[IAEP] Voting for sugar!
Let the world know we are alive. please: 1. forward 2. And add to your personal webpage a href=http://sourceforge.net/community/cca09/nominate/?project_name=sugarproject_url=http://sugarlabs.org/;img src=http://sourceforge.net/images/cca/cca_nominate.png; border=0//a 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] Voting for sugar!
just don't forget... the URL is http://www.sugarlabs.org ;-) Sean On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 1:37 PM, Marten Vijn i...@martenvijn.nl wrote: Let the world know we are alive. please: 1. forward 2. And add to your personal webpage a href=http://sourceforge.net/community/cca09/nominate/?project_name=sugarproject_url=http://sugarlabs.org/;img src=http://sourceforge.net/images/cca/cca_nominate.png; border=0//a 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 ___ 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 14, Issue 58
Carol and Caroline, I'm working on something that should communicate just how useful Sugar is for reading ebooks, but you'll need to be patient. I'm about 90% complete on this, which in IT parlance means I have enough to do a rigged demo but the bulk of the work remains to be done. What I am doing is a new feature for Read Etexts which lets the user browse the offline catalog for Project Gutenberg, select a book from it, download it, and read it. This accomplishes several really useful things: 1). You can download and save multiple books to the Journal in one session by using the keep button. So for instance if you want to read A Thousand Nights and a Night as translated by Sir Richard Burton you could get all of the volumes in one go. 2). The Journal title will be a meaningful name taken from the catalog. Thus your download of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carrol will have a Journal entry with that title, instead of 11.zip, which is the filename in the Gutenberg archive. 3). Since Read Etexts is actually creating the Journal entry the entry will use the Read Etexts icon and can be opened from the Journal with one click. No more opening your book with Etoys by mistake. 4). The biggest thing, though, is you can enter in words in the title or the author's name and see a list of books that have all of those words in them. This really communicates that there are over twenty eight thousand books available in the Gutenberg catalog. For instance, a child entering the word Shakespeare will find books about Shakespeare and all of Shakespeare's plays in several languages. (He will not find Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles or Plutarch's Lives in the list, but if he reads all the other books and plays he'll eventually realize he needs to read those too). To see a screenshot from the rigged demo go to this URL and click on the thumbnail: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Read_Etexts#Planned_Features It's going to take awhile to get the feature fully functional and user friendly, but I have enough working that I know I can get the rest finished in a few weeks. I think this will communicate the variety of ebooks available very well and should be a worthy addition to SoaS. As for some of the other ideas that were expressed, the Sword Bible reader and the Koran reader and the Newbery book bundle might give the impression that to read a book on Sugar you need to package it up somehow. You need to communicate that there are thousands of books ready to go, as is, and these don't do that. (I have nothing against the content of these books, of course). Unfortunately, Project Gutenberg may be the only ebook site with an offline catalog. It would be nice to give the core Read Activity a catalog search like this, but there are no comparable catalogs of PDFs. Maybe Sayamindu's fbreader could use something like this for EPUB files from Gutenberg. James Simmons Date: Tue, 12 May 2009 11:42:33 -0700 From: Carol Farlow Lerche c...@msbit.com Subject: Re: [IAEP] The eBook ah ha moment for Sugar on a Stick To: Caroline Meeks carol...@solutiongrove.com Cc: iaep iaep@lists.sugarlabs.org Message-ID: c856d2f0905121142u5a625ba2he65f1544f37b7...@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 This issue was discussed at length about a week ago, and James Simmons and Alexei (I think) were discussing the provision of a library activity. Until that happens, I think James' reader activity and Sayamendu's fbreader activity should be packaged for SOAS to allow epub, comic format and text formats to be read conveniently in SOAS. http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/search?q=newberycat=all is a package on aslo of all the free Newbery honor books by women authors as a .xol package. The texts themselves are epub format. I wish someone would reinstate the ability to access .xol files in SOAS. ___ 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 14, Issue 58
James, I'm curious. Can't it be as simple as putting books on memory or a thumbdrive and having a program find the books locally and let you pick from that list? Like MS Reader searching for .lit books or Peanut Reader (whatever it is called today) searching for .pdb files and creating a library list for you? -Kathy -Original Message- From: iaep-boun...@lists.sugarlabs.org [mailto:iaep-boun...@lists.sugarlabs.org] On Behalf Of James Simmons Sent: Monday, May 18, 2009 8:52 AM To: Carol Farlow Lerche; Caroline Meeks Cc: iaep@lists.sugarlabs.org Subject: Re: [IAEP] IAEP Digest, Vol 14, Issue 58 Carol and Caroline, I'm working on something that should communicate just how useful Sugar is for reading ebooks, but you'll need to be patient. I'm about 90% complete on this, which in IT parlance means I have enough to do a rigged demo but the bulk of the work remains to be done. What I am doing is a new feature for Read Etexts which lets the user browse the offline catalog for Project Gutenberg, select a book from it, download it, and read it. This accomplishes several really useful things: 1). You can download and save multiple books to the Journal in one session by using the keep button. So for instance if you want to read A Thousand Nights and a Night as translated by Sir Richard Burton you could get all of the volumes in one go. 2). The Journal title will be a meaningful name taken from the catalog. Thus your download of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carrol will have a Journal entry with that title, instead of 11.zip, which is the filename in the Gutenberg archive. 3). Since Read Etexts is actually creating the Journal entry the entry will use the Read Etexts icon and can be opened from the Journal with one click. No more opening your book with Etoys by mistake. 4). The biggest thing, though, is you can enter in words in the title or the author's name and see a list of books that have all of those words in them. This really communicates that there are over twenty eight thousand books available in the Gutenberg catalog. For instance, a child entering the word Shakespeare will find books about Shakespeare and all of Shakespeare's plays in several languages. (He will not find Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles or Plutarch's Lives in the list, but if he reads all the other books and plays he'll eventually realize he needs to read those too). To see a screenshot from the rigged demo go to this URL and click on the thumbnail: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Read_Etexts#Planned_Features It's going to take awhile to get the feature fully functional and user friendly, but I have enough working that I know I can get the rest finished in a few weeks. I think this will communicate the variety of ebooks available very well and should be a worthy addition to SoaS. As for some of the other ideas that were expressed, the Sword Bible reader and the Koran reader and the Newbery book bundle might give the impression that to read a book on Sugar you need to package it up somehow. You need to communicate that there are thousands of books ready to go, as is, and these don't do that. (I have nothing against the content of these books, of course). Unfortunately, Project Gutenberg may be the only ebook site with an offline catalog. It would be nice to give the core Read Activity a catalog search like this, but there are no comparable catalogs of PDFs. Maybe Sayamindu's fbreader could use something like this for EPUB files from Gutenberg. James Simmons Date: Tue, 12 May 2009 11:42:33 -0700 From: Carol Farlow Lerche c...@msbit.com Subject: Re: [IAEP] The eBook ah ha moment for Sugar on a Stick To: Caroline Meeks carol...@solutiongrove.com Cc: iaep iaep@lists.sugarlabs.org Message-ID: c856d2f0905121142u5a625ba2he65f1544f37b7...@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 This issue was discussed at length about a week ago, and James Simmons and Alexei (I think) were discussing the provision of a library activity. Until that happens, I think James' reader activity and Sayamendu's fbreader activity should be packaged for SOAS to allow epub, comic format and text formats to be read conveniently in SOAS. http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/search?q=newberycat=all is a package on aslo of all the free Newbery honor books by women authors as a .xol package. The texts themselves are epub format. I wish someone would reinstate the ability to access .xol files in SOAS. ___ 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] IAEP Digest, Vol 14, Issue 58
Kathy, The free books aren't on a thumbdrive. They're scattered all over the Internet. There are hundreds of thousands of free books that teachers could use if they knew how to find them. One way to help them would be to put links to the best websites on the start page when you open Browse. That would be good, but finding and downloading the books to the Journal is still a lot of work. Read Etexts won't let you browse through every available free book, but it does let you browse and download 28,000 good ones. What I hope to accomplish is to demonstrate just how much free content there is. Free ebooks can be used to justify using Sugar on a Stick or buying XO's all by itself, just like VisiCalc and Lotus 1-2-3 justified buying PC's and Apples for businesses. In the long term all the other stuff that Sugar can do should be more valuable, but ebook reading is something that's easy to sell. James Simmons Kathy Pusztavari wrote: James, I'm curious. Can't it be as simple as putting books on memory or a thumbdrive and having a program find the books locally and let you pick from that list? Like MS Reader searching for .lit books or Peanut Reader (whatever it is called today) searching for .pdb files and creating a library list for you? -Kathy ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Sugar Camp Refection
I thought that I should share some reflections on SugarCamp Paris. I am pretty sure that I have read that reflection is an important part of learning. I have been thinking about the Sugar Labs meeting format for the last couple of months. I hesitated to post the theory behind the process until after we had experienced it. If I am going to enforce 'show me the code', I should probably follow it myself. Several times discussions about pedagogy have come up on iaep:) One of the common themes is instructional-ism vs constructional-ism. It struck me as rather odd that in the mail lists and at the November and January meetings we preached constructional-isms while we practiced instructional-isms. One person talking from the front of a room about predefined topics seems pretty instructional. This meeting I wanted to try a guided constructionist approach. We had one day, Sunday, to test the theory. Saturday was OLPCFrance's day We started Sunday by brain-storming about issues and challenges with Sugar and Sugar Labs which could benefit from further exploration. From there, we broke into teams of 5 or 6 people to collaboratively explore subsets of those issues for about an hour. Following the team sessions we meet again as group to reflect on what we had learned. A member of each team gave a short summary of what that team learned in the team. Finally a break for lunch. We repeated the process in the afternoon. This time drilling more deeply into the issues which we identified in the morning. The original teams from the morning sessions each explored and identified three topics worthy of further discussion. That resulted in 9 topics. We met again as a large group and collaboratively identified the top seven topics we would like to work on throughout the afternoon. For the afternoon team session, we then split into groups of three to four people for the next two hours to produce action items related to the topics identified in the morning. Next, we came together as a large group and reflected on the afternoon as member of each team share their results from the afternoon session. As a final session we each reflected on SugarCamp by sharing three good and three bad things about the weekend. The goals of this SugarCamp methodology are three fold: 1. SugarCamp is a place where participants curious about Sugar come to learn more about the project. By iterating through the topic narrowing process they are immediately immersed in the consensus base decision making process. 2. If Construction-ism is the best method for young learners, it is good enough for us. My prediction is that if we continue this methodology we will learn that there is value in having a few prepared talk. So maybe instructional-ism has a place in learning. 3. It is perfectly scalable. Anyone familiar with the methodology can hold their own regional SugarCamp. You don't need domain experts to come and speak. You can invite a group of interested people to come and learn about the local challenges facing Sugar in your region. Areas to Improve: Improve communication between SugarCamp attendees and the larger Sugar Community. I take entire responsibility for the poor external communication. I didn't think that as a groups we were capable learning an entirely new meeting methodology while attempting to engage the virtual community. (Low floor, High ceiling) Increase the length of SugarCamp. It would be valuable to have one or two prepared talks to start day one. They would provide a chance to learn something entirely new. It would be valuable to iterate through the process a few more times. Either by drilling deeper into a topic or starting fresh with new broad topics. Drilling deeper would be especially useful for new participant as they walk through the entire contribution process. Teachers might create sample lesson plans. Marketers might write the upcoming press release. Developers might hack a bit and submit a patch. Create measures to insure that the knowledge learned is retained and available for distribution. More breaks. I did not anticipate the energy required by this process. It was pretty exhausting. More trained facilitators. This is not an easy process. Maybe that is why deployments complain the construction-ism is difficult without well trained teachers. It was fascinating to watch Caroline Meeks' +1, Scott, work with the distribution team. Scott started with a very limited knowledge of Sugar, yet was able to help the team do some great work. Cultural Issues. Strict enforcement of schedules and deadlines. Any passionate person can come up with a list of 'things we should do', which 9 out 10 times actually means 'things someone else should do.' The difference at Sugar Labs is the ability to identify, prioritize, and accomplish tasks with the limited resources available. Keep your laptop closed during sessions. If you have spent several hundred Euros traveling to a face to face event
