Re: [IAEP] OLPC in Science-Subjects --- NEED HELP!!!
/moku...@earthtreasury.org wrote: It is straightforward to share Journal entries between XOs. *..Printing is not necessary.* / Mr. Mokurai: MAybe you are an exprert in Education, and Xo, or SUgar development, or teaching children , but I think that you don't KNow the reality of the XOs here in Uruguay, or somewhere that the teachers uses XO. *Printing is not necessary* is a very good statement , I agree, but for the real people (not the theoretical children) is only a statement, that is almost impossible to apply now. It is like saying The peace is better than the war... is a very good phrase, we all agree, but with that phrase I can not solve the problems of the world. The real world exists, and* in the real world the teachers wants to print.*. that is a fact, and We can not change it. Maybe in 30 Years the mind of the Teachers will change, but not now. MAybe in 30 Years this statement will be true, but now if you told a TEacher that you can't print is the same as saying _don't use the Xo's. You have a XIX century mind. The XO are made for XXII century minds only._.. This is not my opinion, it's simply an observation of the real world that I see that here in Uruguay: _there are a lot of teachers that don't Use the XO_ because of lots of problems that it has (there are also other reasons that are non technical). One of those problems are the printing problem. You said to share the Journal. Excuse me, Mr. Mokurai:_* *_Do you Know that the MEsh doesn't works? Even if you can share something, The XOs hangs up, or loose the entire journal, and the children don't use the journal for important things, that's why the teachers wants to print to have something hardware that works, even if the XO hangs, or the journal fails. I Invite YOu to come to Uruguay to teach us how to share something in a real classroom with real Children . NOrmally if YOu would share something, YOu have to use 30 minutes of an hour-class only for setting up the connections, and interrupting the class every 10 minutes because a child had a disconnection. -- Sorry for my poor English. Paolo Benini Montevideo ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] OERs and collaboration
On 12.5.2011, at 18.09, Valerie Taylor wrote: A wiki-based solution could work. We are hosting an experimental wiki-like solution for primary and secondary school teachers for finding, authoring and sharing OERs. The are close to 20 000 educators from 65 countries working in 48 languages (the UI is available in 14 languages). The site is here: http://lemill.net/ In LeMill teachers can create: I Content (1) educational web pages with embedded media, (2) exercise with a) multiple choice questions, b) fill-in-the-blanks exercise, c) open-ended questions or upload questions from Hot Potatoes, (3) Lesson plans (4) Media pieces (upload images and sound clips) (5) Reference (links to external websites II Methods - Descriptions of teaching and learning methods (from brainstorming to seminar) III Tools - Descriptions of teaching and learning tools (from post-it notes to mindmap software) Despite of the relatively large number of users and OERs only the Georgian and the Estonian communities are truly active and lively. The tag cloud of languages spoken by the community members is interesting: http://lemill.net/community/cloud?base=languagetype=MemberFolder We also have some hypothesis why the Georgians and Estonians are so active. It would be great to have more Sugar-related content on LeMill. Best regards, - Teemu --- Teemu Leinonen http://www.uiah.fi/~tleinone/ +358 50 351 6796 Media Lab http://mlab.uiah.fi Aalto University School of Art and Design --- ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] OLPC in Science-Subjects --- NEED HELP!!!
Hi Johanna, On 12 May 2011, at 20:08, Johanna Wener johanna.we...@chello.at wrote: Hello Everybody! I’m studying at the University of teacher education in graz in austria to become a teacher for primary school. For my final thesis I’m working in a class with olpcs to find out which programmes can be used in the subjects of science. I worked with FotoToon, Labyrinth, InfoSlicer and many more. Just wanted to confirm that Labyrinth does support exporting its maps as PDF so you can use them in resolution independent ways elsewhere if needed. I rarely print anything myself, but I'd suggest popping in a USB memory stick and using Journal to drag the PDF to the stick, then take the stick over to a machine set up to use your printer (or email). Here's a screen grab of the Labyrinth toolbar with the PDF export button: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:Labyrinth_Toolbar_1.png Regards, --Gary The big problem I have is, that everything that the children do on the olpc could not be used for learning because there is no way to print their works out. We tried to make a screenshot and send it by mail – doesnt work! And we have no chance to print out anything we worked on! Can anybody help us? Nice greets Johanna Wener ___ 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] OERs and collaboration
YOU are systematic. It is the rest of us who need help. On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 4:34 PM, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 2:33 PM, Valerie Taylor vtay...@gmail.com wrote: I think there is merit in having a public repository like the Sugar Labs wiki to encourage educators and others to see what is being done, and build on that in a systematic way. We are not exactly systematic about it, but Tony links to his most relevant blog posts in the wiki. Please see http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/TurtleArt#Tutorials and http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/TurtleArt/Using_Turtle_Art_Sensors As far as how to make these posts have more impact, we are open to suggestions. Good example - the first encounter with the Turtle Art page is a little overwhelming - Obviously tons of wonderful information with pictures and code... Some us need to know what can it do? and why do I need to know all this stuff? (rather than how does it work?). The Challenges are great! This is where it starts to make some sense for me. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/TurtleArt#Challenges Provide a way to showcase and contribute learning objects - basically challenge descriptions with categories / tags - subject, degree of difficulty, ... and optional information like learning objectives and additional information for teachers or students - setup, curriculum integration, links to more advanced related challenges. There should be a mechanism for adding reviews to challenge entries, too. The Turtle Art page is sooo organized that it doesn't invite contributions or collaboration. If there was a button that said add your own challenge or add a review of this challenge it would create a safe way to contribute. A form pops up with boxes to fill in, including some options, save and it is added to the page in the proper place without the risk of messing up what is already there. This would also help educators (and students) find challenges to try themselves. Once they locate a couple of challenges that seem appropriate and interesting, then they will be motivated to work through all the terrific material provided. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] volunteer translators needed
Hi Tim and Beth, We are training a group of volunteers from the Haitian Coalition in Etoys tomorrow. We have some practice at teaching Etoys at this point. How/what would you like me to teach them about translating? What is the minimum they need to know to start helping you? Thanks, Caroline On Thu, May 5, 2011 at 10:18 AM, Timothy Falconer tee...@waveplace.orgwrote: Hi partners and friends, We're looking for a little help with our Waveplace courseware. We're hoping to get it all translated into: Haitian Creole French Spanish Portuguese Our funds are limited, so I wanted to know if you have any volunteers who could possibly help in this effort. Our courseware is located at http://wiki.waveplace.org/display/wp/Courseware. So far, the lessons we have finished are: General--Basic Etoys http://wiki.waveplace.org/display/wp/Basic+Etoys (needs outlines and projects translated) Language Arts--Storytellinghttp://wiki.waveplace.org/display/wp/Storytelling (needs outlines translated) Mathematics--Geometry http://wiki.waveplace.org/display/wp/Geometry (needs outlines and projects translated) Science-- Motion http://wiki.waveplace.org/display/wp/Motion (needs projects translated) Health-- Clean water http://wiki.waveplace.org/display/wp/Clean+Water (unfinished but can translate what projects are finished) Health-- Malaria http://wiki.waveplace.org/display/wp/Malaria (unfinished but can outlines in the meantime) Technology--Sugar http://wiki.waveplace.org/display/wp/Sugar (needs outlines translated) As you can see, it's a bit of work. Many things are already translated into Haitian Creole, but not everything. Please let me know if you can offer any help to us! Thanks so much! -- Timothy Falconer Waveplace Foundation http://waveplace.org + 1 610 797 3100 x33 ___ 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
[IAEP] Sugar Digest 2011-05-13
==Sugar Digest== 1. I am just back from two weeks on the road. My primary destination was the EduJam event in Montevideo. As you have no doubt already heard, the meeting was very productive: a great opportunity for developers, teachers, and other community members from the region to share ideas—what works and what challenges remain ahead of us. Many thanks for Gabriel Eirea, Gonzalo Odiard, Pablo Flores, Andrés Ambrois, Adam Holt, and everyone else who helped to organize the event. Also, thanks to everyone who took the time to come from near and far—we had participants who travelled from as far away as Siberia in attendance. It really was a community effort. What struck me above and beyond the passion that the Sugar community has for providing great learning opportunities for children is that we have reached a turning point in the project. While software is never complete—see the discussion below—the bulk of the discussion was not about Python, Forth, or Smalltalk. Rather, it was about how to better utilize the tools we have in the classroom and how to provide support to teachers as they make the transition from instructors to guides and participants in a discovery process. Indeed, even my pre- and post-EduJam meetings at Plan Ceibal were primarily focused on pedagogy rather than technology. We got some further insight into how Sugar is being used in the classroom from a data-driven presentation given by Plan Ceibal (See http://www.anep.edu.uy/anepweb/servlet/main004?403). While it was not surprising to see that Browse, Write, and Record were among the most used activities, and that the children enjoy Tuxpaint and games, it was heartening to see that Etoys and Turtle Art are also popular. There was a skew in the statistics between poor, rural schools and more well-to-do urban schools. In the latter, the use of Etoys and Turtle Art was much greater. We had a discussion about how to best reach out to teachers—for sharing best practice and so I asked if they had any data on where the Uruguayan teachers hang out. (There is lots of material available in our wiki, but apparently the teachers are not finding it. I think we need to go to where the teachers are rather than expect them to come to us.) Alas, there are no data yet that we can leverage. The real take-away for me was the growing demand for better channels of communication between teachers and the broader Sugar community. I gave a talk at the end of the first day of the meeting (http://www.slideshare.net/eduJam2011/edujam-walter) in which I tried to remind everyone that we need to keep our eyes on where we want to go as a community and not to be distracted by short-term quick fixes. Quoting Skip Barber: You go where you look, so you better look where you want to go. Going to specifics, I made some observations about the Sugar Journal. I reminded everyone that its primary purpose was to be a place of reflection for the learner and that we should not dilute that vision. To drive my point home, I made an analogy to the commit message that is required whenever someone submits a patch to git. We want our learners to compose a commit message every time they work on something, thus providing a history of not just what they did, but why they did it. (This rant was in response to a recent decision to remove the naming alert from the activity close dialog, where we presented an opportunity to write descriptive text in the Journal.) Sugar is a learning platform and our design and engineering decisions must consider the impact on learning in order that we remain relevant. 2. Speaking of the Journal, one tangible outcome of the evaluation summit held in Cambridge last month was the call for a simple way to make a presentation from Journal entries. While you can use Turtle Blocks to make a Power Point presentation, it requires a fair degree of experience. At the Sugar Camp following EduJam I wrote a new activity, Portfolio [http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4437], which lets you make a slide show from Journal entries that have been starred as favorites. It is easy to use: just star the entries you want included in the presentation and then launch the activity. It presents a sequence of slides that include the Journal entry's title, preview image, and any description written by the learner. It also has an export function to save the presentation as an HTML document that can be shared. Another step towards making studio thinking and portfolio assessment part of the Sugar learning experience. 3. I struck gold in a meeting at Plan Ceibal. Mónica Báez arranged for me to meet with her team, which is driving the curriculum development and teacher training for the project. Among them is a math teacher who is responsible to the math teacher-training program and who was really taken with some of Tony Forster's Turtle Block examples and another teacher who is interested in a way to connect art and science; she is specifically interested in having the
[IAEP] Getting started in localization (was Re: [Olpc-open] volunteer translators needed)
On Fri, May 13, 2011 at 10:01, Caroline Meeks carol...@solutiongrove.com wrote: Hi Tim and Beth, We are training a group of volunteers from the Haitian Coalition in Etoys tomorrow. We have some practice at teaching Etoys at this point. How/what would you like me to teach them about translating? What is the minimum they need to know to start helping you? I wrote this in the Wiki when I first started recruiting localizers for Haiti and Cambodia. http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Localization#Getting_started There is other useful information on that page. Please add what you learn from this experience, and tell everybody Mèsi nan men m 'ak nan chak grenn timoun ayisyen. Thanks, Caroline On Thu, May 5, 2011 at 10:18 AM, Timothy Falconer tee...@waveplace.org wrote: Hi partners and friends, We're looking for a little help with our Waveplace courseware. We're hoping to get it all translated into: Haitian Creole French Spanish Portuguese Our funds are limited, so I wanted to know if you have any volunteers who could possibly help in this effort. Our courseware is located at http://wiki.waveplace.org/display/wp/Courseware. So far, the lessons we have finished are: General--Basic Etoys (needs outlines and projects translated) Language Arts--Storytelling (needs outlines translated) Mathematics--Geometry (needs outlines and projects translated) Science-- Motion (needs projects translated) Health-- Clean water (unfinished but can translate what projects are finished) Health-- Malaria (unfinished but can outlines in the meantime) Technology--Sugar (needs outlines translated) As you can see, it's a bit of work. Many things are already translated into Haitian Creole, but not everything. Please let me know if you can offer any help to us! Thanks so much! -- Timothy Falconer Waveplace Foundation http://waveplace.org + 1 610 797 3100 x33 ___ 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 ___ Olpc-open mailing list olpc-o...@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/olpc-open -- Edward Mokurai (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) Cherlin Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation. The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination. http://www.earthtreasury.org/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [support-gang] volunteer translators needed
On Fri, May 13, 2011 at 10:01 AM, Caroline Meeks carol...@solutiongrove.com wrote: Hi Tim and Beth, We are training a group of volunteers from the Haitian Coalition in Etoys tomorrow. We have some practice at teaching Etoys at this point. How/what would you like me to teach them about translating? What is the minimum they need to know to start helping you? Thanks, Caroline Caroline, Here are my thoughts (from a L10n process perspective), although Tim or Beth can speak for Waveplace. Haitian Kreyol Project on Pootle http://translate.sugarlabs.org/ht/ eToys itself needs more work http://translate.sugarlabs.org/ht/etoys_new/ Waveplace lesson templates for malaria and geometry are available here. (Basic eToys is there, but already translated). http://translate.sugarlabs.org/ht/Waveplace/ Check the Waveplace Courseware wiki page to see if any more templates are available, I think I've got most of them on Pootle now. The PO files are easily converted to text with po2txt from Translate Toolkit Quoting from: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Translation_Team/Pootle_Projects#Waveplace_Lessons Waveplace Lessons These are outlines and materials for Waveplace lessons using eToys. There are two very important elements of *context* that should be kept in mind when localizing these materials. 1. Each PO file is only part of an overall 10-week lesson plan. You should familiarize yourself with the entire set of materials related to the module you are localizing by reviewing it at the link below. http://wiki.waveplace.org/display/wp/Courseware 2. Many of the directions in these lessons use terms that have specific meaning in eToys or refer to commands / menu items in eToys. You should make sure that the translation of those terms is consistent with the way they are localized in eToys itself to avoid confusion. This can easily be done by searching those terms in the eToys Pootle project. cjl ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] OERs and collaboration
Valerie Thanks for the helpful comments. A problem of educational resources developed by an open source community is that people have 'scratched their own itch' and there are lots of disconnected education resources but little overall structure. This is not a criticism of the community, without the community, the resources would not exist. I started blogging rather than adding to the wiki for what I suppose are the usual reasons: not wanting to mess with another's document, being unsure about my work's quality and relevance and wanting to own my own work. Later I changed my mind but kept blogging to be consistent. Anything which makes the invitation to edit a wiki more explicit is good. Any tools that make it easier are good. But many will still want to manage their own resources. I think the idea of Delicious style tagging is good, but I am not sure how you would implement it. The following examples of sites have good resources in the 'turtle graphics' space occupied by TurtleArt, Scratch and Etoys. A search facility that could find all of them (and more) would help teachers. Its unrealistic to expect that all the resources would be on the wiki, regardless of how easy the editing was. http://sites.google.com/site/solymar1fisica/fisica-con-xo-investigacion- http://www.fing.edu.uy/inco/proyectos/butia/ http://www.scribd.com/doc/20189623/The-XO-Laptop-in-the-Classroom http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Aplicacion_Problema_de_Pizzas http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/images/0/0e/Gravity.odt neoparaiso.com http://ictmindtools.net/scratch/ http://www.waveplace.org/resources/tutorials/ The issues (also addressed in Valerie's http://wikieducator.org/User:Vtaylor/Learning_objects,_personal_learning_environments,_study_guides) which make bringing all the resources in some way under one umbrella difficult include: Difficulty and inconsistency in finding and navigating to resources Different formats of the resources, wiki, blog, image, pdf, doc Different depth in the resources, ranging from as little as a single image to a book Patchy coverage of the subjects Different languages, primarily Spanish and English Difficulty in assigning a resource to a subject or year level What are the limits of what is relevant? Authors may be unaware of complimentary resources and not incorporate or cross reference Authors' reluctance to add their own work to a wiki (or tagging) in case its not good enough or relevant enough Abandoned partly completed projects That's a list of problems, unfortunately I don't have solutions. Thanks for the comments on http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/TurtleArt Yes its a big document. Walter has started the steps to breaking this up into smaller documents, its already 9 sub documents stitched together (click view source to see the structure) Will breaking it up make it easier to comprehend and more inviting to edit? Any comments on the structure welcome or just edit it yourself. Glad you like the 'Challenges' section. Would you rather see it closer to the top? Does it need a run through of what TurtleArt can do first? In how much detail? Provide a way to showcase and contribute learning objects - basically challenge descriptions with categories / tags - subject, degree of difficulty, ... and optional information like learning objectives and additional information for teachers or students - setup, curriculum integration, links to more advanced related challenges. There should be a mechanism for adding reviews to challenge entries, too. Can you flesh this idea out a bit? Or even better do it? I am a bit vague on degree of difficulty curriculum integration for the existing samples, this needs feedback from teachers in the field. Getting feedback is important. Would you let the tags just grow organically or should we work out some hierarchy of tagging? Is it worth making a start with something like Delicious? I suspect that reprogramming the wiki is too much to ask for at this stage. You said you had made a TurtleArt sample. Please add it to the wiki. Feel free to restructure the existing pages so that its addition makes sense in the larger structure. Thanks again for the feedback Tony YOU are systematic. It is the rest of us who need help. On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 4:34 PM, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 2:33 PM, Valerie Taylor vtay...@gmail.com wrote: I think there is merit in having a public repository like the Sugar Labs wiki to encourage educators and others to see what is being done, and build on that in a systematic way. We are not exactly systematic about it, but Tony links to his most relevant blog posts in the wiki. Please see http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/TurtleArt#Tutorials and http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/TurtleArt/Using_Turtle_Art_Sensors As far as how to make these posts have more impact, we are open to suggestions. Good example - the first encounter
[IAEP] Por favor ayúdennos a recopilar información (fotos, presentaciones, etc.) del eduJAM! // Please help us collecting information (photos, presentations, etc.) of eduJAM!
Quisieramos armar una página que recopile toda la información posible sobre el eduJAM! Para ello les pedimos ayuda, agregando en http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/EduJAM/2011 todos los links a fotos, presentaciones, videos y otros materiales que consideren oportunos sobre eduJAM! 2011. Gracias!! We would like to build a page collecting as much information as possible from eduJAM! So we ask you for help, adding in http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/EduJAM/2011 all the links to photos, presentations, videos and any other material you may find valuable about eduJAM! 2011. Thanks! ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] OERs and collaboration
On Fri, May 13, 2011 7:07 am, Valerie Taylor wrote: YOU are systematic. It is the rest of us who need help. It isn't just that. We are talking about producing several hundred subject-matter OERs for all subjects at all levels, plus local content in history, literature, health, agriculture and so on, in perhaps a hundred languages, in both student and teacher editions, where the teacher's edition will not be distinguished by having the right answers to the problems, but by having lesson plans for each topic in a variety of styles, as Muska Mosston put it, From Command to Discovery. And then permitting remixing and matching to state, province, national, or subject-matter-expert curricula. Among other things. On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 4:34 PM, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 2:33 PM, Valerie Taylor vtay...@gmail.com wrote: I think there is merit in having a public repository like the Sugar Labs wiki to encourage educators and others to see what is being done, and build on that in a systematic way. We will need a proper Free Software document repository built on a sufficiently powerful database engine to support all of the requirements mentioned above. We are not exactly systematic about it, but Tony links to his most relevant blog posts in the wiki. Please see http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/TurtleArt#Tutorials and http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/TurtleArt/Using_Turtle_Art_Sensors Very nice. I have some to add. As far as how to make these posts have more impact, we are open to suggestions. Good example - the first encounter with the Turtle Art page is a little overwhelming - Obviously tons of wonderful information with pictures and code... There are many OLPC and Sugar Labs Wiki pages with lots of good information and almost no guidance on how to use it. I used to do the kind of documentation we need for a living, but there is only one of me. We need a team. Some us need to know what can it do? and why do I need to know all this stuff? (rather than how does it work?). The Challenges are great! This is where it starts to make some sense for me. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/TurtleArt#Challenges Which one of these meets my needs with the least fuss? Provide a way to showcase and contribute learning objects - basically challenge descriptions with categories / tags - subject, degree of difficulty, ... and optional information like learning objectives and additional information for teachers or students - setup, curriculum integration, links to more advanced related challenges. There should be a mechanism for adding reviews to challenge entries, too. The Turtle Art page is sooo organized that it doesn't invite contributions or collaboration. If there was a button that said add your own challenge or add a review of this challenge it would create a safe way to contribute. A form pops up with boxes to fill in, including some options, save and it is added to the page in the proper place without the risk of messing up what is already there. For the experienced Wikiist, the Edit button is sufficient invitation, but it takes people a while to believe it. This would also help educators (and students) find challenges to try themselves. Once they locate a couple of challenges that seem appropriate and interesting, then they will be motivated to work through all the terrific material provided. We need to make some pages with just challenges and hints. I have been working on the idea, off and on, at http://booki.flossmanuals.net/discovering-discovery/edit/ and more recently http://booki.treehouse.su/discovering-discovery/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- Edward Mokurai (#40664;#38647;/#2343;#2352;#2381;#2350;#2350;#2375;#2328;#2358;#2348;#2381;#2342;#2327;#2352;#2381;#2332;/#1583;#1726;#1585;#1605;#1605;#1740;#1711;#1726;#1588;#1576;#1583;#1711;#1585; #1580;) Cherlin Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation. The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination. http://www.earthtreasury.org/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] OERs and collaboration
On Fri, May 13, 2011 9:33 pm, fors...@ozonline.com.au wrote: Valerie Thanks for the helpful comments. A problem of educational resources developed by an open source community is that people have 'scratched their own itch' and there are lots of disconnected education resources but little overall structure. This is not a criticism of the community, without the community, the resources would not exist. The new Sugar Labs Replacing Textbooks project means to address that problem, allowing a hundred flowers to bloom, or a hundred itches to be scratched, and also recruiting professional subject matter experts to create OERs that conform to various curriculum standards, with peer review. You can see our beginnings on the test server that dogi set up for us. http://booki.treehouse.su/ We will also need a repository that can handle a multidimensional collection of documents * on every school subject and teacher training subject, plus many more * at every level of child development * for every country * in every language needed with local materials in topics such as history, geography, civics, health, agriculture and more. Even in PE we have to allow for countries where the number one game is soccer, baseball, or cricket. I have proposed teaching statistics using sports records, so even math materials have to have local content. I started blogging rather than adding to the wiki for what I suppose are the usual reasons: not wanting to mess with another's document, being unsure about my work's quality and relevance and wanting to own my own work. Later I changed my mind but kept blogging to be consistent. We can and intend to provide space on the booki server for single-author materials and group efforts. I have many notions about how to use Turtle Blocks as the introductory math language, with the aim of making it as natural as learning talk. This was Seymour Papert's goal for Logo, as described in Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas. So I would like to work with you. Anything which makes the invitation to edit a wiki more explicit is good. Any tools that make it easier are good. But many will still want to manage their own resources. I think the idea of Delicious style tagging is good, but I am not sure how you would implement it. The following examples of sites have good resources in the 'turtle graphics' space occupied by TurtleArt, Scratch and Etoys. A search facility that could find all of them (and more) would help teachers. Its unrealistic to expect that all the resources would be on the wiki, regardless of how easy the editing was. Reference librarians have plenty of good ideas on managing bibliographies. What is harder is to make a collection that does not look academic, that invites children in. http://sites.google.com/site/solymar1fisica/fisica-con-xo-investigacion- http://www.fing.edu.uy/inco/proyectos/butia/ http://www.scribd.com/doc/20189623/The-XO-Laptop-in-the-Classroom http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Aplicacion_Problema_de_Pizzas http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/images/0/0e/Gravity.odt neoparaiso.com http://ictmindtools.net/scratch/ http://www.waveplace.org/resources/tutorials/ The issues (also addressed in Valerie's http://wikieducator.org/User:Vtaylor/Learning_objects,_personal_learning_environments,_study_guides) which make bringing all the resources in some way under one umbrella difficult include: Difficulty and inconsistency in finding and navigating to resources Different formats of the resources, wiki, blog, image, pdf, doc Different depth in the resources, ranging from as little as a single image to a book Patchy coverage of the subjects Different languages, primarily Spanish and English Difficulty in assigning a resource to a subject or year level What are the limits of what is relevant? Authors may be unaware of complimentary resources and not incorporate or cross reference Authors' reluctance to add their own work to a wiki (or tagging) in case its not good enough or relevant enough Abandoned partly completed projects That's a list of problems, unfortunately I don't have solutions. Good start. Yes, none of us has the answer. We'll invite the children and the teachers to help us find some. Thanks for the comments on http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/TurtleArt Yes its a big document. Walter has started the steps to breaking this up into smaller documents, its already 9 sub documents stitched together (click view source to see the structure) Will breaking it up make it easier to comprehend and more inviting to edit? Any comments on the structure welcome or just edit it yourself. Glad you like the 'Challenges' section. Would you rather see it closer to the top? Does it need a run through of what TurtleArt can do first? In how much detail? That's what I particularly want to work on. Provide a way to showcase and contribute learning objects - basically challenge descriptions with categories / tags -
[IAEP] Printing in Uruguay (was Re: OLPC in Science-Subjects --- NEED HELP!!!)
On Fri, May 13, 2011 2:30 am, nanon...@mediagala.com wrote: /moku...@earthtreasury.org wrote: It is straightforward to share Journal entries between XOs. although not over mesh networking. *..Printing is not necessary.* / I said also that printing was useful. Further comments below on your comments. It is possible to set up XOs to print, but it requires installing the CUPS printing package, and it means plugging into a USB printer for each job. What we want is a school server with a printer, and a robust way to use the wireless on the XOs to access it. Mesh networking is utterly unreliable in the classroom, so we have to fall back to regular WiFi and Jabber servers, or to a Web-based interface where one can upload a file or a Journal entry and schedule it for printing. There are a number of technical problems with this, which we need to put serious effort into fixing. We also have to work on the user interface. I will be happy to assist. Is anybody working on this in PLAN Ceibal? Step 1. Collect user requirements in the form of use cases * Who wants to print what, when, for what purposes? * Do lots of children want to print at the same time? * Is it acceptable to queue print jobs for later pickup? * Color or black white, or a mixture? * Documents from other sources, or Journal entries, or printing from activities? * What sizes? (Metric vs. US; letter vs oversize and undersize) * Should teachers schedule printing, or should students, or both? * How much printing can a school afford? * How will we manage permissions and privileges? * What else have you heard from teachers and students? * Which use case has highest priority? Step 2. Triage * Which use cases do we know how to support? * Which use cases are most important? * Who should decide what to do next? * What minimizes the current pain? Step 3. Implement first-cut solution * Who will do the work? * What oversight will there be? * How do we test the solution? * Did we solve the right initial problem? Step 4. * Lather, rinse, repeat I hope this helps. Who is willing to work on this problem? Mr. Mokurai: MAybe you are an expert in Education, and Xo, or SUgar development, or teaching children, I reject the title of expert. I know a little, but mostly I know how little I know. I am Project Manager of the Sugar Labs project to Replace Textbooks with Open Education Resources, not because I know how to do it, but because I am the only one who sees its importance as I do, and is willing to do the work, and to find out how. but I think that you don't KNow the reality of the XOs here in Uruguay, or somewhere that the teachers uses XO. My Spanish is bad, and I have not been to Uruguay, true. I am working on both of those problems. I know how I use my laptop and my two XOs, which does not include printing, unless an employer or a government agency insists. *Printing is not necessary* is a very good statement , I agree, but for the real people (not the theoretical children) is only a statement, that is almost impossible to apply now. It is like saying The peace is better than the war... is a very good phrase, we all agree, but with that phrase I can not solve the problems of the world. I have some ideas on peace, but they will take at least a generation to work out. I am counting on our millions of children to help out after they learn how to work with each other around the world. See The Evolution of Cooperation, by Robert Axelrod, for a theoretical outline of an approach. The real world exists, and* in the real world the teachers wants to print.*. that is a fact, and We can not change it. Maybe in 30 Years the mind of the Teachers will change, but not now. Yes, I am very clear on the difference between want to and need to. It was one of the main topics of my seminary training. MAybe in 30 Years this statement will be true, but now if you told a TEacher that you can't print is the same as saying _don't use the Xo's. You have a XIX century mind. The XO are made for XXII century minds only._.. A XV century, pre-Gutenberg, approach works quite well, actually. We need to adjust our thinking more than theirs. This is not my opinion, it's simply an observation of the real world that I see that here in Uruguay: _there are a lot of teachers that don't Use the XO_ because of lots of problems that it has (there are also other reasons that are non technical). One of those problems are the printing problem. As expected, until we get XOs into the full curriculum in the teachers' colleges. You said to share the Journal. Excuse me, Mr. Mokurai:_* *_Do you Know that the MEsh doesn't works? Yes, I do. You can share journal entries on USB flash drives, or over Jabber servers. Even if you can share something, The XOs hangs up, or loose the entire journal, and the children don't use the journal for important things, that's why the
