Re: [IAEP] maths instruction
On Thursday 30 April 2009 8:04:37 pm Kathy Pusztavari wrote: I'm of the direct instruction camp. If skills and concepts are not build upon each other correctly, you will get kids that either learn a concept wrong (then they have to unlearn it) or fail and then feel like they are stupid... I hope between the 'instruction' camp and the 'construction' camp we don't lose sight of the learner - the individual! :-). The extent to which the learner has control over the learning process seems to have a big difference in the outcomes. There is a big difference between 'feeling stupid' and being told 'one is stupid'. Falling down and feeling stupid at times are part of the learning curve. Being told that one is stupid because one has not understood the concepts presented in a particular way is not. .It should help nerds (what I loving call you guys) when they program modules. How do you teach a skill or concept when you are not sure the student has prerequisite skills or knowledge? You don't, not if you expect a favorable outcome: http://boyslife.org/jokes/1296/three-scouts-good-deeds/ Kids are both with their syllabus and learn all the time (till they become teens anyway :-)): http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/michael_merzenich_on_the_elastic_brain.html Most cases of bad grades and drop-outs turn out to be a mismatch between the learner's expectation and the teacher's method. The tough question is really about how a teacher can discover the learner's method. Subbu___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] after Paris == Re: [Grassroots-l] Planning for Sugar Camp Paris
Hi all, I am not sure if there a need for it. But I can offer een place to work for one week, 26th July - 2nd Agust in Oegstgeest,The Netherlands. It is about 20 min from Schiphol (AMS) Airport (AMS). If wished I could allocate place to camp and workspace (20-30 people room). Access will be free and sleeping will be in tents. There is also place to bring/arrange bigger tents to have meetings. We plan to have a good uplink 40M/bit and a decent wifi/wired infrastructure. The is event is called OpenCommunityCamp. see http://opencommunitycamp.org or ask me for more info. kind regards, Marten -- Marten Vijn linux 2.0.18 OpenBSD 3.6 FreeBSD 4.6 http://martenvijn.nl http://opencommunitycamp.org http://wifisoft.org ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Marketing] Fwd: [Sur] sugarlabs.org: sugerencia
On Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 03:31:29PM -0700, Josh Williams wrote: Martin Dengler wrote: On Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 11:42:32PM +0200, Sean DALY wrote: Alas, if I had the technical chops to code what is necessary, I would have done so already :-( [...] Designing a slick, integrated site can come later as far as I'm concerned (other priorities more important) but we could go to single-window tomorrow if every site section had a link to the homepage, which they do not :-( I'm happy to submit the HTML changes to www.sugarlabs.org, the wiki and download logo home links already take one back to www.sl.o, so that just leaves activities.sl.o, right? I'm working on the front end for ASLO, I don't know who is going to put the navigation code into the php templates, I could do it, but I haven't really touched them as of yet. If someone is planning on putting an additional navigation, please send me a message to coordinate. Otherwise: well, as a curent ASLO maint I'm ok with pushing navigation bar with your new ASLO front end The ul id=nav-access is probably not the best place to put it (even though it's the most logical). I would prefer it placed in div id=page-title and have a ul with an id named=sugar-nav (or similar) created. do you have an account on git.sl.o? I could add you to slo-activities project Also, if someone could ad the class sugar to the body tag of ASLO - or give me approval to do so, it would be appreciated : ) . you can do it in master branch(devel branch) or in private branch if you want. but take into account the fact that we'll have to merge upstream commits later, so changes should be as local as possible -- Aleksey ___ 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
On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 5:17 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. Hi James, If you would could you put a link on the wiki and also a ticket to create a diskette version of a branded boot helper. Using a diskette rather then a CD will be a lot easier on a lot of the old computers because I often have to turn them on to open the CD holder, then turn them off and on again to reboot. 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] Project Gutenberg, etc.
Carol, I took a day off yesterday to run errands and I installed Calibre on a Fedora 10 box and tried it out. It has an enormous number of dependencies so it took a couple of hours to get it installed and working. I don't think our experience of books is that much different. If I had bought a dead tree copy of Edison's Conquest of Mars I would certainly have kept it after I finished it. I have a huge collection of books and am constantly going to used book sales to improve it. I donate books I don't plan to read again, but I end up keeping most of them. So I don't see a gender thing going on there. If I had bought a copy-protected ebook version of the same book I would have backed it up somewhere, because I wouldn't want to risk losing it. On the other hand, with Gutenberg I have reasonable faith that anything I could download today will still be there tomorrow. To me ebooks ONLY make sense for public domain works and content not easily available in another way. Like the Burton translation of 1001 Nights. If I want to read Neal Stephenson I'll buy the dead tree version and somehow make room on my shelves to keep it. Why I would not keep ebooks on the XO is that it has only 1 gig that is really useful, and almost half of that is taken up by the OS. Considering all the things a student will use his XO for there really isn't room for a big library on there. Plus I sometimes have to do a clean reinstall of Sugar that clears out the Journal, so there's not much point in putting stuff there that might not get used. Now as I said before, I do have a library of comic books in .cbz format. I keep some on an SD card and the rest on a Fedora 10 box where I can download them to the XO Journal using the web server on that box. So if I wanted to build something that does what Calibre does it would make sense to make it a server based application. There has been talk of packing up ebooks like they were Activities. If you do that, every school could have its own copy of a version of activities.sugarlabs.org containing ebooks packaged by the teachers and the older students. Having that kind of website, with few changes, would let kids look up books, rate them, see which books are the most popular, the newest, etc. You could put it on the School Server. As for the XO itself, right now the Journal always lists entries in order of most recently used. If you added the ability to sort by the title string instead, plus gave it a filter that showed entries NOT created by any Activity I think you'd have 80% of the value of Calibre right there. Add an optional meta tag for Author and allow sorting by it and you'd bring the total to 90%. I also didn't care for the book reader supplied with Calibre. To use it for Gutenberg plain text files you need to convert then to Sony ebook format, and I wasn't all that pleased with the results. I wrote Read Etexts so I could read the books without converting them. James Simmons Carol Farlow Lerche wrote: I guess we all view the needs of our target audience through the prism of our own experience at their age. I was an avid reader, and a re-reader of favorite books. (Still am, as are many of my women friends -- perhaps this is gender related). So the idea of dumping a book I enjoyed would be anathema to me, especially if my access to the net was not reliable and pervasive. Do try calibre, as it really doesn't seem like overkill to me, except for the format conversion features perhaps. ___ 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
Caroline, The boot diskette is from here: http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager.html It is not free software, but it is free to download. There originally WAS a link in the Wiki to this, but I couldn't find it the last time I looked. You really couldn't make a branded version of this for Sugar (there is no source code). You have to take it as it is. To be truthful, the diskette is not a very good way to use SoaS. Granted, starting a computer using the CD requires you to get the drive open and closed quickly, but the diskette only seems to recognize USB 1.1 ports, so you have a LONG boot to wait for. I only use the diskette when a suitable version of the boot CD is unavailable, because the diskette works with any version of SoaS, whereas the CD needs a kernel, etc. that matches what's on the stick. James Simmons Caroline Meeks wrote: Hi James, If you would could you put a link on the wiki and also a ticket to create a diskette version of a branded boot helper. Using a diskette rather then a CD will be a lot easier on a lot of the old computers because I often have to turn them on to open the CD holder, then turn them off and on again to reboot. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Project Gutenberg, etc.
James, Thanks for taking the time to at least examine this. I took a day off yesterday to run errands and I installed Calibre on a Fedora 10 box and tried it out. It has an enormous number of dependencies so it took a couple of hours to get it installed and working. Yes, it was troublesome to install on Ubuntu as well, but seemingly this was because of the Python version. wouldn't want to risk losing it. On the other hand, with Gutenberg I have reasonable faith that anything I could download today will still be there tomorrow. Since my ebooks largely come from somewhere other than PG, I am not so sanguine. I also buy a few. To me ebooks ONLY make sense for public domain works and content not easily available in another way. Like the Burton translation of 1001 Nights. If I want to read Neal Stephenson I'll buy the dead tree version and somehow make room on my shelves to keep it. De gustibus non est disputandum. However, for the XO using kids in the deployments, I doubt they have access to many paper books of their own or from a library. Why I would not keep ebooks on the XO is that it has only 1 gig that is really useful, and almost half of that is taken up by the OS. Considering all the things a student will use his XO for there really isn't room for a big library on there. Plus I sometimes have to do a clean reinstall of Sugar that clears out the Journal, so there's not much point in putting stuff there that might not get used. First, textual items are not large. My 123 books take 43 MB. Second, kids won't be reinstalling sugar or wiping their journal or we have a problem bigger than losing their ebooks. Finally, what are the electronic other things that are more precious to a child than books? Now as I said before, I do have a library of comic books in .cbz format. I keep some on an SD card and the rest on a Fedora 10 box where I can download them to the XO Journal using the web server on that box. So if I wanted to build something that does what Calibre does it would make sense to make it a server based application. I just don't agree that personal collections of reading material should rely on the school server. As for the XO itself, right now the Journal always lists entries in order of most recently used. If you added the ability to sort by the title string instead, plus gave it a filter that showed entries NOT created by any Activity I think you'd have 80% of the value of Calibre right there. Add an optional meta tag for Author and allow sorting by it and you'd bring the total to 90%. I don't disagree that this COULD be done. But so far, hardly anything that is asserted as a great change to functionality of the journal HAS been done. This is what I call making the perfect the enemy of the good. I also didn't care for the book reader supplied with Calibre. This is why we need to get Sayamindu's fbreader activity brought into aslo. Right now it is only available on the XO. The Calibre book reader looks to be a separable component. To use it for Gutenberg plain text files you need to convert then to Sony ebook format, and I wasn't all that pleased with the results. I wrote Read Etexts so I could read the books without converting them. epub format is available experimentally directly from Project Gutenberg. Works great for me! I have Sherlock Holmes, Father Brown mysteries, Autocrat of the Breakfast Table and the Baroness Orczy Pimpernel series that way. Carol Lerche ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Project Gutenberg, etc.
Carol, I think we agree on more things than we disagree on. As a software developer by trade I tend to think in terms of what's the least you could do that could get the job done? Software projects tend to get more and more complex as they go on, and if you don't start with something simple your project will go off the rails at some point. The lackluster support in Sugar for reading ebooks has been a gripe of mine ever since I got my G1G1 XO and discovered it could only read PDFs and that it wouldn't save the page number you stopped reading at in a way that would survive a reboot. I tried to improve things by writing Read Etexts and View Slides and that just made me *really* frustrated with Sugar. The XO has a terrific feature in that it can fold up to be an ebook reader. If only the software for reading ebooks was as good! I don't own an iPhone, but I admire the There's an App for that commercials. They do a good job of selling the product. But suppose you bought an iPhone and found out that if you wanted to make a phone call that There's an App for that. Actually, four different Apps, and you had to choose the App that handled dialing to phones belonging to the phone company your recipient used. And there was a Phone Directory App which would let you dial out using whichever App you liked from any number, but refused to remember which phone number belonged to which phone company. You had to be sure to pick the right one each time. Also, the Phone Directory only listed entries in the order you entered them in and could not sort them any other way. On the other hand, it would be *really* good at playing games. That's where I think we're at with Sugar today. There have been some improvements. In SoaS metadata like page number last read is saved across reboots, and you can choose what Activity to open your Journal entry with from the main Journal listing, rather than having to open the Journal details page to do it. The Read activity can read DjVu files in addition to PDFs. But there's lots of room for improvement. And one thing I'd like to see is that reading ebooks would be a function of Sugar itself, and there would be no Read Activities. I wonder how the OLPC project might have changed if it was sold as an ebook reader that could also run educational software. It brings to mind an old Woody Allen joke, where he claimed to own a sword that turned into a cane so the muggers would feel sorry for him. James Simmons ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
