Re: [IAEP] reconstructed maths

[Albert Cahalan]

On Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 10:08 PM, Bill Kerr <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 7:16 PM, Albert Cahalan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> misunderstandings and misrepresentations aside, I'd raise this point
> in response - your assumption is that a large scale study is more
> important than the individual research and findings of one person
>
> I don't see why this assumption should necessarily be true - ie.
> historically it has been shown many times that lone individuals or
> small groups have turned out to be correct and the predominant or
> mainstream way of doing things has eventually been displaced - that
> is the nature of scientific revolutions

I agree, but this doesn't help constructionism one bit. If anything,
constructionism is the predominant or mainstream way of doing things
in teacher's colleges. Don't compare "large scale study" against
"lone individuals or small groups"; this is apples and oranges.
Compare "large scale study" against the complete lack of evidence
that constructionism works in real classrooms with real teachers
and real students.

There are numerous smaller and less formal studies in support of
non-constructionist methods. Typically an underperforming school
will switch methods (new leadership or parents nearly rioting) and
the math performance will go way up.

I found neither size of study in support of constructionism.
Constructionist web sites are totally quiet on this issue.
I thought this to be odd. After all, if you have such a great
idea, surely you'd gather evidence in support of it. I was left
with an uneasy feeling about the whole thing. I then stumbled
across the opposition while researching something else, and woah!
I see real evidence! It's really refreshing to see solid numbers.
There are studies both large and small. The largest one is of
course most impressive, being the biggest educational study ever,
but there is no lack of smaller and less formal ones.

> it could be that whole systems have been built and maintained for
> generations on principles of direct instruction - that various
> challenges to this have arisen and been trialled, some good,
> some not so good - but throughout this process the predominant
> form of teaching has remained direct instruction
>
> it seems to me that in a system that has evolved in that way, that
> due to forces of inertia and group think mainstream studies would
> tend to show that mainstream ways of doing things are the "best way"

Project Follow Through's data was analysed by two independent groups.
Since math was the topic (a favorite for constructionists), there was
little room for interpretation: did the students learn math?

> Piaget did many studies and wrote many books and papers based on
> the study of 3 children - that does not in itself make him wrong.
> He might be wrong but I can see many advantages of doing in depth
> studies based on a small group.

That's an interesting prototype, but nearly any teaching method
will work great in a tutoring environment with a fanatical teacher.
The next appropriate step is to try it out in a full classroom, then
in several classrooms with typical grade school teachers. Much more
than that has been done for constructionism already, and it failed.
When you have a proven failure, you need to stop.

> I would like to discuss this issue more, just raising it here in
> simple form --> minority views are not wrong because they are
> minority views

Right, they are wrong just because they are **WRONG**. :-)
Remember that constructionism is, at least in the teaching
colleges, the majority view. You probably won't graduate
unless you at least pay lip service to it. It's a political
correctness of the teaching profession. (one of many...)
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Re: [IAEP] reconstructed maths

[Albert Cahalan]

Alan Kay writes:

> Suppose we take as a premise that the following results of surveys over the
> last 20 years were gathered well enough to form a real generalization:
>
> - only 20% of American adults can read a well written important ideas essay
>   (they used Tom Paine's "Common Sense"), and understand it well enough to
>   discuss it, write about it, criticize it, advocate it, etc. (National
>   Literacy Foundation)

That essay is a particularly useless choice, being written in
the language of 1776. I'm surprised that 20% could handle it.
Comprehension of common consumer contracts would be a far more
useful measure of reading comprehension -- not that I expect
a better success rate.

> - only 5% of American adults are "literate/fluent" enough in math & science
>   to deal with mainstream ideas, have an extended conversation with a
>   mathematician or scientist, be operational enough to put a mathematical
>   map on a set of ideas and do something with them, etc.

This is one reason to despise the fuzzy math of constructionism,
which is one cause of the lack of fluency.

Science is actively opposed by many parents. Lab work is doomed
for the same reason that the XO displays idiotic warnings when
you shut it down. (do not eat the laptop, do not eat the frog
soaked in formaldehyde, do not eat the sodium metal...)

> However, even if they had funded the study, we realized that it would be
> adding more of the largest problem of doing anything in a school with math
> or science, which is working with teachers who don't remotely understand
> their subjects

Right. The union works hard to ensure that it is impossible to
reward the good teachers or eliminate the bad ones. Because of
this, throwing money at the problem does not work.

Elementary school teachers normally can't deal with fractions
or basic English grammar.

BTW, it is probably impossible to pay a good student to help
teach others. I mean "impossible" because of teacher contracts
and other administration problems. Paying students to help out
is a very effective way to motivate them.

> another deeply important factor is that children in a single classroom
> exhibit a wide variation in motivations, knowledge, skills, maturity and
> "wiring". Different children need different approaches. A classroom is a
> tough place to learn anything (as an orchestra is a tough place to learn how
> to play an instrument). The US factory approach to education was hoping for
> economies of scales via method, but it forgot that it wasn't about just
> turning out Model-T's, but every kind and variation of vehicle using every
> kind and variation of materials and design.

Many schools avoid tracking, even up to the 8th grade. The parents
of a dumb and violent kid believe that he belongs in the advanced
class, and they may raise hell to ensure it.

There is also no ability to drop back by a fraction of a grade.
If a student misses something, there are a few bad options: they
can go on without it in the reasonable hope that it will be useless
material or taught again, they can drop back a whole grade (rare),
or they can drop down to a lower track if one is available. Both
dropping back a grade and dropping down to a lower track will
generally affect all subjects, not merely the one with a problem.

There is a severe need to reteach things. It's caused by the lack
of a national curriculum (transfer students must be dealt with),
the grade promotion of students without full mastery, distractions,
and the existence of summer vacation.

> Again, this successful scheme doesn't necessarily generalize to every
> subject. But it's strong enough to be worth considering in areas where
> "doing skills" are an important part of the subject. (One problem with
> "math" in the US is that it isn't actually "math" but only simple
> calculation skills. This isn't enough to help with actual math thinking
> (which is a special skill all its own that can indeed be taught, but isn't.)

I'm not sure what you mean by "actual math thinking". FWIW, some
places do have students doing proofs in algebra and geometry.
(what I got in Massachusetts from 1988 to 1990) I suppose that
this is not the norm.

Simple calculation skills are critical. Without them, you can not
quickly and reliably manipulate numbers in your head. Besides having
real-world value, this skill is a prerequisite for higher math.
You are unlikely to see the connections if computation isn't easy.
Stuff like 3/1.5 needs to be effortless.
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Re: [IAEP] [Fwd: 0.84 goals]

[Albert Cahalan]

Benjamin M. Schwartz writes:
> forster at ozonline.com.au wrote:

>> I remain unconvinced that a journal, even with enhanced
>> tagging and searching, is the best solution.
>
> I am pretty well convinced.

You're using it exclusively, right...? (no bash, no MacOS, etc.)

If it's not good enough for you, then it's definitely not good
enough to be forced on other people.

> Both tags and hierarchies provide a combinatorial explosion of
> labels for objects.  In fact, unless you have directories like
> /foo/bar/baz AND /bar/baz/foo, tags are just as good as directories
> for uniquely identifying objects.

Could those tags at least be usable via the folder metaphor?

At top level, show tags and anti-tags (absence of tag) as folders.
Sort them by how evenly they split the files into two groups,
with the most evenly splitting ones first.

>> I have found the concealment of the underlying directory
>> structure from the user quite frustrating when working
>> with email attachments.
>
> It would be good to hear your specific frustration in this use case.

It appears that you are not a Journal user. :-(

Here is an example: pretend you are a kid who wants to learn about
his computer by exploring the filesystem. You want to look in /dev,
look in /etc, and so on. Using only Sugar, can you do it?

>> The journal rapidly fills with rubbish, I could not turn off
>> the autosave.
>
> As you may have noted, the new Journal designs
> (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Designs/Journal) provide a "Star"
> column to identify important entries.  A single click then
> shows only the starred entries.  New objects, such as e-mail
> attachments, will not generally be starred on creation.

How exactly does this "Star" deal with the fundamental problem?
As he says, "The journal rapidly fills with rubbish".

The user's work is lost in a sea of spam. No matter how you make
the default (starred or unstarred), spam will have the same state
as everything else. It is completely unreasonable to expect users
to wade through a sea of spam to star/unstar some of the entries.
Deletion is also unreasonable.

>> The journal is OK but should it be the only tool available to the user?
>> Isn't the best file system the one which most empowers the user?
>
> How does the Journal fail to empower the user?  With tagging and
> versioning, the Journal design empowers the user to organize their
> objects, find their objects by organization scheme or by content, and
> never lose something because they forgot to save it.  That seems like
> plenty of power to me.

Clearly you are not a Journal user. You may have played with it,
and you may have even written some code for it... but clearly you
do not really use it.

What happens:

1. spam builds up
2. user gives up on finding anything in the mess
3. system becomes slow
4. system fails (out of space) or user does "rm -rf" on journal
5. user blames his problems on Linux, then installs XP

At step 2, the user's work is effectivly lost forever.

Oddly enough, XP makes it possible to use traditional UNIX tools
on the user's files. Desktop files reside in the filesystem under
normal names. With cygwin or SFU, you can operate on them. Suger
users are unable to do likewise, despite being on Linux. All the
power has been taken away.
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Re: [IAEP] Concise explanation of Constructionism from the Learning Team

[Albert Cahalan]

Seth Woodworth writes:
> [Future of Learning Group]

>> We are developing "Constructionism" as a theory of learning and
>> education. Constructionism is based on two different senses of
>> "construction." It is grounded in the idea that people learn by
>> actively constructing new knowledge, rather than having information
>> "poured" into their heads. Moreover, constructionism asserts that
>> people learn with particular effectiveness when they are engaged
>> in constructing personally meaningful artifacts (such as computer
>> programs, animations, or robots).
>
> I thought that this explination was concise and really interesting.
> I would love to explain this to people who want to desige activities,
> just to give them a little snapshot of the concept.  Does anyone have
> a problem with this deffinition? Does anyone have an improvement?

Yes.

That definition sounds lovely, like a politician's speech.
It's all feel-good stuff that matches up perfectly with how
we **desire** education to work.

Unfortunately, the cold hard facts don't support the ideas.
In study after study, including the largest educational study
ever done, the ideas have been proven to fail.

Better:

Constructionism is a failed educational theory which promoted
the feel-good idea that people would reinvent human knowledge
though personally meaningful exploration. Constructionism is
commonly used to hide both teacher and student deficiency in a
sea of confusion, allowing the avoidance of necessary learning.
Through the use of vague open-ended projects without instruction,
the brighter students are brought down to the level of the dimmest
students. The resulting lack of education is hidden by avoiding
reproducable tests.
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Re: [IAEP] [Fwd: 0.84 goals]

[Albert Cahalan]

victor rajewski writes:
> On Sat, Aug 16, 2008 at 3:05 PM, Albert Cahalan 
> wrote:

>> You're using it exclusively, right...? (no bash, no MacOS, etc.)
>>
>> If it's not good enough for you, then it's definitely not good
>> enough to be forced on other people.
>
> That would be like expecting gnome/OSX/windows developers to use
> the GUI exclusively without using the command line. The GUI is for
> a particular set of users, power users and developers might need
> something else. A 10 year old student and a tertiary educated software
> developer will have different needs from a file system.

I don't know about gnome developers, but as for OSX and windows,
yes they definitely do work exclusively in the GUI. I've seen it
with my own eyes for Windows. (creepy!) I have to assume that
pre-OSX developers didn't use a command line, because there
wasn't any command line at all.

Windows developers don't even type filenames into a Makefile.
They just use the GUI.

> Gmail and delicious (and no doubt others) use a tag-and-search system;
> they both work great for me, and if a similar functionality existed
> for my regular filesystem, I'd use it in a second.

Gmail is tolerable (barely) because email is mostly searchable text
and because Google throws a massive compute farm at the problem.
On the XO, we have mostly non-text and no compute power to spare.

>> Here is an example: pretend you are a kid who wants to learn about
>> his computer by exploring the filesystem. You want to look in /dev,
>> look in /etc, and so on. Using only Sugar, can you do it?
>
> No, just like you can't do this in OSX using just the GUI. That's what
> the terminal is there for.

I can do that with GNOME, KDE, and Windows. While I think bash is
wonderful, forcing people into it just to view files is no good.

>> Clearly you are not a Journal user. You may have played with it,
>> and you may have even written some code for it... but clearly you
>> do not really use it.
>
> This is the tricky part - we are not the intended audience of the
> journal/sugar. The intended audience is school kids. We need to be
> looking at how they use it and if it suits them, not if it suits us.

This bothers me greatly. I'll do my best to explain, but it isn't
all that easy.

Perhaps you've heard of "the soft bigotry of low expectations".
You're... looking down on the kids when you decide that they can't
use the same thing as yourself. They get toys, not tools.

I can agree that some of the more complex stuff should be out of
the way by default. The journal is more than that though; it makes
the more complex stuff simply unavailable. It also encourages a
mental model that is not in line with reality. The result is a
limit to how far a kid can advance.
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Re: [IAEP] Concise explanation of Constructionism from the LearningTeam

[Albert Cahalan]

On Sat, Aug 16, 2008 at 2:30 AM, Costello, Rob R
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> If constructionism means "the use of vague open-ended projects without
> instruction" then maybe more people would agree with you...
>
> But I can't see that anyone is really promoting that, except maybe as a
> paper tiger to shadow box with

In real-world schools, that is exactly what constructionism means.
If you mean otherwise, then you'd best avoid using that word.
If you can, blacklist it with a spell checker.
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Re: [IAEP] Concise explanation of Constructionism from the Learning Team

[Albert Cahalan]

On Sat, Aug 16, 2008 at 6:03 PM, Edward Cherlin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 15, 2008 at 10:52 PM, Albert Cahalan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

>> Unfortunately, the cold hard facts don't support the ideas.
>> In study after study, including the largest educational study
>> ever done, the ideas have been proven to fail.
>
> Links or it never happened, Albert. I have asked you over and over
> what your evidence is, and you have never yet replied.

I did, at least twice. Search the mailing list archives if
you need to. (on laptop.org I believe, not sugarlabs.org)
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Re: [IAEP] Concise explanation of Constructionism from the LearningTeam

[Albert Cahalan]

On Sat, Aug 16, 2008 at 3:31 AM, Costello, Rob R
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> I work in a real world school, and its not what it means there

Consider yourself lucky. Perhaps your school is just special.
Perhaps your whole country is special. In any case, you're in
an uphill battle if lots of people have a different definition.
Your message gets mangled when you choose words that
your listener will interpret differently than you.

Here it means disasters like "Everyday Mathematics",
"Mathland", and "Connected Mathematics".

> The challenge is how to balance the need for lots of instruction while
> preserving the spirit of inquiry

Typically, constructionism is against instruction. Balance is
not allowed; it can not be allowed when instruction is made
out to be the great evil.

> Not entirely sure if you're just wanting to get a rise out of polarised
> points of view, where accuracy or ability to see the whole isn't really
> a priority

I was quite open minded about constructionism, but I believe
that the purpose of an open mind is to close on the truth.
Initially I was curious. I became annoyed and suspicious as
it became obvious that evidence was lacking and that nobody
could explain things in a way that was clear, concise, useful,
unambiguous, and so on. Then, during some other research,
I stumbled upon the horror of constructionism as practiced
and I found the evidence that constructionists would suppress.
It's time to get the word out: constructionism hurts children.

Maybe in some theoretical ideal world, there could exist
some form of constructionism that is not rotten to the core.
We don't live in that world, so let's not concern ourself with it.

> If not, and you just happen to feel strongly on the issue, you might be
> interested in this
> http://www.learningtolearn.sa.edu.au/Colleagues/files/links/Teaching_and
> _Learning_in_a.doc

I find straw men. The writer imagines that traditional instruction
is purely memorization. The writer expects me to accept on faith
that one's immature and uneducated peers are learning aids.
The writer admits to horrible inefficiencies that require the use
of extra hours and possibly extra teachers.

It sounds like some people are still trying to recover from some
nun who whacked them with a ruler every time they failed to
perfectly regurgitate some useless trivia. Sorry if that's the
case... but regular education is mostly not like that.
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Re: [IAEP] Concise explanation of Constructionism from the Learning Team

[Albert Cahalan]

On Sat, Aug 16, 2008 at 7:21 PM, Edward Cherlin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 16, 2008 at 4:04 PM, Albert Cahalan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> On Sat, Aug 16, 2008 at 6:03 PM, Edward Cherlin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>> On Fri, Aug 15, 2008 at 10:52 PM, Albert Cahalan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>
>>>> Unfortunately, the cold hard facts don't support the ideas.
>>>> In study after study, including the largest educational study
>>>> ever done, the ideas have been proven to fail.
>>>
>>> Links or it never happened, Albert. I have asked you over and over
>>> what your evidence is, and you have never yet replied.
>>
>> I did, at least twice.
>
> Not in a form I recognized as such. Make a page on one of the Wikis
> for your evidence.
>
>> Search the mailing list archives if
>> you need to. (on laptop.org I believe, not sugarlabs.org)
>
> What would I search for, and in which list? Searching for

I forgot about lo-res.org, where the post resides.
http://lists.lo-res.org/pipermail/its.an.education.project/2008-July/001361.html

I gave you **three** links. Please read them all.

Note that it is directly a follow-up to you. I'm 99% sure
that you got your own copy.

> "Can I get you to agree that all children
> must memorize traditional arithmetic methods long before getting
> any exposure to vector calculus? Can I get you to agree that
> constructionism does not work for teaching math?
...
> The answers to your questions are
>
> * No, children can grasp the concepts of vectors, calculus, and vector
> calculus visually without any arithmetic. (You are confusing geometric
> vectors with their numeric representations.)

That sounds like a Math Appreciation course. It's a lot
like a Music Appreciation course: an easy "A", and you
don't really have to learn how to do the Math/Music.
Superficial understanding is not of great value.

> * No, none of us agrees that Constructionism does not work for teaching math.

So you are OK with this:
http://mathematicallycorrect.com/ml1.htm

More:
http://mathematicallycorrect.com/nychold.htm

> You have not named or linked to your alleged study. So, again, links
> or it never happened.

Maybe it's still in your inbox.
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Re: [IAEP] Concise explanation of Constructionism from the Learning Team

[Albert Cahalan]

Edward Cherlin writes:
> On Sat, Aug 16, 2008 at 11:11 PM, Albert Cahalan  
> wrote:
>> On Sat, Aug 16, 2008 at 7:21 PM, Edward Cherlin  
>> wrote:

>>> What would I search for, and in which list? Searching for
>>
>> I forgot about lo-res.org, where the post resides.
>> http://lists.lo-res.org/pipermail/its.an.education.project/2008-July/001361.html
>
> Oh, that nonsense. Carol Lerche dissected your post quite well.
> "Burning straw men", she said.

Not. One of the 3 links did indeed mention the whole-language crap.
(not that it doesn't seem to match up perfectly with these ideas)
Carol's reference to "the article" suggests that she read only one.

The study is indeed a bit old, and it does focus on the younger crowd.
I don't believe either issue is significant. Humans are humans.

There is an unjustified, and even proven wrong, suspicion that there
could be some problem with self esteem. First of all, that isn't the
point of a math program. Second of all, it has been shown that real
acheivement in a real math program is better for self esteem. That is
even mentioned in the links I provided, proving that they were not read.

There is an unjustified, and even proven wrong, suspicion that
higher-order thinking may be lacking. Project Follow Through covered
this. In numerous complaints against the crummy math programs,
mathemeticians have pointed out that higher-order thinking will not
come easily to students who can not quickly manipulate numbers.
That said, I doubt that it is reasonable to solidly prove anything
about something as ill-defined as higher-order thinking; I think I'll
trust the many mathemeticians who have commented on the matter.

> Project Follow Through did not investigate _Constructionism_, and the
> report does not lead to the conclusion you draw. The actual conclusion
> was that woolly-minded "systems" based on Dewey and on Piaget's
> _Constructivism_, with no tested lesson plans, failed abysmally, and
> that the one "system" that did include tested lesson plans was usable,
> and thus the winner of _that competition_. To conclude from this study
> that no other method is viable is one of the most woolly-minded
> notions possible.

Until you find a few $billion to redo the study with your favorite
methods, we can conclude that no other method is proven to be viable.
Meanwhile, it is only right to use the best proven method.

> Now we in the Sugar community propose to think through and test a set
> of lesson plans on both discovery and mastery (which would include
> those basic skills you are pressing for). No woolly-mindedness
> allowed.

No wonder the terms are such a mess. When shown dismal failure,
you redefine them. Trying to get a grip on this stuff is like
trying to get a good solid grip on Jello.

>> That sounds like a Math Appreciation course.
>
> I suppose they _all_ sound like Math Appreciation, to *you*. It is
> actually quite difficult to get college students who have been taught
> how to calculate using numerical representations of vectors to grasp
> that a vector is not any of its numerical representations. It exists
> prior to the choice of an orthonormal basis for calculating
> components.

We call those students Art History majors. We could teach them
Math Appreciation, but that won't turn them into engineers.

>> It's a lot
>> like a Music Appreciation course: an easy "A", and you
>> don't really have to learn how to do the Math/Music.
>> Superficial understanding is not of great value.
>
> Among the greatest virtues of both Math and Music is that they deal
> with mastery and performance, which cannot be faked. Unlike, say,
> Literature or History. Or Music Criticism, or the Philosophy of Math.

Right. Without the numerical fluency, you're not teaching Math.

>> So you are OK with this:
>> http://mathematicallycorrect.com/ml1.htm
>>
>> More:
>> http://mathematicallycorrect.com/nychold.htm
>
> Of course not. It's woolly-minded rubbish. It has no connection with
> Constructionism, either.

It claims to be. It seems you wish to dispute that claim, at least
as soon as the horrible results are obvious. While words do not have
inherent meaning, they certainly do have generally agreed upon meaning.
You may well claim that somebody stole your favorite word... oh well.

>>> You have not named or linked to your alleged study. So, again, links
>>> or it never happened.
>>
>> Maybe it's still in your inbox.
>
> Yes, now that I know what terms to look for I can find it. But let's
> try this once more. Project Follow Through says nothing about
> Constructionism. Do you have any refutations of Constructionism?
> Links, or it didn't h

Re: [IAEP] Sad

[Albert Cahalan]

Microsoft probably deserves to win. :-(

Problems can't get fixed unless you admit that they exist.
This may require the loss of a few sacred cows.

Responding to several people here...

I fear it was not a joke to suggest that "Sugar on MIPS"
would somehow be compelling. Let's not be totally out of
touch with planet Earth. People rightly ask what an XO
with Sugar can actually do, and the answer is "not much".
It's simply nuts to think Sugar is competitive with XP.

Within the Sugar community, certain activities are adored.
They hold privileged positions, generally being installed
be default despite not being of a utility (shell, browser)
nature. They even get to hide their bloat by being allowed
to require RPMs that are of no use to anything else. They
are terribly slow. They are terribly complicated.

It's really offensive to insist that other people (children,
the poor, dark-colored people, them foreigners...) be forced
to use stuff which you yourself find to be inadequate for
your own daily (exclusive) use.

Performance issues start here:
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=all

Why should we rally around Sugar? Microsoft is getting a
chance because of Sugar. When something doesn't work, and
you just keep insisting, how is that going to get anywhere?
A truly amazing opportunity (Linux-only laptops for kids)
has been squandered.

Tweaking GNOME for the small screen and unreliable pointer
would be a workable plan to save Linux on the XO. Those of
you without a Linux background might not know it, but the OS
can actually be rather easy to use! It can even perform well
and allow you to find your files.

Right now we're looking at an awkward environment that eats
most of the RAM to provide a level of attractiveness similar
to that of GEM, GeOS, Apple GS/OS, Microsoft Windows 1.0,
and Apple LisaOS. (more pixels, less polish)

It comes down to this: do you want to be "right" about Sugar
so badly that you would rather let XP win than support any
alternate Linux GUI? If you're that stubborn, XP wins without
a fight.
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Re: [IAEP] Sad

[Albert Cahalan]

On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 5:51 AM, Bert Freudenberg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Am 17.09.2008 um 10:19 schrieb Albert Cahalan:

>> Within the Sugar community, certain activities are adored.
>> They hold privileged positions, generally being installed
>> be default despite not being of a utility (shell, browser)
>> nature. They even get to hide their bloat by being allowed
>> to require RPMs that are of no use to anything else. They
>> are terribly slow. They are terribly complicated.
>
> Feel free to name names, and please state why providing those activities is
> bad for a learning device, and don't hesitate to suggest a (non-Sugar) Linux
> application as replacement.
>
> If you are thinking of the same activity I think you are, then this got

"activities" -- plural

At least two activities obviously qualify, but I hate to pick
on them because other activities share many of the same
issues. It's in fact rather typical for activities to frustrate.
I actually have serious doubt about the learning value of
some of these activities, even ignoring the problems with
ease of use.

In my previous email I probably strayed too far from my main
point: as long as we remain oblivious to deficiencies and
insist on staying the course, we're handing kids to Microsoft.
It's damn hard to step back and see things as others do,
especially after spending tons of effort on cool new ideas.
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Re: [IAEP] Coloring books on the XO?

[Albert Cahalan]

C. Scott Ananian writes:
> On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 9:48 AM, Samuel Klein  wrote:

>> Coloring something certainly helps remember it.  And changing the
>> colors of shapes/objects in a drawing or scene or skin is one of
>> the simple pleasures in life.  A simple implementation of coloring
>> would let you pick the colors of your own sugar skin and icon.
>>
>> I dreamed the other day about those pattern-coloring books that introduce
>> you to unusual but beautiful tilings; when I was a kid we used to make
>> copies of them or trace them on onionskin and color separately, later
>> comparing the results for elegant patterns.
>
> Colors! might be a nice base for this activity.
>
> In general, we should think hard about how to best distribute 'example
> content', which you can open and remix on your XO.  From a UI
> perspective, I've suggested previously that these be presented as
> 'friends' in the UI, who have files you can share.  The Red Cross
> might be a friend who has some coloring books available you can open
> in Colors! (or your choice of Paint programs).

Tux Paint has this functionality. I was thinking of ripping it out
to save a bit of space. I guess it's more valuable than I thought?

Press the button the create a new image. You'll see a set of images
to start with. The ones at the top are solid color, but scroll down
and you'll find the starter images.

Starter images have both foreground and background. The foreground
is always shown on top, and thus obviously needs an alpha channel.
For a traditional coloring book page, the foreground is all black
and has line art in the alpha channel. The background would be all
white in that case. Full color is possible. You could have a forest,
with some of the trees in the foreground. Erasing restores background.
Starter image properties survive save/quit/restart/load.

The full set of tools is available, including stuff like flipping
and mirroring the image. The stamp and flood-fill tools are most
useful, though cheating I suppose. (BTW, flood-fill is fast)

We have:

jigsaw puzzles
grids
chess board
chicken
airplane
ocean reef
rocket
shipwreck
diploma-style frame
skyline
farmer
maps (US, Japan, each continent, world, canada)
castle
nagasaki
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Re: [IAEP] squeak/etoys accepted as free software...

[Albert Cahalan]

Jecel Assumpcao Jr writes:
> Holger Levsen wrote:

>> IIRC/IIUC this is one aspect why the ftpmasters didnt accept
>> it in main. More generally said, (IIRC) it's because the
>> impossibility to bootstrap etoys.
>
> Is the subject correct? I mean I know we are talking about a directory
> called "non-free" but is there anyone out there that after what has been
> said still doesn't accept etoys as Free Software?

I'm not fully convinced. It is apparently free of horrible legal
problems, but it's not in a reasonable form for modification.
The freedom is not fully usable in any reasonable way.

>> Even though the etoys developers "don't do it" and the stateful VM
>> (or rather patches to it) is/are the prefered form of modification.
>
> Note that several Smalltalks can be built entirely from a set of text
> files: Self, GNU Smalltalk, Slate, Little Smalltalk and others. There is
> no technical difficulty.

The solution should be obvious: pick any one of those Smalltalks,
and port something to it. Use standard audio and image formats
for the source-free multimedia blobs.

Your choices:

A. Port the code that generates the Squeak VM executable. Port any
code needed to create a VM. Make VM creation part of the build process.
BTW, this really should be set up to allow cross-compiling, but I admit
that lots of craptastic software fails to meet this higher standard.

B. Port just Etoys, eliminating the need for Squeak. This might be
more a matter of adding multimedia stuff to a non-Squeak Smalltalk.

> But as you said, the people who can do it don't
> have any reason to do so. This leads us to the situation where there is
> a group of people who want to do something which they feel would be very
> important but they can't do it themselves and another group that could
> do it but are busy with other things. It is very easy for discussions to
> get heated under such circumstances.

It's not merely a matter of not being "people who can do it".
It's more a problem of "why should we do your work?". When you
want to join a group, you need to follow the customs and not
expect others to pick up your slack.
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Re: [IAEP] Volunteer-driven development of educational software

[Albert Cahalan]

Greg Dekoenigsberg writes:
> On Tue, 11 Nov 2008, Greg Smith wrote:

>> On the question of Open Source to develop applications which
>> are not necessarily used by the people who write the code.
>> That is a challenge which I think we should address directly.

It isn't fully doomed. Develop software for your own kids,
then accept patches as needed to better support other kids.
This will easily produce software for kids; the result might
not be optimal for a large classroom.

> (b) activities that are not strictly educational but have
> educational uses (Browse, Write, Chat, maybe some games, etc.)

Kids like "real" tools anyway. It works in the physical world
as well. Give a kid a few screwdrivers and turn your back...

> I think that producing useful activities that are intended
> solely for kids, with a strong pedagogical element, is still
> a largely unsolved problem.

It's worse than that.

It's not a problem restricted to activities. It hits Windows
and MacOS as well. It's not merely an unsolved problem, but
a very poorly defined problem.

Put aside the platform for the moment, and the implementation
details. (note: "requires a strong AI" is not just a detail!)
Simply try to imagine some purely educational software that
wouldn't be dreadful. Got any ideas?

I suspect the major issue is that we are seeking a computer
program that can be a teacher, but even the worst teacher is
thinking in a way that an AI is unlikely to match. Teaching
is largely a matter of human interaction.

>> We need more input on the educational research to see if either
>> synchronous or asynchronous is better correlated to the theory.
>> Any pointers or comments welcome.

Synchronous, especially peer-to-peer, is better correlated to bugs.
Even if not educationally ideal, the non-buggy solution is better.
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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Education on the XO

[Albert Cahalan]

David Van Assche writes:

> Actually there are a whole bunch of examples I uploaded
> to schools.sugarlabs.org, the problem we have is of how
> to categorise them. ie... do we put them via subject,
> via class, via country, via language?

I can't see anything there. It keeps demanding an account.
I have absolutely no desire for yet another web site account,
especially when Moodle will supposedly shove constructivist
bullshit down my throat.

Why can't I just browse?

> If there are any course content creators out there, I'd love
> to hear their ideas, and if they need help with creating courses
> on the schools.sugarlabs.org site, I believe I can help.

Perhaps we can find some way to work together.

In about 10 months I taught a kid about 10 years of normal honors
math. Along the way I saved all the worksheets that I made for him.
He's now beyond that, being well into my old college calculus textbook.
At the start he was only doing single-digit addition and subtraction.
Nope, it's not constructivist. It actually works.

I was careful to mark the worksheets that were not my own work.
I think that far less than 10% of the worksheets are thus not free
to be used in some other project. The free worksheets could be used
as the majority of practice problems for a set of free math books.

It's currently on graph paper, 10 lines to the inch. I don't have a
scanner for it, though maybe my 3016x2008 camera (should do 200 dpi)
would be workable. (really slow though -- I have hundreds of pages)
Conversion would involve dealing with plenty of line art. I'm not
likely to have much time for any of this, but it sure seems wasteful
to let the problems just gather dust. Perhaps success is more about
the teaching method and continuous effort though, in which case the
worksheets are less useful.

BTW, when faced with teachers that are missing or useless, something
closer to the Robinson Curriculum would be appropriate. Be sure to
note how the subject ordering avoids premature and ineffective study.
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Re: [IAEP] Userful Linux & ThinNetworks to deploy 300, 000+ virtualized desktops in Brazil

[Albert Cahalan]

John Watlington writes:
> On Feb 19, 2009, at 12:34 PM, Tony Anderson wrote:

>> Really sad. Buying one desktop and creating 'five' seats is probably
>> cheaper than 5 or 6 XOs.
>
> Is it really ?   I don't even see a real cost benefit.
>
> $450 - one low end desktop computer
> $350 - (5) $70 monitors
> $ 50 - (5) keyboards/mice
> $250 - (5) seats of virtualization hardware (from the userful web site)
>
> $1100 for five students => $220 per student

Nothing cheaper comes with:

1. a mouse that kids can actually operate
2. a keyboard that doesn't drop letters
3. a usable desktop environment
4. a network that is fast and reliable

>> However, it restricts use to the school day.
>> The ability for the child to take the laptop home is crucial.

I agree, but...

School people are low-risk types who are used to dealing with
lots of damage and loss. They've seen the books come back torn
and soaked or worse.

What do you do when a kid loses his XO? Does he just miss out
on an education, or does the school stick to XO-free lessons?
How many replacements are you going to give him?

>> Think, for example, of the impact of the laptop on the other
>> members of the family.

It's for the kids. Other users would cause wear, unavailability,
and running out of storage.
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Re: [IAEP] First competitor?

[Albert Cahalan]

Christian Marc Schmidt writes:
> On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 8:58 AM, Caroline Meeks  gmail.com>wrote:
>> On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 8:56 AM, Christian Marc Schmidt > gmail.com> wrote:

>>> I think we'd need to know the specific points of contention.
>>> I can't imagine which design decisions might work less well
>>> on PCs. Sugar remains significantly easier to use than
>>> standard PC operating systems...
>>
>> Put Sugar in front of the average adult sitting alone, without
>> any instruction, for 20 minutes.  I doubt many of them would
>> agree with you.
>
> Caroline, I agree this is a challenge.
>
> Of course I would argue that this is due to our familiarity with
> current desktop-based operating systems and the difficulty of
> breaking old habits. Sugar was designed from the ground up, and
> hence does require a bit of a learning curve for those of us who
> use other systems (but for new users should prove much easier to
> learn). So our marketing needs to continuously address that Sugar
> is not designed for adults, but for children!

Never mind the adults. Think of the children!

"should prove much easier" is a hope, not a fact.

Children struggle HORRIBLY with Sugar, especially if they don't
have a real mouse to use. They do like playing with it, sure, at
least until the frustration sets in.

I have never seen a child successfully use the journal. That's not
surprising; it is a black hole for data as far as I can tell.

I have never seen a child successfully use the hover palettes.
They also totally kill user efficiency and are incompatible
with the long-awaited touchscreen.

I have never seen a child successfully use the frame. It's always
there when you don't want it, and usually not there when you do.
Regular computers have an interaction device that is essentially
always there but leaving at least two sides of the screen free of
trouble. (original MacOS menu, OS/2 Presentation Manager thing,
Windows taskbar, fvwm GoodStuff, etc.)

I guess the thing to learn is that getting rid of time-tested GUI
design is unlikely to produce good results.

Uh, now what?
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Re: [IAEP] Adults and Sugar

[Albert Cahalan]

Caryl Bigenho writes:

> One man sat in front of the XO for several minutes with a puzzled
> look on his face.  Finally he asked, "Where is your file manager?"
> I explained that he needed to forget everything he knew about
> computers and just pretend he was a child again.  He got up in
> disgust and left.

He asked a simple question and you blew him off. Adults use
communication to avoid wasting time.

Had you tried to explain, you might have gotten better feedback.
Of course, then you need to avoid being dismissive of the feedback.

> Meanwhile, nearby, a little boy, about 8-years-old was happily
> exploring Sugar.

I'm sure he was, but "exploring" is not the same thing as being
productive.
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[IAEP] 3D engine uses in a no-nonsense GUI (was: XO Gen 1.5)

[Albert Cahalan]

Christoph Derndorfer writes:

> I honestly can't think of a use-case for including any sort
> of 3D acceleration into the basic Sugar and activities. There's
> about a million significantly more important things that people
> should be working on before even thinking about 3D (IMHO).

One can use a 3D accelerator to greatly improve human factors in
the GUI. Smooth transitions in the GUI are vital to reducing the
user's sense of disorientation and confusion. This isn't just an
issue for less-clueful users; you might not realize it but poor
transitions are forcing needless mental effort that eats up a tiny
bit of time here, a tiny bit of time there... and it all adds up.
You may feel it in frustration even if you don't spot the cause.

Without the 3D engine, animations are a painful compromise. They
are slow, jerky, and CPU consuming. Imagine if the frame could
slide into view with fast perfectly smooth motion and almost no
CPU use. Think how much more usable Sugar would be.

Imagine if view switching and activity switching looked like a
rapid zoom out to showing a grid of all views and activities,
then a rapid pan to the right grid spot, and finally a rapid zoom
in to the newly selected view or activity. Better yet, make it
all in one smooth motion so that the user feels as though they
are jumping with a ballistic trajectory. The confusion goes away
and the transition might even be attractive. You can't make this
be acceptably fast or smooth without a 3D engine, even if you
cheat by using static screenshot images for the activities.

Imagine having every activity smoothly scaled to fit the screen.
An activity opens a 320x720 window. It becomes a 400x900 window
on the LCD, but the activity doesn't have to deal with that at all.
Getting stuff to work well on the XO is suddenly much much easier.

Users can spot objects on the screen faster if they have slightly
organic shapes. Rather than having **perfectly** sharp corners on
things, give them tiny anti-aliased curves. Use bump mapping and
other shader features in **subtle** ways to enhance object edges.
Make the edges look like they have been polished or sanded a tad,
instead of being infinitely sharp and thus ill-defined to the eye.

Today, pressing a GUI button normally causes the button face image
to shift a bit. That's the best we could do before 3D engines.
Imagine if the button face could pop from convex to concave, with
perfect realism. The highlights, the density of the shadow, etc.
The button metaphor would be more effectively represented to the user.

BTW, stay away from the pointless stuff. It's now common to use 3D
for random nonsense that hurts usability. Don't do that. Stick to the
stuff that helps the eye follow things: smooth motion, softened shapes,
realistic shading, quality scaling, etc.
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Re: [IAEP] Books Books Books

[Albert Cahalan]

Edward Cherlin writes:
> On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 7:39 PM, Caroline Meeks  
> wrote:

> There are supposed to be a Bible and a Qur'an for the XO. I know where
> the texts are for a dozen other religions, if anybody is interested in
> providing them.

Sugar is not restricted to mature audiences you know. It's for kids.

Both of those books are loaded with sex and violence. I really can't
think of any books that are more violent, and I can only think of
one book that has worse sexual perversion. Both of them even glorify
genocide, war, and torture. Both have in fact been used to justify
and encourage genocide, war, and torture.

> Students will need more than the bare texts. At least a dictionary of
> Elizabethan English, and preferably some of the books that Shakespeare
> himself read, such as Aristotle's Poetics, Plutarch's Lives, and
> Holinshed's Chronicles.

Sugar for adults studying Libral Arts at an Ivy League school?

If you want harder reading material, try consumer contracts. :-(
Those at least have extreme importance to people's lives.
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Re: [IAEP] Books Books Books

[Albert Cahalan]

Costello, Rob R writes:

> So refreshing to have Albert trolling again - waiting
> for us to rise to the bait

If you really believe I'm trolling, why did you give me a win?

Unfortunately for me, I had other reasons to post that email.
I'm annoyed at the double standards here.

If it looks like I'm trolling, then that's just an indication
of how far apart we are in our beliefs. (and possibly style
differences w.r.t. making clear arguments in a limited medium)

> This form someone who proposed a doom version for the XO at one point

I was in fact thinking about DOOM when I sent that email.
The double standards really offend me; I don't actually mind
the depicted violence in either DOOM or the books. (inspired
real violence is another matter entirely)

I'll assume that you believe that DOOM is inappropriate. Any **fair**
assesment would say the books are far worse. For example, suppose I
wrote my own book with similar content. You'd be horrified by my tale
of murder, war, sexism, torture, genocide, sexual mutilation, slavery,
revenge, rape, gambling, prostitution, and so on. If such books are OK
though, then obviously the mere killing of non-humans is fine.

Compare...

Death depicted in DOOM: hundreds of non-humans die
Death depicted in book: most of humanity purposely drowned, etc.

Real death caused by DOOM: probably none
Real death caused by book: millions and millions (ongoing)

Plus, in case it's an education project:

Anti-science message in DOOM: flawed physics model
Anti-science message in book: where do I even begin...

Constructing content for DOOM: encouraged
Constructing content for book: often punished, sometimes with death

I wish I could suggest alternate books, but sadly all the good ones
are still protected by copyright. ("The Ancestor's Tale" for example)

The things that bug me most: double standards, ongoing REAL death,
and the anti-science (anti-education) message.
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Re: [IAEP] The User experience/interface for Printing

[Albert Cahalan]

Vamsi Krishna Davuluri writes:

> So, talking to Tomeu, we agreed that for Write and Read using
> the gtkprint would be best as both support it as a printing API.

The focus on "Write and Read" is short sighted and may lead
to inflexible solutions.

> Now, the current plan is:
> 1) We do journal printing only, albeit, the respective
> activity opens the file.

Eh, OK. Provide a script called /usr/bin/lpr which runs ps2pdf
or directly runs gs. This lets normal software, which is already
designed to output standard Postscript to lpr, work just fine.
After conversion, put the PDF into the journal.

Better yet, just toss the file into the journal without conversion.

BTW, this can also be implemented as a filter script that the
normal lpr program invokes for the default printer.

> Now here a cross road is presented:
>
> 1) Do we use a print dialog inside each activity that can save it as pdf,
> print or export a pdf to moodle
>
> 2) Do we use separate buttons for each of these operations?
>
> What of the user experience?

Separate buttons provides a distinction that will be important
in some environments. Some places will want immediate printing.

For now, the "print" button can be almost the same as the other,
but with the output PDF marked for near-term deletion.

"Make PDF" and "Print now" seem like fine names.

> The initial plan was to make Read the global printing station,
> how do you find this idea?

Starting up Read just to print something is not nice. Read may
even cause an out-of-memory condition. For sure, there is no need
to very slowly render a big document that doesn't even need to be
seen on the screen.

> the teacher checks his print page in moodle, views the file (either
> through fancy javascript or a download) and approves/disapproves
> for printing. Kennedy then logs into his moodle print page and
> checks if the job was success or not, and if he has a comment from
> his teacher.

I can barely imagine that happening in a real classroom. Try this:

The student brings his XO to the teacher's desk, with his work shown
on the screen. The teacher looks at the work, then lets the student
plug his XO into a printer which sits on the teacher's desk.

> Printing resources can be very expensive for most schools, so
> the system should include a way for students to submit jobs to a
> queue and for an administrator to preview and approve or denie them.

Tux Paint can rate limit a student's printing. For example, a setting
of 60 will be once per minute.

Do not forget that this issue is more social than technical. In addition
to any discipline, the teacher can simply turn off the printer. This is
advisable in any case; many printers use excessive power in standby.
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Re: [IAEP] The User experience/interface for Printing

[Albert Cahalan]

On Mon, May 4, 2009 at 1:47 AM, Andrés Ambrois  wrote:
> On Sunday 03 May 2009 06:29:26 pm Albert Cahalan wrote:
>> Vamsi Krishna Davuluri writes:

> The priority is on sending the docs to cups-pdf for conversion and then
> talking to Moodle for teacher review. It is a good idea to have the code
> that sends docs for printing (to Moodle, a local printer, or one discovered
> by avahi) in a reusable module that a /usr/bin/lpr script can use.

Sending the docs to cups-pdf for conversion and then talking to Moodle
for teacher review can be done via /usr/bin/lpr, eliminating the trouble
of having multiple data paths.

> Adding a print dialog to every activity (e.g. Adding some gtkprint support
> in sugar-toolkit) should be optional for GSoC. First we should concentrate
> on getting entries printed, and getting teacher review right. Then we can
> move code around for legacy support and nice "print me" buttons.

If you start with what you disdain as "legacy support", then you
can trivially test "getting entries printed" from the command line.
The same goes for "getting teacher review right".

You could even test with the TuxPaint activity, using real kids.

>> > the teacher checks his print page in moodle, views the file (either
>> > through fancy javascript or a download) and approves/disapproves
>> > for printing. Kennedy then logs into his moodle print page and
>> > checks if the job was success or not, and if he has a comment from
>> > his teacher.
>>
>> I can barely imagine that happening in a real classroom. Try this:
>>
>> The student brings his XO to the teacher's desk, with his work shown
>> on the screen. The teacher looks at the work, then lets the student
>> plug his XO into a printer which sits on the teacher's desk.
>>
>> > Printing resources can be very expensive for most schools, so
>> > the system should include a way for students to submit jobs to a
>> > queue and for an administrator to preview and approve or denie them.
>>
>> Tux Paint can rate limit a student's printing. For example, a setting
>> of 60 will be once per minute.
>>
>> Do not forget that this issue is more social than technical. In addition
>> to any discipline, the teacher can simply turn off the printer. This is
>> advisable in any case; many printers use excessive power in standby.
>
> I dont see a teacher having a printer on her desk. Most schools here in
> Uruguay (and I dare say in Perú) don't even have printers. If there is one,
> it will be where the server/administration is. And possibly locked in a cage
> (like we have the servers now). So that scenario is going to be priority
> one.

That sounds like a printer that students aren't allowed to use.
Such a school might not need printing support at all.

Teachers are unlikely to learn a complicated (probably slow too)
interface for approving printer use. I just don't see it happening
with regular normal everyday human teachers.
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Re: [IAEP] The User experience/interface for Printing

[Albert Cahalan]

On Mon, May 4, 2009 at 12:48 PM, Sascha Silbe
 wrote:
> On Mon, May 04, 2009 at 04:44:33AM -0400, Albert Cahalan wrote:
>
>> Sending the docs to cups-pdf for conversion and then talking to Moodle
>> for teacher review can be done via /usr/bin/lpr,
>
> But that would sidestep the Journal and prevent review of the actual output
> (i.e. what it looks like on paper, not on screen - that can be vastly
> different!) before printing.

It wouldn't have to. That could be how all activities put print
jobs into the Journal.

You are essentially using the Journal as client-side print queue,
and Moodle as server-side print queue. You might as well use
the normal (highly compatible) way to submit to a print queue.

FYI, preview isn't going to be perfect anyway. PDF code can
ask the printer for exact dimensions; this info is unavailable
to the Read activity. It can be used for landscape/portrait rotation,
scaling, or whatever. Some enterprising kid may even concoct
a PDF that looks nice in Read, but offensive on paper. Getting
your teacher to approve printing goatse is priceless.
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Re: [IAEP] educational brew

[Albert Cahalan]

Costello, Rob R writes:

> most teachers that i know want to know that any 'innovation'
> 'addresses the curriculum'
...
> but this won't overturn the inertia in traditional curriculum content

To a teacher, is curriculum the raw state/national standard or is it
instead the content of the particular textbook that the school uses?

In any case, you're up against a compatibility issue. Students will
transfer, sometimes during the school year, and hopefully graduate.
An oddball school does a disservice to the students.

> for example i can see no maths curriculum in the world (i've been
> looking at lots of them in detail recently) that is doing much
> more than including a few references to recursion or iteration...
> (there was more 'programming' in my year 12 course in 1985)

Which other math would you eliminate to make room for this,
and what will happen to the students if they transfer or graduate
without knowing that other math?

BTW, though I like computer science too, this stuff isn't that useful.

> i also fully agree with Kathy that personalisation can mean
> software intelligently adapts the sequence of lessons...
> i've seen that in action as well

I've been thinking about this. It's really valuable, though not
so easy to implement. Let's take 4th grade math as an example:
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Math4Team/Resources/Curriculum_Chart

Suppose you wrote up lessons for all those. You'd get a lot of
overlap with the California standard, the Iowa standard, etc.
The overlap becomes severe if you add the rest of the grades.
Imagine having lessons to cover all standards.

To benefit from a given lesson, one must master any prerequisites.
This should remind you of building software with the "make" program
or perhaps installing software from RPM packages. Leaving aside the
minor issue of review, there is no point to presenting students with
old lessons. Leaving aside the minor issue of "testing out", there
is no point to presenting students with lessons that they have not
prepared for.

You could set up "4th grade math for Massachusetts" as a list of
things to master. It's quite similar to setting up a Makefile with
a target that exists purely to have a list of prerequisites.
This target becomes a goal to reach. Once the goal is chosen, the
software supplies lessons as required to reach it. When more than
one lesson would be appropriate, allowing student choice could help
to keep the student in a good mood for learning.

Sadly, a real-world system would also need to provide distraction
for the students who are at risk for completing the grade before
the end of the year. Traditional schools don't tolerate that well.

> i know traditional curriculum can get suffocating and dry ..

Of course, dealing with "suffocating and dry" stuff is a valuable
life skill. :-/ Sitting down to slog through something boring is
not easy for many people.
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Re: [IAEP] educational brew

[Albert Cahalan]

Kathy Pusztavari writes:

> "You could set up '4th grade math for Massachusetts' as a list of
> things to master. It's quite similar to setting up a Makefile
> with a target that exists purely to have a list of prerequisites."
>
> Albert - that is exactly what I was referring to.  A set of curriculum
> to get you started but a good teacher could then go in and adapt the
> files or make file for their standards (or find a local nerd to help).
> I referred to Turtle Typing.  Being a linux numbskull, I accidentally
> ran the MAKEFILE and found out that it seeds your lessons.  Honestly,
> I had heard of MAKEFILE but I didn't know what it did.

Sorry about that. The explanation wasn't any good for non-programmers.
I suppose I can try to explain "make". Here you go:

Suppose you had a file, commonly called "Makefile", containing this:

###

4th-grade-math: 4th-grade-fractions long-division

long-division: simple-division big-multiplication
teach long-division.lesson
teach long-division-extra-work.lesson
teach long-division-extra-work-2.lesson

simple-division: simple-multiplication
teach simple-division.lesson

4th-grade-fractions: simplify-fractions measure-fractions

measure-fractions: ruler
teach measure-fractions.lesson
teach measure-fractions-extra-work.lesson

ruler:
teach ruler.lesson

simplify-fractions: lcd gcd simple-division what-fraction-is
teach simplify-fractions.lession

[ ... lots of stuff missing ... ]

count-to-3:
teach count-to-3.lesson

###

Each item on the left, before a colon, is something you could create.
(in this case, you're creating an education) Each item to the right,
after a colon, is a prerequisite for the item to its left. The indented
lines are commands that are needed to create things.

To learn 4th-grade-math, you don't actually need to create anything.
You just need to satisfy the prerequisites. So if we ask the "make"
program to create 4th-grade-math, it adds 4th-grade-fractions and
long-division to the list of things you want to learn and starts in
on them. Once those prerequisites are done, 4th-grade-math is done.

The long-division knowledge also has prerequisites, simple-division
and big-multiplication. Prerequisites must be done prior to starting
a lesson, so we add those to the list of things to learn and keep
going. Unlike 4th-grade-math, long-division has lessons to teach.
We have to come back to those after the prerequisites are satisfied.

4th-grade-fractions is more like 4th-grade-math. It doesn't have a
lesson by itself; it is just a list of other things to learn.

Eventually you get to a starting point with no prerequisites. That is
count-to-3 in my example. There may be more than one starting point,
in which case they may be done in any order. Reasonable starting points
always have lessons. Those are taught, completing the starting points.
This satisfies prerequisites for other things, which thus become
available as starting points. Ultimately 4th-grade-math becomes a
starting point, which is trivial because it has no lessons. Since that
was the original request, you're done.

If we were actually going to run that file using "make", we'd need a
command called "teach". Maybe the "teach" command sends a text message
to a human teacher, or maybe it runs a Sugar activity. The "teach"
command just needs to ensure that the material is taught.

There are plenty of details that keep this from working exactly as
written. Students may forget things. I used spaces instead of tabs
to indent the lines. I left out a big chunk. I hope this cleared up
what I meant though.

That "MAKEFILE" you mention might not be a real Makefile. It might
be a script that runs the "make" command with a particular Makefile
specified.
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Re: [IAEP] versus, not

[Albert Cahalan]

Kathy Pusztavari writes:
> Caroline Meeks writes:

>> 3. Improved authoring tools and other automation tools might
>> reduce the level of effort required to create this content.
>
> *Yes, this will be key.  I really liked some of the ideas that
> Albert Cahalan put forth - even if I didn't fully understand them.
> I'd love to hear more of his ideas (hint, hint, prod, prod, wink, wink).

Thanks. :-) I'd like to point out that I was really delighted
to see your email mentioning Project Follow Through. Around here
it often seems I'm the only person willing to accept that the
independently reviewed evidence favors Direct Instruction. It's
like some kind of idealistic reality denial is going on.

Authoring tools are indeed a problem. Last summer I got together
with somebody to convert some paper-based math worksheets I have.
It's not so easy! I took a few photos, he proved that bitmap to
vector conversion could work OK, and... nothing more happened.
Getting things into a nice practical format is not trivial. So you
have some art, but... unless you print it out for use as a normal
paper worksheet with a human grader, it's just not usable.

(these were sheets used to turn an 8-year-old who only did single
digit addition and subtraction into a 9-year-old studying calculus)

Making a nice sheet of math problems with pen and paper is easy.
Getting that to be useful without paper is much harder. Is it
going to take a week or more of custom software development to do
what can be done in 10 minutes with pen and paper? It seems so.

That's not even counting the stuff that is impossible to preserve.
For example, unambiguous writing is very important for math. You
can't expect to handle math in college if you have sS5 confusion,
1|I confusion, zZ2 confusion, etc. -- and that includes Greek letters.
Students still need to master traditional graphing and sketching.
Long division normally requires an ability to keep numbers aligned.
Kids who don't practice these things are not getting prepared.
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Re: [IAEP] versus, not

[Albert Cahalan]

Maria Droujkova writes:

> I think it may be useful to distinguish tracks, and destinations to
> which they lead. The real deal destinations are to make mathematics:
> coin definitions and refine them, pose problems, form conjectures,
> construct example spaces, create models and so on. Activities with
> real deal destinations invite students to make mathematics; this is
> the part where I get pretty "religious" and I suspect Tim does, as well.

I don't think this is a proper expectation.

Gym class isn't expected to create pro or Olympic athletes.
Music class isn't expected to create pop stars. Native language
class isn't expected to create a J. K. Rowling, Shakespeare,
or Tom Clancy.

Math isn't any different.

A student who is **solidly** prepared for calculus is doing well.
This would include word problems with a minimum of 4 steps,
some algebra, geometry, trigonometry, etc.

Here in the USA, most students get nowhere near that level.

For the very best students we may hope for completing calculus early
enough to use it for physics, followed by statistics with calculus.
Maybe one could throw in a tiny bit about game theory or aliasing.

A desire to have students "make mathematics" can't be allowed to
get in the way of ensuring that non-ideal students learn the existing
math that they need. Math isn't just for people like Euler.
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Re: [IAEP] F.Y.I.: this month's cover story for CACM is "OLPC: Vision vs. Reality" (cross posted)

[Albert Cahalan]

Expensive journals are obsolete.
http://pcic.merage.uci.edu/papers/2008/OneLaptop.pdf
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Re: [IAEP] Journal criticism

[Albert Cahalan]

Tomeu Vizoso writes:
> On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 20:20, Lucian Branescu
>  wrote:

>> I'm new to Sugar, so I may be horribly wrong.
>>
>> But to me, the Journal seems more of an annoyance than anything else.
>> A lot of the work I see done is towards bringing back some of the
>> properties that regular filesystems have
>>
>> What advantage does it have as opposed to a regular filesystem with
>> support for versioning and metadata? A filesystem would be more
>> compatible with existing software (which could just ignore the
>> metadata), at least.
>
> I can very easily understand that for someone who is used to a regular
> filesystem, the journal may seem as an annoyance when an attempt to
> use it in the same way is done. The same can be said of any other
> diversion in Sugar from how Windows/OSX behave.
>
> Though, interestingly, many people have successfully switched from
> files-in-folders-in-folders email clients to GMail. Maybe it is
> because the journal is not as mature as gmail?

There are big differences in the problem space.

GMail is dealing with text. Text search is somewhat reliable.
Sugar is dealing with all sorts of random data, like video.

GMail can briefly throw **lots** of beefy hardware at the
problem, allowing searches to be fast. Sugar can operate a
single wimpy processor.

Also, lack of folders in GMail is a common complaint. People
put up with it because they like other things about GMail.
I switched partly because Evolution was eating my inbox.

> If I think that something like the journal is worth having, it is:
>
> - because I can easily observe how non-technical users are unable to
> find the files that they stored in folders some time ago, or forget to
> save an important document, or modify a file that Firefox saved to
> /tmp and it got deleted after a reboot, etc,

Now we have equality. The technical users are now also unable to
find their files. :-(

> I think it's very important if we want to keep pushing Sugar that we
> distinguish between design decisions and bugs and unimplemented
> features. If we bring down good design ideas not by themselves but
> because of its implementation status, we risk ending up with nothing
> that brings new value compared to existing desktops.

You say that like it would be a bad thing. The existing desktops
are at least time-tested. Learning to deal with the common features
of modern desktop systems is very valuable for children.

> And btw, the Sugar people aren't alone in this, as GNOME will ship
> with a very similar journal concept in their 3.0 version. You can
> find info in the net and read their own justifications for it.
>
> Would be awesome if the Sugar Journal and the GNOME one could share
> its backend. Could someone check out the current state of the GNOME
> one and compare with our needs?

It looks like a heavy-duty version of "Recent Documents". It's far from
being a Journal clone as far as I can tell, but it certainly deals with
the concerns that led to the creation of the Journal.

Converting the Journal database is possible I think, allowing for an
excellent migration path.
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Re: [IAEP] Journal criticism

[Albert Cahalan]

Tomeu Vizoso writes:
> On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 04:54,   wrote:

>> I am happy to expand this to the list. I have raised the journal once
>> or twice before but mainly kept quiet not wanting to be trollish.
...
>> The journal and sharing are probably the two central things that
>> distinguish sugar as as a purpose built learning platform. The team have
>> a huge investment of time and energy and are rightly proud of their
>> achievement. That presents a problem for constructive discussion around
>> the journal, the last thing I want to do is be trollish and destructive.

You probably would look trollish and upset a few people, but this
can be good for sugar and/or education. If few people ever dare to
point out problems, we have useless groupthink.

I certainly point out problems, but you can't rely on me alone.
It's easy to dismiss one person as a grumpy old troll, but not
so easy to dismiss a variety of unrelated people pointing out
that something isn't right. The more fundamental/core/central
the issue, the more this applies.

>> For me, the workings behind the journal are hidden and there is a lack of
>> tools to make it do different things when the default operation is not
>> what you want. Also temporal and tagging is fine as a primary method of
>> storage but hierarchical storage is not offered as an alternate method.

Instead of trying to add hierarchical storage to the journal,
consider inverting the issue. Modern desktop systems often have
special ways to view particular directories. For example, Windows
does something special with the directory you use for MP3 files.
It also does something special for the font directory.

Suppose that one directory got a special view called "journal view".
This could be a "My Documents" or "Desktop" directory. Activities
throw stuff in there using the journal API. AFAIK, GNOME's Nautilus
just needs a plug-in to enable a journal view to work there.

 The hiding of the file system was well intended, files and directories
 are probably just a passing phase in computing and they cause some
 confusion to beginners, but they are the system which underlies the
 Journal and the way we interface with the www
>
> I agree that it would be helpful to have hierarchical views of the
> file system in Sugar, though I don't think they should be the default

Given that they are everywhere, it's an educational issue.
This isn't like the particulars of Microsoft Office 2007.
This is something pervasive throughout the world of computing.

> one because IMO a flat view like gmail with good filtering and search
> capabilities is more efficient for users that don't want to spend
> their energy in keeping their data in directories. I understand this
> opinion is very debatable, but it comes from my observation of how
> people around me use their computers and also from the feedback about
> Sugar from the field.

The most interesting feedback from the field was about the kids
teaching each other to wipe the journal with "rm".
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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] journal criticism

[Albert Cahalan]

James Zaki writes:

> Understanding hierarchical file structures use the concepts of containers
> and recursion with no limits (except for total capacity). It is not
> naturally intuitive, like a tree where branches get smaller from the trunk
> with fruit/leaves only at the end nodes.
>
> Empirically I've seen many new people approach computers (non-tech
> elder-relatives included), and hierarchical structures are not initially
> utilised. It was a secondary focus that had to be learnt out of necessity.

Perhaps the concept is easier to learn as a child. If you've gone
many decades without it ("non-tech elder relatives") and gotten set
in your ways, you may be at a disadvantage.

Let's not leave the next generation at a disadvantage too.

> Perhaps an activity/game could be made that teaches the concepts
> of a hierarchical file structure.

That won't get enough use. Learning to deal with the general features
of modern computing is much of the reason why the XO even exists, yet
the children are denied the opportunity to learn about directories.
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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Journal criticism

[Albert Cahalan]

2009/5/28 NoiseEHC :
>
> I think it's very important if we want to keep pushing Sugar that we
> distinguish between design decisions and bugs and unimplemented
> features. If we bring down good design ideas not by themselves but
> because of its implementation status, we risk ending up with nothing
> that brings new value compared to existing desktops.
>
>
> You say that like it would be a bad thing. The existing desktops
> are at least time-tested. Learning to deal with the common features
> of modern desktop systems is very valuable for children.
>
>
> This relies on the assumption that 8 years from now when children grow up we
> will still use directories. I do not dare to predict the future so I will
> leave it to you... :)

In graphical environments alone, directories are over 25 years old.
Since 8 is less than a third of that, there is only one safe bet.

It'd be way more than 25 years, except that we didn't even have
graphical environments much beyond that. Directories go back
about 40 years. 8 years is just another 20%.

This isn't the "Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2" feature set.
This is a concept that is pretty fundamental in computing.
It crosses platforms, it's in our network protocols, and it's even
required for all the programming languages that implement Sugar.

> The following things unfortunately cannot be done with a flat filesystem
> view:
> 1. Revision based view.
> 2. Tagging.

First, I think you didn't mean "flat". That's the Journal.
Second, both flat and tree systems can handle that.

> It is a totally different problem that the current Journal barely implements
> those things but dropping it in favor of "time-tested" solutions is a
> mistake IMHO. (Note that no filesystem solves those problems I have
> mentioned.)

No filesystem should! It looks like GNOME 3.0 will get you those
features on top of a plain old UNIX-style filesystem tree though,
without making the filesystem incompatible with both software
and humans.
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Re: [IAEP] Journal criticism

[Albert Cahalan]

On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 5:49 AM, Jonas Smedegaard  wrote:
> On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 04:58:17AM -0400, Albert Cahalan wrote:
>>Tomeu Vizoso writes:

>>> I think it's very important if we want to keep pushing Sugar that we
>>> distinguish between design decisions and bugs and unimplemented
>>> features. If we bring down good design ideas not by themselves but
>>> because of its implementation status, we risk ending up with nothing
>>> that brings new value compared to existing desktops.
>>
>>You say that like it would be a bad thing. The existing desktops
>>are at least time-tested. Learning to deal with the common features
>>of modern desktop systems is very valuable for children.
>
> I flat out disagree that Sugar should be a learning experience towards
> using alternative user interfaces.
>
> In that mindset we should mimic Word, Excel and the Windows desktop, not
> for the quality of their interface designs, but simply because they are
> expremely popular so getting acquainted to them is "very valuable for
> children".

To the extent that there are common features that are highly
unlikely to change across versions or even OSes, definitely.

MacOS System 6, MacOS X, OS/2 Warp, and Windows Vista
have certain basic features in common. It's a safe bet to say that
most of these features will remain in the computers of 2017.
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Re: [IAEP] [Grassroots-l] OLPC in Kindergarten

[Albert Cahalan]

Tony Forster writes:

> Nobody knows the age limit on teaching graphical programming.
>
> Experience with Scratch and GameMaker is that it works at the whole of a
> class down to grade 3 though I have had smart individuals down to grade 1.
> But I note that the cognitive load is higher for these programming tools,
> they allow multiple objects and are event driven. The beauty of Turtle Art
> is its simplicity, only 1 object, the turtle and no need to get your head
> around events and their associated actions.
>
> So I agree, lets get something out there, get it road tested and refined
> and see how low it will go.

In terms of grade level, plain old BASIC on the Apple ][ went at
least that low. It doesn't seem that "graphical" gets you anything
other than layout trouble and a dead-end tiny-community language.

> Where the graphic is not reasonably intuitive, maybe better to retain the
> text? At least an adult could read them. Walter is going to do tool tips,
> that would make my point irrelevant, graphics on blocks with text
> tooltips.
>
>> They don't need localization. This is important for children whose
>> language of instruction is not their native language. English in
>> Ghana, for example, or French until recently in Rwanda.
>
> Yes, reminds me of Vanuatu, their local language is spoken the village,
> Bislama is the national language but the language of instruction may be
> English or French. I doubt we would ever see localisation down to the
> local language level, maybe 1000 speakers.
>
> Final thought. We are not eliminating language, just substituting one
> symbol set for another, hopefully more recognisable ones. Language in the
> wider sense is symbols with meanings which can be used for communication
> and as tools to think with. Mathematics is a language too. Though some
> blocks could have photorealistic symbols, we are mostly using abstract
> symbols like the arrow. (the arrow is based on the bow and arrow but we
> have all but forgotten the roots of its symbolism).

It is eliminating language by any usual definition.

It's not right to provide equality by making everybody do without.
You're right that translating for a language of 1000 speakers isn't
all that likely, but **hurting** everybody else to acheive equality
is a cure worse than the disease. (steal from the rich and... burn it)

If you want to help these people to have a future without poverty,
give them text in a language that can provide economic benefit.
This would tend to be a national language.
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Re: [IAEP] The Children's Library On OLPC project

[Albert Cahalan]

Jim Simmons writes:

> A Journal entry consists of a file plus metadata.  There is no real
> advantage in NOT storing the book in the Journal.  You can convert
> whatever book format you're reading into a zipped archive of same on
> reading it for the first time then mark the Journal entry with Read's
> activity id.  This would give the Journal entry Read's icon and make
> it resumable by Read.  I do something like this with Read Etexts when
> it reads a plain text file.  I'm not trying to save disk space in this
> case; I need to add a pickle file to the archive to store annotations,
> so I create a new Zip file and store the text and the pickle in it.

This encapsulation makes it more difficult for people to share
books with non-Sugar users. If a Sugar user provides a PDF to a
Windows user, Adobe Acrobat should recognize it. Likewise for
sharing with MacOS X and GNOME users.

Putting a bit of non-critical metadata on a file is not a reason
to be changing the file format. Normally an xattr would be used to
store this data. (hopefully the Journal is xattr compatible)

> The XO does not have enough disk space to hold hundreds of books as
> PDFs.  Plain text files would work, but kids like pictures and I don't
> blame them.  As I see it, the child should choose what books go on his
> computer for himself, and delete books when he has lost interest in
> them.

This all depends greatly on the PDF generation tool.
Most are not focused on producing small files.

Text should be stored as text. It should not have fancy kerning,
because this causes bloat from constantly specifying coordinates.
It should use a standard PDF font. The font should not be embedded.

The PDF should be compressed. (not just the images)

Images should be stored as JPEG with an appropriate compression
level. Computer-generated line art should be in vector format.

A recent PDF standard revision should be used.
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Re: [IAEP] New activity: Arithmetic.

[Albert Cahalan]

First of all, it's wonderful to finally see this activity.

Plenty of words in the UI are not easy, starting with "difficulty". :-)

There doesn't seem to be any scratch space to work in, but I'm just
looking at the screen shot. Can the user lay out a long division in
the standard form? Can the user have some place to write out extra
numbers for borrow/carry (optionally tiny) and possibly cross out the
original numbers? There are at least two styles for this, with tiny
numbers probably the norm when doing multi-digit multiplication.

The 3 difficulty levels are kind of vague. Just for addition I can
think of...

0..9 plus 0..9 resulting in 0..9
0..9 plus 0..9 resulting in 0..18
0..9 plus 0..9 plus optional-one resulting in 0..19
multi-digit w/o carry
multi-digit w/ carry, no change in number of digits
arbitrary multi-digit

That's w/o even considering decimals, negative numbers, fractions,
and worse. Subtraction has an extra level, because borrowing is
harder when you need to borrow from a zero.
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Re: [IAEP] getsatisfaction.com

[Albert Cahalan]

Re: [IAEP] getsatisfaction.com
dfarn...@sugarlabs.org

David Farning writes:

> I just wanted to thank everyone who is helping out at
> http://getsatisfaction.com/sugarlabs .

Some URL there! All I can think of is this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjgeXTF0WNQ

BTW, this works nicely, even on non-x86 debian:

youtube-dl http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjgeXTF0WNQ
mplayer -quiet TjgeXTF0WNQ.flv

(scale it up if you wish and have the CPU power)
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Re: [IAEP] OOO4kids running

[Albert Cahalan]

s.boutayeb at free.fr writes:

> OpenOffice for Kids (OOO4Kids) is available
...
> http://olpc-france.org/wiki/index.php?title=Image:Ooo4kids2.png

On the subject of adapting software for kids...

Good: eliminating or enlarging fiddly things that are hard to control
with the mouse (ESPECIALLY WHEN KIDS MAY HAVE ONLY A TOUCHPAD)

Bad: taking away the grown-up-tool feel (grey 3-D look), making kids
suspect that they have something as worthless as a hollow toy hammer

Good: being really careful to prefer beginner words and simple
sentence structure in the UI
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Re: [IAEP] Which Language?

[Albert Cahalan]

Benjamin M. Schwartz writes:

> There are other options, such as HTML+Javascript, Squeak,
> and C/C++, but they each suffer from some combination of
> reduced functionality, problematic cross-platform guarantees,
> and increased difficulty of programming.

Let's not ignore Python, which suffers plenty:

1. Python has no language standard. The best you can claim is that
   the language is defined by /usr/bin/python on some random system.
   There is a history of breaking compatibility with new releases.
   There exist several Python interpreters actually, which don't
   run the same code. Python version 3 will probably break your code.

2. Python is a joke regarding performance. You know how Java is often
   several times slower than C? Java beats Python by 20x or 30x.

3. Python being easy is **your** opinion. (and you're wrong)

4. Python has reduced functionality because it lacks inline assembly.
   That particular language feature is the door to everything.

IMHO there is a limit to the value of "universally usable", but if
you want to push that goal you can. The most stable interfaces are
the CPU instructions, the Linux system call interface, and the X11
protocol. Bring along any interpreter you need, and statically link
all the binary executables. If you need Python 2, include a copy.
Be sure it doesn't need any /lib/*.so files to run; you can check
this by running ldd on the binary.

FWIW, plain C is an excellent choice. It's the easiest language.
Unless you tolerate FORTRAN or assembly, it's also the fastest.
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Re: [IAEP] Paint and Transparent Backgrounds

[Albert Cahalan]

Tim McNamara writes:
> 2009/10/5 Caroline Meeks 

>> Could we set Paint to have a transparent background on images
>> as a default rather then white? That would make it easier to
>> layer different drawings and have them interact. Is that
>> difficult programatically?  Can people think of places where
>> having a transparent background will be a problem?

It's trivial programatically, but a problem for a kid's GUI.
This adds all sorts of complexity. If you want that, use GIMP.

Other things to NOT ask for: layers, channels, physical resolution,
non-square pixels, zoom, painting bounded by selection, scrolling,
user-defined canvas sizes, and maybe even cut-and-paste!

On the other hand, you should expect stereo sound. :-)

> What format does Tux Paint save in? If it can save in PNG, then
> setting the alpha layer to #00 (or is it #ff - must check!)
> should be fairly straight forward. If we wanted this functionality
> by default, it may need cooperation from the upstream developers.

For drawings, Tux Paint normally uses PNG without an alpha layer.
The stamps (clip art) are normally PNG with alpha, meaning that
you currently need something like the GIMP to create a stamp.

There has been talk of changing things for the specific case of
stamp creation. Tux Paint remembers the initial background image.
This could allow the background image to be subtracted out, even
with the anti-aliasing that Tux Paint uses for everything. The
result would then be made available as a stamp.

There are problems, some of which could perhaps be mostly solved
by having more than one stamp creation button. Consider the case
of a simple unfilled circle. Do you want the middle opaque?
Now suppose the user draws a gray object on a white background.
Is that to be opaque gray, or partially transparant black?
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Re: [IAEP] Fwd: #1690 UNSP: Retain font and size in Write Activity

[Albert Cahalan]

Sascha Silbe writes:
> On Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 10:57:55AM +0100, Tomeu Vizoso wrote:

>> Should we default to non-serif?
> ISTR others arguing that one of Serif/Non-Serif is better suited for
> paper and the other for screens

Remember that "screens" would normally mean very few pixels with which
to render the serifs. The serifs are forced to be much larger than the
font designer wants, misshapen, and not quite correctly positioned.

If you're using a large font on a 200 DPI screen, everything changes.
You're getting perhaps 3x the pixels in each direction, more like paper.

It's also important to remember that this isn't a choice that can be
made without affecting other aspects of the font. If "non-serif" is
mapped to DejaVu Sans, then readability will be poor because that
font has very non-standard character shapes.

> A well chosen default font (with the ability to override it via gconf)
> with decent coverage (resp. a set of fonts for different alphabets)
> would probably have a larger impact.

This reminds me of a usability problem. You think you are using font X,
and you hate it. You change to font Y, and it looks the same. This is
because in both cases you're really using font Z. Really, getting a
bunch of substitution glyphs (little rectangles) was more usable!

One can easily get a choice that looks like 20 fonts but is really 1.
Font selection would ideally be per-script, but obviously this info
can't be preserved in many document formats.
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