Sugar. If anyone has ideas I'd like to hear them. There is a fair amount of interest in TTS with highlighting even though Read Etexts is the only Activity that supports it, and it might be worthwhile to find out what the machines it works on have in common so we can make the gstreamer espeak plugin work reliably everywhere. In addition to Browse not being able to launch on the first stick I tried I had problems launching View Slides on the second stick. The week before I couldn't launch Tam Tam Mini or Hablar Con Sara on the Beta. These applications all work fine in my Fedora 10 Sugar test environment. It seems to be a general flakiness with unpacking Activities. I use 4 GB SanDisk Cruzer Micro sticks, a popular brand sold at Costco. James Simmons ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- Caroline Meeks Solution Grove carol...@solutiongrove.com 617-500-3488 - Office 505-213-3268 - Fax ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Experiences with Soas2-200904231400.iso Snapshot
Another comment on SoaS snapshot: When I found myself without a Browse activity in the first stick I had a notion to copy the Smolt text from Terminal to the clipboard, save the text to the Journal, then copy that Journal entry to a second thumb drive which I could then mount on a different computer to update the Wiki with a link to my hardware profile. I found that SoaS would not recognize that I had inserted a second USB thumb drive and automatically mount it. It seems to me that this is something it should be able to do. James Simmons Caroline Meeks wrote: Hi James, Thanks for testing! We do have a Boot Helper CD iso on the wiki page. I personally think we shoudl recommend that people start with that then see if they can change thier BIOS so we have more first time success. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] SoaS on CNet download
http://download.cnet.com/Sugar-on-a-Stick/3000-18513_4-10913733.html ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] 70 minute interview with Bryan Berry on XO deployment in Nepal
On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 10:37:42PM +0930, Bill Kerr wrote: I've transcribed a large portion of this interview on my blog: http://billkerr2.blogspot.com/2009/04/olpc-nepal-project-overview.html might be handy if you don't have 60 minutes to spare Thanks very much - 5 mins. vs. 60 mins...makes all the difference. The portion that I'll paraphrase as content is king (or create the content and the hardware orders will come, for a longer version) made me re-think the ebook-concept-as-trojan-horse argument that's been made before: its big advantage is that it short-circuits the lack of content problem by definition: it seems popular discourse takes for granted that e-book readers are separate to e-books but not that educational laptops are separate from educational content. A killer app might be an App Store for books, with the ability to access multiple stores. Project Gutenberg could be a store, for example. Even just Project Gutenberg support in Read would be cool (Apologies if this is already available and I don't know about it - please correct me). Calibre's been talked about but the feature is on the TODO list[1] (though I didn't see it[2]). http://www.mobileread.com/ appears to be a place to start reading about e-book reader software and platforms, but I don't have any more time to do the necessary research to see what the solved problems are (and how they're applicable to Sugar), unfortunately. Martin 1. http://calibre.kovidgoyal.net/ticket/2297#comment:1 2. http://calibre.kovidgoyal.net/roadmap pgpjnI2ff8Pqy.pgp Description: PGP signature ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] 70 minute interview with Bryan Berry on XO deployment in Nepal
Martin Dengler wrote: A killer app might be an App Store for books, with the ability to access multiple stores. Project Gutenberg could be a store, for example. Even just Project Gutenberg support in Read would be cool (Apologies if this is already available and I don't know about it - please correct me). Perhaps you would like http://manybooks.net --Ben signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] 70 minute interview with Bryan Berry on XO deployment in Nepal
Sayamindu has ported fbreader to the XO, but it is Sugar .82 and is not yet in SOAS or a.sl.o. It reads epub format among others, which is to be found on many of the free sites. I made the following XO style library bundle of the Newbery medal winning children's books by women authors from the UPenn site, and it is still experimental in aslo because it needs recommendations, but recommendations require that you have the reader. http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4077 Yes, it is in English. I know there is a lot of classic Spanish language content out there that could be packaged as well, because I gathered it as a resource for my daughter's AP Spanish Literature class a few years back. I have a detailed lesson plan and student materials bundle for a wonderful literacy activity using write and browse that I want to load (teacher tested -- contributed by my daughter the teacher -- and I could make more) , but we need a category for lesson plans so someone would know to look for it. We're so close to being able to start loading content, but seem to get sidetracked into discussions of better content formats and other perfect is the enemy of the good topics every time. On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 9:09 AM, Benjamin M. Schwartz bmsch...@fas.harvard.edu wrote: Martin Dengler wrote: A killer app might be an App Store for books, with the ability to access multiple stores. Project Gutenberg could be a store, for example. Even just Project Gutenberg support in Read would be cool (Apologies if this is already available and I don't know about it - please correct me). Perhaps you would like http://manybooks.net --Ben ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- I don't consider him a particularly reliable source of information. -- Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, at a House Foreign Affairs Committee meeting, on former Vice President Dick Cheney. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Experiences with Soas2-200904231400.iso Snapshot
James Simmons wrote: Another comment on SoaS snapshot: When I found myself without a Browse activity in the first stick I had a notion to copy the Smolt text from Terminal to the clipboard, save the text to the Journal, then copy that Journal entry to a second thumb drive which I could then mount on a different computer to update the Wiki with a link to my hardware profile. I found that SoaS would not recognize that I had inserted a second USB thumb drive and automatically mount it. It seems to me that this is something it should be able to do. James Simmons Er... that's interesting. Normally, SoaS mounted additional USB drives. This was in the latest snapshot, right? Using a boot helper or not? I guess we should really get a new boot helper soon, to narrow down some issues. We need to find out what's causing which error here. --Sebastian Caroline Meeks wrote: Hi James, Thanks for testing! We do have a Boot Helper CD iso on the wiki page. I personally think we shoudl recommend that people start with that then see if they can change thier BIOS so we have more first time success. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Experiences with Soas2-200904231400.iso Snapshot
Sebastian, I used the PLOP boot diskette, which allows you to boot off a USB drive even if the BIOS doesn't support doing that. This was with the latest snapshot. It never occurred to me to try it with any of the Betas. I would expect that if you booted off the USB drive directly you'd have the same result. I don't have any computers that can do that, unfortunately. James Simmons Sebastian Dziallas wrote: James Simmons wrote: Another comment on SoaS snapshot: When I found myself without a Browse activity in the first stick I had a notion to copy the Smolt text from Terminal to the clipboard, save the text to the Journal, then copy that Journal entry to a second thumb drive which I could then mount on a different computer to update the Wiki with a link to my hardware profile. I found that SoaS would not recognize that I had inserted a second USB thumb drive and automatically mount it. It seems to me that this is something it should be able to do. James Simmons Er... that's interesting. Normally, SoaS mounted additional USB drives. This was in the latest snapshot, right? Using a boot helper or not? I guess we should really get a new boot helper soon, to narrow down some issues. We need to find out what's causing which error here. --Sebastian Caroline Meeks wrote: Hi James, Thanks for testing! We do have a Boot Helper CD iso on the wiki page. I personally think we shoudl recommend that people start with that then see if they can change thier BIOS so we have more first time success. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Fwd: OLPC Volunteer Infrastructure Group Meeting: [Today]
OLPC/SugarLabs is still in the process of transitioning systems out of OLPC. For instance I hear the Pootle migration is coming along nicely. But there are still services that that need to be moved, and completely new systems that need to be constructed for us to continue our work. I wanted to make sure that IAEP was aware of the Volunteer Intrastructure Group meeting today, where I hope that we can discuss some of this upcoming work: -- Forwarded message -- From: Stefan Unterhauser d...@laptop.org Date: Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 3:25 PM Subject: [Olpc-sysadmin] OLPC Volunteer Infrastructure Group Meeting: [Today] To: olpc-sysad...@laptop.org, de...@lists.laptop.org, support-g...@laptop.org The Volunteer Infrastructure Group (/gang) Meeting is today (April 21th) at 4pm (EST) The Volunteer Infrastructure Group is a team of Volunteer Sysadmins who help maintain services and systems around OLPC and the OLPC/SugarLabs community. The weekly VIG meeting is an excellent chance to get involved, or to be aware of upcoming projects. http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC:Volunteer_Infrastructure_Group http://vig.laptop.org/wiki/index.php/User:Dogi http://idea.laptop.org/ideatorrent/ideatorrent/vig/ http://embed.mibbit.com/?server=irc.oftc.netchannel=%23olpc-adminsettings=12a698505c860f99a6ad1051c57975f9noServerTab=falsenoServerNotices=truenoServerMotd=truenick=Guest Meeting Details: Date: April 28th, 2009 Time: 16:00 EST Location: irc.oftc.net #olpc-admin Please feel free to follow up on the olpc-sysadmin mailing list if you would like to add anything to the agenda. Right now the agenda will be set at the start of the meeting. Thanks everyone, Stefan Unterhauser ___ Olpc-sysadmin mailing list olpc-sysad...@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/olpc-sysadmin ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] IAEP Digest, Vol 13, Issue 86
Martin, Read doesn't support plain text files, but a separate Activity I wrote, called Read Etexts, does. You can download one of the Zip formats from the Gutenberg site to the Journal with Browse, then Resume it with Read Etexts. Read Etexts also has a text to speech with highlighting feature that you might like. Read can process Djvu files when an Evince plugin for that purpose is installed. This should be a standard part of the Sugar installation in the future and I think it's in SoaS now. Djvu is a format used by the Internet Archive that reproduces scanned pages in a highly compressed way, giving the ebook the appearance of the original book pages. It seems to work better than PDFs for this purpose. Between Gutenberg and IA you have thousands of books available. On the Sugar-devel list there was a discussion of Unified Bundles, where various kinds of readable media can be bundled up like Activities are bundled. One of the goals of this would be to improve the experience of reading texts, slide shows, and the like under Sugar. Instead of needing to know what reading Activity goes with what format, the child would just launch the bundle and the appropriate code would display the content to him. Configuration in a file in the bundle would say what kind of file it was. The bundle maker would set that up, and the child wouldn't have to deal with it. If you were going to create an application to get books from all of the different possible sources and package them up as bundles that sounds to me like a web application on a server, not an Activity. In any case, if you want to download books from Gutenberg to the XO check out Read Etexts and see what you think. James Simmons The portion that I'll paraphrase as content is king (or create the content and the hardware orders will come, for a longer version) made me re-think the ebook-concept-as-trojan-horse argument that's been made before: its big advantage is that it short-circuits the lack of content problem by definition: it seems popular discourse takes for granted that e-book readers are separate to e-books but not that educational laptops are separate from educational content. A killer app might be an App Store for books, with the ability to access multiple stores. Project Gutenberg could be a store, for example. Even just Project Gutenberg support in Read would be cool (Apologies if this is already available and I don't know about it - please correct me). Calibre's been talked about but the feature is on the TODO list[1] (though I didn't see it[2]). http://www.mobileread.com/ appears to be a place to start reading about e-book reader software and platforms, but I don't have any more time to do the necessary research to see what the solved problems are (and how they're applicable to Sugar), unfortunately. Martin ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] IAEP Digest, Vol 13, Issue 86
James, Thanks for your reply... On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 05:07:15PM -0500, James Simmons wrote: [I]f you want to download books from Gutenberg to the XO check out Read Etexts and see what you think. Thanks - will do. And please know I'm just muttering from the peanut gallery - I'll put my code where my mouth is sometime, hopefully, but I can't now, sorry. So please feel free to ignore me. The scenario I was imagining was: Teacher: Can I get my class to read Shakespeare in Sugar? Imaginary SL person: Sure, just click on Read ETexts and then the Find Books tag. Type Shakespeare, and go from there [at which point project gutenberg, journal items with a special tag, and other sources are queried filtered by Shakespeare to show what books are available for reading]. James Simmons Martin pgpGhx3usOgV7.pgp Description: PGP signature ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] 70 minute interview with Bryan Berry on XO deployment in Nepal
hard to argue against someone who is doing such great work in Nepal but I thought Bryan overplayed the local factors too much: 10) Open Source software critical to high quality education – education has to be very customised, to the kids, the teacher, the environment and the country – not something you can design in New York city and will fit another country http://billkerr2.blogspot.com/2009/04/olpc-nepal-project-overview.html The counterbalance to that is that The Enlightenment is what made us, what created modernity, what transformed diverse cultures into our modern culture I hope it doesn't become unfashionable to say that modernity is a good thing see http://learningevolves.wikispaces.com/nonUniversals ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Books Books Books
Yes! In theory there are thousands of free books. We need people to be able to experience that there are books available for Sugar when they try Sugar. I like the idea of hooking the readers to a library. I don't know how much work that is or who is available to do it now. Does anyone know where we are in terms of books on the activities portal? On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 6:23 PM, Martin Dengler mar...@martindengler.comwrote: James, Thanks for your reply... On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 05:07:15PM -0500, James Simmons wrote: [I]f you want to download books from Gutenberg to the XO check out Read Etexts and see what you think. Thanks - will do. And please know I'm just muttering from the peanut gallery - I'll put my code where my mouth is sometime, hopefully, but I can't now, sorry. So please feel free to ignore me. The scenario I was imagining was: Teacher: Can I get my class to read Shakespeare in Sugar? Imaginary SL person: Sure, just click on Read ETexts and then the Find Books tag. Type Shakespeare, and go from there [at which point project gutenberg, journal items with a special tag, and other sources are queried filtered by Shakespeare to show what books are available for reading]. James Simmons Martin ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- Caroline Meeks Solution Grove carol...@solutiongrove.com 617-500-3488 - Office 505-213-3268 - Fax ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Books Books Books
On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 7:39 PM, Caroline Meeks solutiongr...@gmail.com wrote: Yes! In theory The difference between theory and practice is that in theory there is no difference, but in practice there is. there are thousands of free books. In actuality, actually. Not just Project Gutenberg, but Wikibooks, Creative Commons, and others. See, in particular, http://www.librarianchick.com for textbooks on any and every subject. We need people to be able to experience that there are books available for Sugar when they try Sugar. I like the idea of hooking the readers to a library. I don't know how much work that is or who is available to do it now. Does anyone know where we are in terms of books on the activities portal? We can easily put together a set of bookmarks. What form should books be in for the School Server? There are supposed to be a Bible and a Qur'an for the XO. I know where the texts are for a dozen other religions, if anybody is interested in providing them. On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 6:23 PM, Martin Dengler mar...@martindengler.com wrote: James, Thanks for your reply... On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 05:07:15PM -0500, James Simmons wrote: [I]f you want to download books from Gutenberg to the XO check out Read Etexts and see what you think. Thanks - will do. And please know I'm just muttering from the peanut gallery - I'll put my code where my mouth is sometime, hopefully, but I can't now, sorry. So please feel free to ignore me. The scenario I was imagining was: Teacher: Can I get my class to read Shakespeare in Sugar? Imaginary SL person: Sure, just click on Read ETexts and then the Find Books tag. Type Shakespeare, and go from there [at which point project gutenberg, journal items with a special tag, and other sources are queried filtered by Shakespeare to show what books are available for reading]. Students will need more than the bare texts. At least a dictionary of Elizabethan English, and preferably some of the books that Shakespeare himself read, such as Aristotle's Poetics, Plutarch's Lives, and Holinshed's Chronicles. James Simmons Martin ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- Caroline Meeks Solution Grove carol...@solutiongrove.com 617-500-3488 - Office 505-213-3268 - Fax ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- Silent Thunder (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) is my name And Children are my nation. The Cosmos is my dwelling place, The Truth my destination. http://earthtreasury.org/worknet (Edward Mokurai Cherlin) ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
