Re: [IAEP] stepping down as maintainer
On 24 October 2010 17:42, David Farning dfarn...@ubuntu.com wrote: Sugar Labs lost its lead developer. [...] At the risk of angering pretty much everybody Sugar Labs has three fundamental problems. Sugar Labs is optimistic to the point of untruthfulness. Sugar Labs is lead by veto rather than vision. There is a lack of accountability to stakeholders. David, Thank you for your bravery and frankness with which you have raised these concerns. My main desire from these discussion is that contributors will feel like they are contributing to a project with momentum by the end of them. I would like to address your three points. However, I would also like to add some more context to the discussion as I see it: Sugar faces several up-coming technical challenges that will test the resolve of Sugar Labs. - a move to a touch-based interface - change in hardware infrastructure for the XOs (e.g. ARM processors) - Move to GNOME 3.0 - Move to Python 2.7 eventually to 3.x From the pedagogical side, I'm sure that an increased emphasis on standardised testing (at least in the developed world) means that there will be an increased expectation for standardised teaching tools. *Issue 1*: over-promising This is a tricky problem. Sugar is enticing. I think that we will not be able to contain people's enthusiasm, nor do I think that Sugar Labs should stop aspiring to provide the world's best educational platform. Instead, we should focus on improving the technology. *Issue 2*: veto We have a small cadre of experienced and highly able contributors. *Issue 3*: lack of accountability to stakeholders I don't agree that Sugar Labs is unresponsive. Nor do I agree that a change in the leadership structure will be beneficial. WB has provided excellent service to the team. We have engaged with OLPC, Fedora and provide support several deployments. For a volunteer driven organisation, it's highly responsive. Here are some of my reflections over the last few days: The list of challenges does look overwhelming. There is probably a lack of developer capacity in our community to deal with them. At least, I'm fairly intimidated. Sugar is a very large project, with hundreds of interdependent parts. However, we should remember that each of these challenges is surmountable. They will also present developers with the possibility to innovate and interesting solutions. It would be good to quantify the risks that the project faces. Are the list of challenges I've written up valid things to worry about? I think Sugar Labs could create an informal mentor system to enable more contributions from current 'lurkers'. This proposal is I think the development teams needs to draw on IAEP others for support. I think that once everyone feels like that a degree of momentum has been reached, the community will grow and our educators will be able to go back to just educating. Sugar Labs does lots of its own infrastructure. Is that the best use of contributors' time? (Why don't we use Canonical's Launchpad?) Regards, Tim McNamara @timClicks ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Colbert Report guest: Nicholas Negroponte
Thanks Kevin, I only received your mail today but I just watched the show at http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/363111/october-25-2010/nicholas-negroponte Thanks. Carlos Rabassa Volunteer Plan Ceibal Support Network Montevideo, Uruguay On Oct 25, 2010, at 11:34 PM, Kevin Cole wrote: -- Forwarded message -- From: Kevin Cole dc.l...@gmail.com Date: Oct 25, 2010 11:31 PM Subject: Colbert Report guest: Nicholas Negroponte To: Jeff Elkner j...@elkner.net, Mike Lee curious...@gmail.com Tonight's Colbert Report on Comedy Central will feature Negroponte as the guest. Show repeats three times tomorrow and eventually on http://comedycentral.com/ ___ 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] NN, Mitra, and the role of the teacher
HI All... I watched Negroponte on the Colbert show last night. Nice. He seems to have toned down his former we don't need teachers... kids will do it all line a bit, but it is still implied. Sugata Mitra implies the same in his TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_themselves.html But, I argue that teachers are still very much needed as orchestrators and conductors of this learning. In Mitra's project he served as the master orchestrator by providing the content and asking the children questions that will lead to learning by discovery. The grannie cloud in his project was the conductor, encouraging and cheering on the students as they worked their way through the learning experience. On Saturday I followed a bit of the irc chat from Room 555 on Saturday which discussed children being chosen as experts to help the others learn. Irc was not being friendly so I had to give up, but again, the teacher was the orchestrator... and conductor. Planning the lesson with the right questions and choosing the players and conducting the learning experience. Of course, many excellent teachers already know and practice this approach to teaching. They are most often found in hands on type classes like the arts, lab sciences and production classes. Now we need to ask, how do we (and should we) prepare all teachers to teach in this untraditional manner, which really good teachers have always done? Should OLPC or Sugar Labs consider developing and disseminating, this teaching style, and a curriculum for training teachers? How would we disseminate it? Evaluate it? Advertise it? Etc? Let's have a discussion! Caryl (aka GrannieB and Carolina) ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] NN, Mitra, and the role of the teacher
Caryl, This is an interesting question. I have a niece (friend of the family sense, not a blood relation) who went to the Illinois Math and Science Academy. This is actually a public boarding school for very bright students. They have no textbooks, probably no School Board, and from what I heard from her father the students are pretty much expected to teach themselves. (The teachers don't teach! is something he kept telling me). On the political side, a significant number of Americans believe that everything is the teacher's fault, or the teacher's union, or the fact that they are allowed to have a union, or the fact that the teachers have no economic incentive to be better than other teachers. I find it refreshing that Constructivism focuses more on the students than on the teachers. I don't think Negroponte was saying that students don't need teachers. What I heard was that they don't need the kind of superstar teachers that the politicians think the miracle of the free market will create. He was saying that even if your teacher is illiterate you can still learn. This corresponds to my own experience. I've had teachers I loved and some I hated, some that were more effective than others, but ultimately it came down to me. In college I learned to program computers from some of the least effective teachers I ever had. They were all competent computer programmers, but they couldn't teach worth a damn. I still got a good education. I did it by reading books and trial and error. Somewhere along the line I must have had teachers who encouraged me to learn on my own, but they weren't all like that. I do have a great respect for teachers and if I ever ran into my old teachers I'd apologize to half of them for wasting so much of their time. James Simmons On Tue, Oct 26, 2010 at 12:12 PM, Caryl Bigenho cbige...@hotmail.com wrote: HI All... I watched Negroponte on the Colbert show last night. Nice. He seems to have toned down his former we don't need teachers... kids will do it all line a bit, but it is still implied. Sugata Mitra implies the same in his TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_themselves.html But, I argue that teachers are still very much needed as orchestrators and conductors of this learning. In Mitra's project he served as the master orchestrator by providing the content and asking the children questions that will lead to learning by discovery. The grannie cloud in his project was the conductor, encouraging and cheering on the students as they worked their way through the learning experience. On Saturday I followed a bit of the irc chat from Room 555 on Saturday which discussed children being chosen as experts to help the others learn. Irc was not being friendly so I had to give up, but again, the teacher was the orchestrator... and conductor. Planning the lesson with the right questions and choosing the players and conducting the learning experience. Of course, many excellent teachers already know and practice this approach to teaching. They are most often found in hands on type classes like the arts, lab sciences and production classes. Now we need to ask, how do we (and should we) prepare all teachers to teach in this untraditional manner, which really good teachers have always done? Should OLPC or Sugar Labs consider developing and disseminating, this teaching style, and a curriculum for training teachers? How would we disseminate it? Evaluate it? Advertise it? Etc? Let's have a discussion! Caryl (aka GrannieB and Carolina) ___ 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] NN, Mitra, and the role of the teacher
While it's true that I was (and still am) somewhat self-motivated when it came to computers, I'd have to say that for me, personally, it was the teachers who either through direct instruction, or through my observation and emulation of them, taught me a sort of zen of programming, for lack of a better word. (Watching Fearless Freddy debug students code was a thing of beauty to behold.) And my interest, albeit amateur, in physics was definitely due to the patience that Bob the Dope Fiend had for working with me. I think the dope must have kept him mellow. ;-) (I always compare my epiphany regarding simple Newtonian motion as being akin to Hellen Keller's experience with Water. Bob, Bob! Oh, my God! You've been spelling Newtonian Motion into my hands for a month! I FINALLY GET IT!!! Now catch me up with the rest of the class on everything else! I monopolized that dude's office hours.) My teachers also gave me an interest in tutoring others. The sense of pride and/or relief that students get when a teacher praises their accomplishments -- particularly after helping them overcome early difficulties with a subject matter -- is irreplaceable at any age. There were definitely losers as teachers too, where it almost seemed they actively worked against learning. But those are the ones that become distant memories (traumatic amnesia?) very quickly. The others burn brightly in my memory like Jedi Knights. -- Kevin Cole Sugar Labs DC Washington, DC ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Sugar Digest 2010-10-26
==Sugar Digest== 1. Tomeu's departure from the project has set off a lot of introspection, speculation, 'blunt' emails, and thoughtful responses. There is no doubt that we will miss Tomeu. He has been not just a prolific contributor to the project, but also a steady hand, with the professional's eye. Under his leadership, we have been able to raise the quality of Sugar and we are much better integrated into the work flows both upstream and downstream from Sugar. We must ensure that this level of professionalism is not diminished. The occasion of Tomeu's departure has triggered the voicing of many unrelated frustrations with Sugar and Sugar Labs. Yioryos Asprobounitis posted a thoughtful email [http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2010-October/028319.html] to the Sugar Developer list. In it, he reminded us of those things that every successful project needs: * Clearly defined aims * Clearly defined road map * Clearly defined tools/methods of implementation * Clearly defined, tangible, milestones and annual _external_ evaluation While I think that the Sugar Community has worked hard towards providing clarity, there remain deficiencies and disagreements. Personally, my aims for are unwavering: Sugar is a software platform that is designed for children for learning. Sugar is developed and maintained by Sugar Labs, a global volunteer community of software developers and educators. Our goal is to raise a generation of critical thinkers and problem-solvers by establishing a culture of independent thinking and learning. Through Sugar, we strive to provide every child with the opportunity to learn learning within a context that will allow them both to engage in an on-going critical dialog with others and to develop independent means towards their personal goals. The technical underpinnings of Sugar are deliberately designed maximize the probability that children will learn. Through the Sugar-platform affordances, we encourage learners to explore by dig deeply into topics for which they are passionate, to express by building upon what they discover, and to reflect by engaging in peer-to-peer and personal criticism. Free Software is fundamental to the project not just as a means to an end, but also because of its culture: it is no coincidence that Free Software developers don't just write code; they talk about Free Software, they criticize it, and they discuss other people's criticisms. Regarding road maps, in my opinion we are quite disciplined in terms of our day-to-day release process. However we are lacking a long-term road map, which I would equate to an architectural specification. Such a document could serve as a metric that would help us with some of our short-term decisions and also help shape the project going forward. Regarding tools and methods of implementation, while there has been lots of heated discussion, I don't think we are so far apart in our opinions. The seemingly endless debate about git vs email vs trac for patch review is winding down. And we are getting better as a community in showing patience with our handling of the influx of patches and questions from newbies. Perhaps the best evidence that we are not so far off track is the great job that has been done packaging Sugar downstream by various organizations and deployments. We are producing a product that they can work with and want to work with. Of course there is always room for improvement and no doubt the debate about tools and process will continue. That said, one legacy of Tomeu is to be uncompromising on quality. I have submitted many patches and have had very few accepted. But I have gotten thoughtful feedback and learned a great deal in the process. My subsequent patches are better for the effort of the Sugar maintainers. Regarding tangible milestones and evaluation, I give us a mixed review. We have a reasonable mechanisms in place for our release process and we are cultivating ever-increasing feedback from the Sugar deployments. However, we are lacking clarity around our long-range technical goals. In terms of evaluation, Sugar in the context of deployments is undergoing some level of scrutiny. There are on-going evaluations underway in all of the major deployments. But with few exceptions it is not clear how Sugar itself is being evaluating in the field. We have some active testing teams, but we have not provided them with very good tool chains; we have almost no automated data collection to inform us as to how children are using Sugar. These deficiencies are mitigated in part by an increasingly vocal community of teachers and mentors and facilitators. Ultimately I think we will learn more from our user community than is typical of other software projects. Indeed, the fact that two teachers are running for positions on our Oversight Board is really encouraging. Dave Neary wrote a blog post about Ubuntu's plans to move to Unity as the default desktop in which he mentions Sugar. OLPC had many teething
[IAEP] Fwd: [Sugar-devel] Transbot: An Interchannel IRC Translator
Hello, Transbot is an IRC translation bot designed to be a tool to connect IRC channels that are in different languages. Transbot is now in a state of development where it will benefit from community feedback and testing. There is a dedicated version of the bot that communicates between the following channels: #transbot-test-en, #transbot-test-es Please drop by and check it out. For more information about the type of feedback we are looking for and transbot in general visit out wiki: https://fedorahosted.org/transbot/wiki/testing If you would like to leave feedback regarding transbot please send an email to: mrt...@rit.edu or tjr1...@rit.edu Thanks, Transbot Team ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] africa labs
On 10/25/2010 8:57 PM, Bernie Innocenti wrote: Mozambique is just starting out with 3000 laptops: http://codewiz.org/wiki/blog/2010/10#fri-oct-15--first-classroom-sessions Bernie, Can you update these 3 pages? http://olpcMAP.net http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Deployments http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Deployment_Team/Places Or do you want help? Thanks! ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Ideas
Kellie, I created a word sort program in Etoys (which is already on the OLPC) here is a blog entry on the project Etoys Minute - Word Sortshttp://mrstevesscience.blogspot.com/2010/10/etoys-minute-word-sorts.html the actual project is posted on the Squeakland site herehttp://www.squeakland.org/showcase/project.jsp?id=10354 you will need Etoys to run which you can download herehttp://www.squeakland.org/download/ And here is video of the project http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ht4-NiB_sfQ I tried to create the project so it can be easily modified with minimal knowledge of Etoys, but it can also make a nice entry point for teachers and kids to create their own Etoys scripts and projects. Any questions/suggestions/requests for improvements send me an email or send one to the squeakland mailing list (need to register first herehttp://squeakland.org/discuss/squeakland/to send emails) Stephen On Thu, Oct 21, 2010 at 10:33 AM, Kellie Doty kd152...@gmail.com wrote: Patricia, I would love to see a program for doing word sorts similar to those described in the book Words Their Way. Having sorts categorized by reading stage vowel pattern would be a huge help for English/reading teachers. Kellie On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 1:00 PM, Patricia Curtis patricia.cur...@gmail.com wrote: Hi All I am a developer , and i am looking to start a new OLPC activity, and i would like some ideas of what is *needed *on the OLPC, rather me spending time writing than just another activity that few would use. Thanks Trish ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- Kellie M. Doty Harvard Graduate School of Education Master's Candidate Technology, Innovation, and Education ___ 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] Ideas
On Thu, Oct 21, 2010 at 12:01 PM, Caroline Meeks carol...@solutiongrove.com wrote: I have had requests for a few things over the years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuisenaire_rods - these are popular math manipulative and an online version would be cool. Here are some Cuisinaire Rods in Etoys (sorry Patricia, I am NOT trying to discourage you, just support your request on what is *needed*) Fraction Bars and Number Lineshttp://www.squeakland.org/showcase/project.jsp?id=10355 and Fraction Tools http://www.squeakland.org/showcase/project.jsp?id=9442 both have Cuisenaire Rods built into the projects. The rods can not only be used for activities shown in the projects (and other activities and lesson plans), but also for kids to journal/describe their understanding of fractions and units. Stephen ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
