Re: [IAEP] GPA Class Notes August 5
Hi David, That would be a big help. I am way behind reading the list and working on bugs. I appreciate any help you can give filing bugs based on the reports. GPA in the keyword field will let me query them later. I plan to do a full clean up of all GPA found issues some time in the last two weeks of August. In terms of the next Sugar release, can anyone help me identify features or bug fixes which address issues raised at GPA? e.g. are there any use cases or work flows which will be improved by the new Toolbar? Thanks, Greg S On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 4:56 PM, David Farningdfarn...@sugarlabs.org wrote: Greg, How have you been doing turning these reports in bug reports for the development side of the project? If you would like, I can start working through your reports turning them into bug reports with a keyword such as GPA. david On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 1:12 PM, Greg Smithgregsmit...@gmail.com wrote: Hi All, Here are my notes from the last class at Gardner public school on August 5. Caroline, Bill, Anurag and I had a class with 9 x 3rd graders. Caroline led the class. Caroline introduced the class and saying we could not finish making the games but we would try to make the computer talk and the kids would take the USB sticks home today. She asked who has computers at home and everyone raised their hand. Then she asked what was the coolest thing they had done and what was the most challenging. Three kids answered: 1 - coolest: making your own memorize game most challenging: playing Conozco Uruguay in Spanish as some kids didn't know Spanish 2 - Coolest: painting your own pictures. Most challenging: getting pictures from the internet 3 - coolest and most challenging were the same: playing maze game. Caroline then showed the kdis how to put a CD in and the USB stick then reboot to bring up sugar. Kids went to the computers and that went well. 4/5 kids got the USB in OK. 1/5 had trouble connecting it and asked for help. Back on the carpet Caroline explained the Home list view and how you can flag activities there to show in the Home circle view. Then she asked the kids to try that and to try playing some of the games. She showed the physics game and the kids oohed at that. Many kids had trouble finding the list view, understanding how to click the star to pick activities and most difficult was to get back to circle home view. See UI comments at the end for more, in short they usually missed the need to click on the dot within circle icon in the upper right from the Home|List view. Several kids really wanted to play Maze but the scale was wrong and they couldn't. Same problem for Physics. In both cases, a part of the app was off screen. We definitely need a screen resolution option. They tried Speak. In most cases they didn't hear it (possibly more debugging data later from the team). It worked for one or two kids and for one it was crashing the OS and needing reboot after working a while. We showed them Mama media stick builder, cartoon builder, solitaire bounce a bunch of other games. They seemed to like them but often ran out of patience or wanted to be shown what to do. Some kids decided to try to chat. They needed instructions on how to connect with each other (more below) but liked that once it was up. Back on the carpet, Caroline explained how to go to Sugar activities page and download new activities with the Implode game as an example. Kids really wanted to play Scary Maze (http://www.google.com/#hl=enq=scary+maze+game+3aq=0oq=scary+maze+game+aqi=g10fp=flbC24gbdiA) but we said that wasn't available. I tried it via Flash later and it worked fine but I wasn't sure its really kid appropriate. I realized that they probably like it because of the adrenalin rush at being scared when you make a small mistake. I think Nintendo 64, Game Boy and other popular younger kid games also benefit from provoking the adrenalin response. I think Sugar could use more adrenalin provoking games Many kids needed help launching Browse and finding the sugar home page. BTW often they ask for help because someone is there to help. If no one was there they would probably soldier on themselves. On activities page they tried to find Pacman to no avail. We also found Gcompris maze games which they liked. Implode,Gcompris chess, and bounce were also popular. Caroline then exhorted them to wait until the computer shuts down before taking out USB. Then they each took a boot helper CD and USB stick and the class was over. We debriefed mostly on UI suggestions and areas which were hard for the kids. Not order comments: - Drop down menus don't show fast enough. In general kids need some kind of feedback on each click on when waiting (e.g. hour glass cursor). This was most apparent when trying to shut down activities because too many are running. I watched a kid do this by opening the frame, clicking on the activity, waiting for the
[IAEP] GPA Class Notes August 5
Hi All, Here are my notes from the last class at Gardner public school on August 5. Caroline, Bill, Anurag and I had a class with 9 x 3rd graders. Caroline led the class. Caroline introduced the class and saying we could not finish making the games but we would try to make the computer talk and the kids would take the USB sticks home today. She asked who has computers at home and everyone raised their hand. Then she asked what was the coolest thing they had done and what was the most challenging. Three kids answered: 1 - coolest: making your own memorize game most challenging: playing Conozco Uruguay in Spanish as some kids didn't know Spanish 2 - Coolest: painting your own pictures. Most challenging: getting pictures from the internet 3 - coolest and most challenging were the same: playing maze game. Caroline then showed the kdis how to put a CD in and the USB stick then reboot to bring up sugar. Kids went to the computers and that went well. 4/5 kids got the USB in OK. 1/5 had trouble connecting it and asked for help. Back on the carpet Caroline explained the Home list view and how you can flag activities there to show in the Home circle view. Then she asked the kids to try that and to try playing some of the games. She showed the physics game and the kids oohed at that. Many kids had trouble finding the list view, understanding how to click the star to pick activities and most difficult was to get back to circle home view. See UI comments at the end for more, in short they usually missed the need to click on the dot within circle icon in the upper right from the Home|List view. Several kids really wanted to play Maze but the scale was wrong and they couldn't. Same problem for Physics. In both cases, a part of the app was off screen. We definitely need a screen resolution option. They tried Speak. In most cases they didn't hear it (possibly more debugging data later from the team). It worked for one or two kids and for one it was crashing the OS and needing reboot after working a while. We showed them Mama media stick builder, cartoon builder, solitaire bounce a bunch of other games. They seemed to like them but often ran out of patience or wanted to be shown what to do. Some kids decided to try to chat. They needed instructions on how to connect with each other (more below) but liked that once it was up. Back on the carpet, Caroline explained how to go to Sugar activities page and download new activities with the Implode game as an example. Kids really wanted to play Scary Maze (http://www.google.com/#hl=enq=scary+maze+game+3aq=0oq=scary+maze+game+aqi=g10fp=flbC24gbdiA) but we said that wasn't available. I tried it via Flash later and it worked fine but I wasn't sure its really kid appropriate. I realized that they probably like it because of the adrenalin rush at being scared when you make a small mistake. I think Nintendo 64, Game Boy and other popular younger kid games also benefit from provoking the adrenalin response. I think Sugar could use more adrenalin provoking games Many kids needed help launching Browse and finding the sugar home page. BTW often they ask for help because someone is there to help. If no one was there they would probably soldier on themselves. On activities page they tried to find Pacman to no avail. We also found Gcompris maze games which they liked. Implode,Gcompris chess, and bounce were also popular. Caroline then exhorted them to wait until the computer shuts down before taking out USB. Then they each took a boot helper CD and USB stick and the class was over. We debriefed mostly on UI suggestions and areas which were hard for the kids. Not order comments: - Drop down menus don't show fast enough. In general kids need some kind of feedback on each click on when waiting (e.g. hour glass cursor). This was most apparent when trying to shut down activities because too many are running. I watched a kid do this by opening the frame, clicking on the activity, waiting for the drop down, choosing stop from that, then clicking the check mark in the Name This Journal entry popup. He had about 6 activities open and it took him about 10 minutes to close them, mostly because he kept looking at what the next kid over was doing while he waited for the menu to show. Also, the check box to close Journal naming dialog was not obvious and in general not needed. Possible improvement would be to make that an X and to not even show it when someone closes from the frame or home view and the activity has not changed since the last save/keep. - When downloading new activities the count down was not always enough feedback that the computer is working. Also, if you don't click OK and just download another file next, the original OK dialog/bar stays there waiting until its gets its OK click. - Bill mentioned that the names of things often includes the file name or other data when it would be better to see a more human useful name. One example is when they opened Turtle Art
[IAEP] GPA Class Notes July 29 - GS
Hi All, Here are some notes from my 1.5 hours in the computer lab at GPA with 10 3rd graders. They are also posted here: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Gardner_Pilot_Academy#Class_notes Comments before class: - We usually boot up each computer with USB stick but Caroline mentioned that its better to let the kids insert and boot. That way they can choose who sits together. - We saw one kid putting a USB cap in his mouth which is a choking danger. - We reviewed the TA lesson plan from Walter and decided to have someone prepare the computers while Walter presented. Walter showed his TurtleArt game designs which should allow the kids to create the games they defined in the previous class. He put up a turtle and asked the kids to say where various places were by saying North, South , East or West. They enjoyed that. One kids noticed that Walter had two USB icons at the bottom of his frame and asked about that. One of the kids pointed to the Maze icon and asked is that a maze game? They wanted to play games and saw that Walter computer had more than they had. After the overview, Caroline had each computer running Turtle Art without the new Game examples loaded. We went to the computers and the kids played with Turtle Art for a while. I was very impressed by how quickly they took to playing with it and moving the turtle around. They also found the prebuilt turtle examples and liked looking at what those created. However, without specific instructions, many started to tire and asked to play games. I worked with some kids to find pictures they had saved before and to download new ones in preparation to make their games. Two follow up items on that: - I think the Star will work to flag a set of content for quick access later. The kids didn't try it but I did and it looks OK. - Download images appear with the approximately following name in the Journal: FILE: 86 px http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6c/Map_of_USA_MA.svg [more stuff]. I think the challenge to find things is that there is too much data there to easily find and compare. Maybe we should start with the file name (no path). Then the rest of the data? Not a deal breaker but it seemed to cost some time. Meanwhile Walter and Caroline worked on delivering the new TA programs. We also did that after class. It was not pretty, but I'll leave the details to a follow up e-mail by Walter. Next class Walter and Caroline will not be there. So Anurag will run the class and I will be backup. We thought we had two more classes but turns out that next week is the last. So we will put the game building on hold and come back to it in the fall. Next class we will just download games (e.g. maze) and play. Thanks, Greg S ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] GPA Notes from visit on Wed July 8
Hi Mel, Thanks for the kind words and insightful comments. I thought about how to ask these questions in the class today, but I wasn't successful. On the first one, they don't actually give out assignments and review kids work. They just play and do what we describe in the reports. The question of how to enable the work flow you describe is about to come up in a big way in preparation for September so we will have a chance to revisit that soon. On idle thought #1: Give me a few icons to use as examples. Then I'll try to find time to just point to it and ask the kids: what do you think that does. The truth is that I'm not sure how they figured out that the computer can talk! I'm guessing its from the Speak icon but that's really an assumption. On idle thought #2: Caroline posted some of the Turtle art work. I can't find it right now but maybe someone can scrape it off the list and post links on the GPA wiki page. Thanks, Greg S ** Whoa. I am humbled. Greg, your notes give me a new standard to reach for. Send me your questions. What do you want to know about the SW and how its used by kids? I'm intrigued by the process of how the kids learn how to save and retrieve files, and what they think of that interaction flow. (This may be biased by prior Windows experience, though.) I loved your documentation of the workflows. I wonder if it might be worth doing some paper prototyping with the kids at the end of the summer, walking through some of the workflows you're noticing now, to see if they come up with interesting design tweaks. This is our chance to test assumptions and get direct feedback with minimal cultural dissonance. I'll make observations and/or ask questions of the kids, if you can identify a UI element or task that you want input on. My main question: How rapidly can a teacher with no Sugar experience review the work of a student (by looking at his/her Journal)? What tools do they use to record this feedback, if any (and how could we make it easier for them, maybe with Moodle on the XS)? I'm curious about the reactions of the classroom teachers, too. Two idle thoughts of much less importance: You noted that some kids saw the Speak icon and immediately said they could make the computer talk (without even running the program) - I wonder whether other icons pass the same test. What can they guess about the meaning/functionality of each icon? (I'm betting, for instance, that nobody will figure out the IRC Activity...) Second idle thought: I'm not sure if this is already part of the game plan with an XS coming in, but I would love to be able to see example of the work the kids are doing (can they post them on Moodle in such a way that we can see and comment on them? Perhaps with names removed? would this cause privacy issues?) - even some of the early TurtleArt experiments on Tuesday produced nifty spirograph-looking things, and it sounds like Paint and Memorize stuff was just as impressive (and probably easier to comment on, in the case of Paint). --Mel ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] GPA Notes from visit on Wed July 8
Hi All, Thanks to Caroline for inviting me to sit in on a class using Sugar for the first time at Gardner Public School. Here are my notes and observations. At the risk of wordiness, I'm writing this stream of conscious straight from the school. I got to the GPA school at 10AM, chatted with Walter, Anurag and Caroline and set up the computers. We talked about options for school server and observed some computers connecting via jabber server and others not and that state changing from time to time. The computer lab has about 20 Compaq EVO D500 SFF 845 BVA11: http://h2.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Home.jsp?lang=encc=usprodTypeId=12454prodSeriesId=96297lang=cc=us They had 19 - 20 monitors. I'll remember to get the RAM and CPU details next time. Sugar was much faster than XO. Quick to open activities, fast task switching, no noticable churn when frame popped up, it was sweet. The only exception was using Paint as noted below. I don't know if it was the HW or improvements were made in latest Sugar but I can say that its a much more fluid experience than I remember on XO 1 w/8.2 Sugar was completely stable. No crashes and even with kids clicking away, it only slowed occasionally and briefly. Nice job! There was a 100Mb Cat5 lan. We had no access to any HW outside the room so not sure what the network uses. * Is there any useful diagnostic we could run on the clients to discover the relevant network issues, especially with respect to accessing the public Jabber server? I think we could arrange a trace route, some arp commands and possibly even a wireshark type capture if that would help. A sign on the wall said that a primary goal of the school is for kids to learn literacy. We set up 14 machines (12 for kids and 2 for teachers) by doing the following: - Attached USB extender and USB with Sugar (assume its Strawberry but don't have exact version) - turn on and open CD - insert sugar helper CD - cold boot while its starting Windows The computer then comes back with Sugar and the Enter a name screen. Very clean and nice install. Only issue was that cold booting during windows start seemed a little harsh. 12 x 3rd graders came in (~8-9 years old) and they sat on the floor. The teacher told me that they have used the computer lab before. They usually use Windows XP and go to http://www.studyisland.com/ to play games that prepare them for the MCAS (MCAS = high stakes, intellectual conformity tests required for all kids in Mass.). The teacher and a kid told me they like the studyisland games (btw George Lucas advertising edutopia.org on public radio in Boston lately). At the end I saw a kid playing studyisland. The color and sound was more vibrant than XO. A little jarring to me (may be due to my conditioning for cubicle life) but I can see where the kids would find it exciting. No kids seemed to notice or care that the Sugar UI was different than Windows. It was all just stuff you click on. And they clicked on lots of things, fast and often. Walter introduced himself and asked who they are. They responded room 33. Walter explained that he will be back once a week to work on games and they said they like to play games. He also said we would be creating games and sharing them with the world. One kid commented that he would make his own web site. Walter talked about Sugar on a Stick and showed the USB stick. Kids commented that they know what that is and its for: get to save stuff inside. Walter mentioned you can save not just stuff but programs too. They asked if they could take it home. One kid asked if they would learn how to fix computers and stuff like that. Walter said you can use the computer to solve any problem. Walter asked if they was anyone who had the same first name and the kids knew immediately that all first names were unique. Walter then invited them to sit at the computers and enter their names and pick a color. Some kids did it quickly and started to click on the available programs. One kid was clicking repeatedly on the XO icon and changing the colors. They saw one they liked but had already clicked to the next and they asked if they could go back. Reply was that you its not easy to do that. Walter invited kids back to the carpet and said we would be playing the memory game. He mentioned that there is also a paint, turtle, writing, and other programs. The kids saw the Speak icon and several said they want to make the computer talk. I'm not sure how they knew just from the icon that was possible. Walter invited the kids to gather around while he walked through playing the memory game. He showed how to play and how to create a new game. Then the kids sat at the computers and tried the default available games. They liked it and had a tendency to click very fast on lots of things. Most selected one item from the top and then clicked repeatedly on the bottom until they found the match. On subsequent passes I saw one kid get alomst every one correct on first try as he had
Re: [IAEP] FUDcon + XOCamp talks
Hi Simon and Marco, I have you lined up for a discussion on Monday afternoon January 12 as well: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XOCamp_2#Monday_January_12.2C_2009 I put a few lines of agenda here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XOCamp_2#Sugar_Synch_Up Fill that in with more detail as you have it. Anything you can post in advance will help be more productive. I can put something together on process (e.g. where do we file bugs, how do we triage them and get them resolved) unless you want to do that. You can also put your name on the list of people coming here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XOCamp_2#Attendees Thanks, Greg S Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2008 13:05:29 +0100 From: Simon Schampijer si...@schampijer.de Subject: Re: [IAEP] FUDcon + XOCamp talks To: Marco Pesenti Gritti marc...@sugarlabs.org Cc: iaep iaep@lists.sugarlabs.org Message-ID: 495a0e89.7070...@schampijer.de Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote: Hello, so we are going to be officially present at FUDcon and I assume some of us will also stay for XOCamp. Is anyone planning to give talks? Here is what I have in mind. I think Simon also had something. FUDcon: * Discussion about packaging activities. xo vs rpm, how do solve maintenance problems etc. +1 I think this is a very important one - and it fits very well into FUDCon. * Newbie oriented class about hacking on Sugar and activities. Hmm, as much as I like this idea, I wonder how much interest we will exactly find at FUDCon. Or if there are other distribution specific challenges we could solve in during that conference. In any case it might be a good way to generate the class material. My additional point would be: * Sugar - How to get involved? - Packaging - Testing: How the Fedora Testing team and the Sugar Labs BugSquad can work together, try to get a discussion on how the work flow with the GNOME BugSquad is. - ? (if i missed something) Best, Simon -- ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep End of IAEP Digest, Vol 9, Issue 89 *** ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Teacher in OLPC-Sur list enchanted to see his idea, integrated into global Sugar
Hi Pato (espero que no le molesta si uso este nombre), I'm revisiting an older thread. I read your blog and I think its great! Congratulations to you and Walter for implementing this and closing the loop all the way back to the classroom. I want to see what we have learned about developing software that is relevant and useful for teachers. I especially want to learn how to make this happen more often and with more people (programmers, students and teachers) involved. I see you have requested two more things: 1.- A Beep function in TurtleArtwithsensors. 2.- A easy way for to write Hello word. I received a report about uruguayan?s kids writing letters with the turtle?s lines, but this way is slow and not fun. These look little more challenging than square root to me :-) I think they also need better definition to fully understand what you need. I believe that Walter has taken over maintenance of the Turtle Art program and that he plans a new release soon. You may want to follow up with him to see if he can get these in a future release. They may need some more definition (e.g. are you asking for these to work a particular school or class? what are you going to teach with these features in TurtleArt? when, how and why do you want to put text in the program etc.) I'm interested in the details but I think its really up to you and the programmers (Walter in this case). So I'll just watch if you don't mind working this out on the list. BTW I also noticed and followed up on this related thread on the Sur list: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/olpc-sur/2008-October/001145.html Thanks, Greg S ** Hi Greg: TurtleArt-11.xo worked perfectly. My report with teacher?s comment, screenshoots, and pedagogical support (only in spanish) here: http://patricioacevedo.blogspot.com/2008/09/mi-reporte-para-sugar-labs.html I want to try this features: 1.- A Beep function in TurtleArtwithsensors. 2.- A easy way for to write Hello word. I received a report about uruguayan?s kids writing letters with the turtle?s lines, but this way is slow and not fun. Thanks Pato Acevedo www.patricioacevedo.blogspot.com Hi Luis, I believe that Walter updated TurtleArt with a square root function to address this. Was that a satisfactory response? Let us know how that worked for you and the people who requested it. Any comments or input appreciated. What else do teachers and users need? Let's see if we can address some more requests and start to improve the quality of the dialog at the same time. Walter, Essentially the same questions for you. Did that go the way you wanted? I get the impression you wanted teachers to modify the code themselves. Maybe you can elaborate on that. Perhaps you could have asked if anyone wanted to learn how to do it. In the cycle of praxis, there's the action and the reflection. If we're done with the action on this one (still want to hear the final ack) then a little reflection may be in order until we pick the next small challenge. At the same time we can think about what tools work best to address these in the future. I didn't see the bug ID come through dev.laptop.org but I may have missed it. I assume IRC didn't work for Luis either... Thanks, Greg S Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2008 17:24:27 + From: luis ACEVEDO [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [IAEP] Teacher in OLPC-Sur list enchanted to see his idea integrated into global Sugar update [First approach] To: iaep@lists.sugarlabs.org Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Hello: My name is Luis Acevedo, live in Santiago, Chile. I participate actively in the mailing list OLPC-Sur and is closely monitoring the mailing list Sugar Labs. Yesterday in the Sur- List we had a report about a required feature for Turtle art activity. This is root square function. Teachers found necessary this function in activities like figure 28 and others from this page http://neoparaiso.com/logo/ejercicios-de-geometria.html I suggested to obtain a ticket trac in http://dev.laptop.org/ and to try in the irc channel. Is there a other way like to contact directly the authors? Is this a correct place for this questions? I feel it is a first opportunity to move from discussion to action. Thanks in advance Luis Pato Acevedo www.patricioacevedo.blogspot.com www.ucpn.cl Lo que hay dentro de ti es lo que cuenta - ?Qu? tipo de atleta eres? _ -- next part -- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/attachments/20080924/67434078/attachment-0001.htm -- ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org
Re: [IAEP] Volunteer-driven development of educational software
Hi Bill, I'm glad you followed up on this. I wanted to send an e-mail saying that there is great learning software and I agree with the ones you list. It sounds like you are not convinced that its all great stuff but I can say that eToys, Scratch and Turtle Art are all very popular and well used in our deployments. I like your classification.. I would just add one general purpose tool to the first section: Browse. The hardest part for me is figuring out what is learning. If we really knew what that means then I think choosing or building the right software would be relatively easy! Thanks, Greg S Bill Kerr wrote: On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 8:25 PM, Albert Cahalan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Greg Dekoenigsberg writes: On Tue, 11 Nov 2008, Greg Smith wrote: 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 can't think of any educational software that is intended solely for kids that is worthwhile. new slogan - improve the quality of your dog food so that you want to eat it eg. Scratch or etoys or turtle art or logo is designed largely with kids in mind (it is deliberately cut down in some way, not fully featured) but nevertheless is still fun and offers new learning ideas for adults software that is intended solely for kids is phoney, eg. maths blaster (lets make maths fun for kids by rewarding mundane arithmetic activity with something totally unrelated to the task), aka dressing up the dog it might be useful to classify educational software. Here is a very rough first attempt which I'm sure could be improved on but might help get discussion moving: *group one - extending reach* most software fits under generalised groupings of extending the reach of humans word processing - better than previous writing tools spreadsheets - better than previous maths tools image manipulation - better image tools wikipedia - more accessible encyclopaedia dr geo II - geometry is more accessible simulators - x2o, inspired by the incredible machine Moodle claims to have a social constructivist theory but I think it's really just for incremental improvement on what schools already do (still looking at moodle though for more information), social constructivist is a fairly meaningless phrase anyway etc *group two* *- great leap forward* what bits of software have a specific educational focus based on a more or less worked out theory, ie. software that can make a claim to being a big leap forward in educational computing, more so than making something we can already do more accessible (yes these claims are often dismissed as grandiose) cmap - concept mapping, Novak hypercard - ? (now defunct) logo, turtle art - Papert, Piaget etoys - Kay, Bruner scratch - Resnick some games (Gee's semiotic domains theory) *group three - simple training * (necessary but not very interesting) eg, typing tutors *group four - dressing up the dog * - cute software that pretends to be interesting but isn't: eg. maths blaster type ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] coming to Sugarcamp
Hi Bryan, Yes we are planning another conference in January. I am working on the subjects and presentations here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XOcamp_2 Any input on that welcome. I need to get it down to less than 30 hours of presentations! We have to pick the exact days but it will be one of the first three weeks of January. Thanks, Greg S Bryan Berry wrote: Subject: [IAEP] Are you coming to Sugarcamp? Unfortunately, won't make it. I will be in the Boston for much of January. Is XOCamp still in the works following FUDCon? Tony Anderson and I were both planning to attend. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [sugar] Sugar Camp Cambridge 17-21 Nov
Hi Rob, On this: I already added some of these above things to the roadmap wiki page as things to try and improve in 9.1. I'm not sure I found the place where you recorded that. Did you by any chance add it to the XO Feature Roadmap? http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap There are some relevant sections there but you can also create your own if you prefer. If you placed it somewhere else you can still add it to the XO roadmap and link to it. FYI there is also an explanation of target scale and use of synchronous collaboration here: ttp://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0_Collaboration_Requirements linked from here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#Synchronous_Collaboration If you can document the work needed to achieve those requirements, you can create a specification and get as detailed as you like. Or you can comment on or change the requirements if you think that is warranted. Comments or questions welcome, in e-mail or just edit the wiki pages. Thanks, Greg S *** Date: Wed, 12 Nov 2008 01:48:17 + From: Robert McQueen [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [IAEP] [sugar] Sugar Camp Cambridge 17-21 Nov To: Bernie Innocenti [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Brendan R. Powers [EMAIL PROTECTED], Collabora OLPC Team [EMAIL PROTECTED], Christian Marc Schmidt [EMAIL PROTECTED], IAEP iaep@lists.sugarlabs.org, Sugar List [EMAIL PROTECTED] Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Hi Bernie, Brendan, Bernie Innocenti wrote: Brendan R. Powers wrote: I would like to propose a discussion on making the collaboration a bit more standards compliant. The idea would be to get sugar to function more like a standard jabber IM client, as well as using existing standards in place of some of the custom solutions used now (xmlrpc instead of dbus perhaps?). I would also like to talk about using the colaboration API to talk to external services not on the jabber network(a moodle server for instance). As well as a possibly a few API changes to make these sorts of services easier to access for activity developers. Switching to XMLRPC?! This seems like some massive sidestep which would break the existing stuff as well as preventing any code sharing between Telepathy apps on Sugar and Telepathy apps on any other Linux platforms. D-Bus and the Telepathy APIs are the emerging standards for accessing real-time communications functionality on Linux desktops and embedded devices. It's already in GNOME in the Empathy client, as well as part of the GNOME Mobile platform, so Nokia's Maemo and Intel's Moblin platforms, and there's ongoing interest in using it in KDE which we hope to push forward at the combined Akademy/Guadec next summer. That aside, the rest of what you say matches up very well with a lot of the ideas we've had for improving collaboration in 9.1: * I've already filed a bug and spoken to Eben to get a UI in Sugar for seeing your JID, entering other people's, and doing authorisation requests. This allows you to deal with people from outside your XMPP server, so basically behaving as a real Jabber client (the Telepathy backends are entirely usable like this - my day-to-day IM client is Empathy). * I also proposed to gradually reduce the sugar-specific abstraction that the presence service does, so activities interact directly with the Telepathy backends more. We can implement the current Sugar presence service API with client code in the sugar library, but it can talk directly to Telepathy behind the scenes. This means: - fewer layers of abstraction - currently Presence Service does a load of caching and re-emitting of information through the curious D-Bus API we inherited when we started work on this way back... :) - any other Telepathy backends can be added and used for chatting, calling and file transfers on other protocols (we have IRC, SIP, MSN, AIM, ICQ, Yahii, and anything else supported by libpurple) without having to mangle presence service to do things it wasn't really intended - the APIs relied on by activities then become the same as Telepathy apps on other platforms, allowing code sharing in both directions - the APIs are the same in terms of documentation and utility code which can be enhanced in telepathy-python (and equivalent -glib and -qt4 libraries) to the benefit of all Having a standards base and flexible collaboration framework that extends beyond the sugar ecosystem offers some very interesting possibilities. I would also like to discuss some of the jabber scalability problems, as well as how we manage grouping students into classes, and collaborating with other schools over the internet. Sure, we've done a lot on enhancing scalability recently with the Gadget XMPP extension to take care of indexing buddies and activities. Groups and collaborating with other schools are the
Re: [IAEP] Volunteer-driven development of educational software
Hi All, 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. Greg D's strategy (programmers code for themselves then we re purpose it for schools) may be the most fruitful in terms producing lots of applications quickly. I certainly hope so. It still leaves open the question of how to adapt the result for use in classes and how to tie the applications in to the learning theory. Maybe that last stage is a job for paid programmers instead of open source volunteers. As more applications become available for the XO/Sugar we can see which get the most demand in schools and go from there. On the other hand, I hope David is correct that we can find people who will work on things which the teachers and students need, even if they don't scratch your own itch. In addition to finding such programmers, the challenge is to define what teachers and students need in a way that is easily actionable. We have lots of input from the field and some input from educational theorists. The hard part is focusing that in to something easily coded. There is one nice synergy between the educational theory and the development strategy. I believe that a tenet of the educational theory is that teachers and students together choose the most relevant topics for learning. If programmers and users also follow that strategy of working together to choose the relevant topics maybe we could pioneer a new paradigm for open source development. I wrote a brief explanation of this strategy here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Gregorio On the question of asynchronous vs synchronous collaboration. If you read the beginning of the thread (http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-October/020588.html) you'll see that neither Juliano nor I are opposed to synchronous collaboration ala CollAbiWord. Juliano was just pointing out that we also need asynchronous collaboration (e.g. multi-kid projects) and that wasn't on the roadmap. We need both and my impression is that the shortest path to major new functionality is on the asynchronous side. Any help defining the requirements and scope of that is welcome. Please add your input here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#Asynchronous_collaboration 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. Clearly the idea of learning by creating projects is central to the educational strategy (see http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/41706?show=full). So is learning by doing and working together. I'm just not sure if it has to be real time or not. I can say that the kids love the real time write sharing when it works and they hate it when it fails. See: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/olpc-sur/2008-May/000118.html When it worked: they loved it ... it seemed like magic When the collaboration broke: ¡QUË DESILUSIÖN On synchronous collaboration I think the requirements are well defined. See: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0_Collaboration_Requirements and http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#Synchronous_Collaboration Comments welcome. The challenge with synchronous collaboration is if/when/how we can support the requirements as defined. Maybe the open source community can get us over the hump on that... Thanks, Greg S Date: Tue, 11 Nov 2008 11:11:59 +1030 From: Bill Kerr [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [IAEP] Volunteer-driven development of educational software To: Greg Dekoenigsberg [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: iaep iaep@lists.sugarlabs.org Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 9:27 AM, Greg Dekoenigsberg [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Mon, 10 Nov 2008, Bert Freudenberg wrote: Cutting this important part out of another discussion ... On 10.11.2008, at 20:49, Jecel Assumpcao Jr wrote: Of course, this all supposes the open source model. If someone gets paid to do a Python Etoys or a GNU Smalltalk one then I wouldn't be at all surprised to see a good quality implementation created from scratch in just a couple of months. I have been thinking about this for quite a while - how valid is the assumption that a volunteer community would be able to create software that they do not intend to use themselves? It is absolutely invalid, IMHO. For example, Etoys development was not driven by volunteers, but by a small research group around Alan Kay with paid developers. It is open- source and free, but we get relatively few contributions from volunteer developers. This is in contrast to Squeak, the underlying system, which is supported and advanced by a thriving community of developers. But the majority of the Squeak community is not interested in Etoys, just in the Smalltalk development system (which they use and improve for
Re: [IAEP] Teacher in OLPC-Sur list enchanted to see his idea integrated, into global Sugar update [First approach] (luis ACEVEDO)
Hi Luis, I believe that Walter updated TurtleArt with a square root function to address this. Was that a satisfactory response? Let us know how that worked for you and the people who requested it. Any comments or input appreciated. What else do teachers and users need? Let's see if we can address some more requests and start to improve the quality of the dialog at the same time. Walter, Essentially the same questions for you. Did that go the way you wanted? I get the impression you wanted teachers to modify the code themselves. Maybe you can elaborate on that. Perhaps you could have asked if anyone wanted to learn how to do it. In the cycle of praxis, there's the action and the reflection. If we're done with the action on this one (still want to hear the final ack) then a little reflection may be in order until we pick the next small challenge. At the same time we can think about what tools work best to address these in the future. I didn't see the bug ID come through dev.laptop.org but I may have missed it. I assume IRC didn't work for Luis either... Thanks, Greg S Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2008 17:24:27 + From: luis ACEVEDO [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [IAEP] Teacher in OLPC-Sur list enchanted to see his idea integrated into global Sugar update [First approach] To: iaep@lists.sugarlabs.org Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Hello: My name is Luis Acevedo, live in Santiago, Chile. I participate actively in the mailing list OLPC-Sur and is closely monitoring the mailing list Sugar Labs. Yesterday in the Sur- List we had a report about a required feature for Turtle art activity. This is root square function. Teachers found necessary this function in activities like figure 28 and others from this page http://neoparaiso.com/logo/ejercicios-de-geometria.html I suggested to obtain a ticket trac in http://dev.laptop.org/ and to try in the irc channel. Is there a other way like to contact directly the authors? Is this a correct place for this questions? I feel it is a first opportunity to move from discussion to action. Thanks in advance Luis Pato Acevedo www.patricioacevedo.blogspot.com www.ucpn.cl ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Teacher in Uruguay enchanted to see his ideas integrated, , into global Sugar update (C. Scott Ananian)
Hi Scott and Michael, In general I still think this is a good statement but its short and may be misinterpreted. Everything we do must be tied to a high level goal and to specific input and users. That is my most fundamental request! There are two parts: Goals - The only point there is that we should say why we are doing something. Write code to scratch your own itch if you like. Whatever, the reason, it helps us work together if you can say why you are working on something and what is the goal of the work. User input- I'm not saying that users deliver edicts which we must act upon. I'm saying that we should work with the users and create a cooperative effort where we all try to achieve the goal of educating children. The teachers know how to teach, how to work with children, how to spend the whole day in a room of 50 young kids, and so much more (culture, language etc). Engineers need to hear from them about how our product works for them. Engineers and teachers need to find common languages so we can work together. Then engineer-teachers need to come up solutions that everyone understands and can use. Then we evaluate and try again ++ I'm mystified as to why that would be controversial, but I appreciate you raising the concern. I can't wait to see Wad's reaction when I ask him how his proposed EC code changes will help the users :-) To drill down on the Lesson plan example. If teachers need lesson plans, that doesn't mean engineering writes the lesson plans for them! However, engineering may want to think about what it means to write a lesson plan, what is needed, how you do it, etc. Then engineering can come up with ideas where they may be able to participate (e.g. a piece of SW that helps write a lesson plan, share it and associate it with an activity). Maybe there's nothing engineering can do. That's OK too but it helps to know that lesson plans are important to this teacher and probably to many more. I haven't received any comments on my wiki home page. http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Gregorio Maybe that will help you understand where I'm coming from. Seems like people don't read URLs that often so I'll post a relevant piece here: any development model needs an optimal process for synchronizing the work with the users expectations. Developers don't fully understand user's daily activities and users don't fully understand the constraints of the development process. Even for open source, the challenge remains how best to achieve a problem-posing methodology of mutual education. Both sides need an efficient way to engage the praxis (action and reflection) of creating relevant applications. Transformation of the process from developers giving users features (banking method) to developers-users learning from each other (problem-posing method) needs attention that empowers all to participate. That challenge is especially acute when there are larges gaps of culture, age, economic status, language, and geography (urban - rural and north - south). Even as users learn to develop their own code, there's a need for all users to have a say in what gets prioritized and delivered. Believe it or not that was from my first e-mail to David Cavalho when I was trying to find a way to work at OLPC. Needless to say, it was way to long and confusing and I had to find a different way in :-) Last point. By happenstance, I'm reading Understanding Computers and Design by Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores: http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Computers-Cognition-Foundation-Design/dp/0201112973/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8s=booksqid=1222092782sr=1-1 All the AI stuff seems dated but there are some great nuggets in there. One is that when a user interacts with a program, they are not interacting with the computer so much as interacting with the developer of the software! One more section to read then I'll comment more if it the book has anything useful to say about how we actually design the sharing interface and the next generation XO SW. Back to the bug database :-) Thanks, Greg S PS I will try and use engineers-teachers to refer to the we of everyone involved from now on. I don't want to just be part of the engineering team. When I say we I want it to be all of us, teachers, users, engineers, volunteers, testers. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Teacher in Uruguay enchanted to see his ideas integrated, into global Sugar update
Hi Eben et al, I'm going to break this in to three parts: 1 - In terms of aggregating and passing on key themes of user input, I'm on it full time :-). Like Janus I have two faces and one of them points towards the users and the other towards the engineers. That said, its much more than a full time job. Its going to take a community engineers and users learning to work together. Hopefully I don't interfere and I can be disintermediated as more direct channels open up. My vision of where we need to go is here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Gregorio In terms of the 9.1 page, I'm asking that people put things which have been aggregated. That is: - collect the input and specific feature request - uncover themes from multiple requests - decide if something is well defined and describe what its for and why (not so much how we will address it) - ensure you have a good communication channel to the requester That's what I think of as aggregating. Once that is done it and its something you think should be built I encourage you to put it on the 9.1 page. In terms of how better to collect and aggregate feedback in to a system from which we can easily extract it, I'm open to suggestions. You said If our biggest problem is sifting through *too much* feedback, then we're in good shape. 2 - Christoph, you asked for a press release showing teacher asked for this and we delivered. Luis gave you something a teacher needs we also got the name of the relevant engineer. Can we close the loop, deliver this and issue a press release? This is what it takes to build trust and create a lasting relationship. One request, understood and worked on by a few people and delivered. Then ++. If you get requests and we ignore them or say you don't want that that hinders future input and damages our relationship building capacity. 3 - This is a related point which deserves its own thread. I will also make related comments on the design meeting and clipboard threads. Just warming you up here. We need copy and paste. My concern is that working on copy and paste does not show us listening to the users. The only user complaint about copy and paste or the clipboard is that it doesn't work reliably. For example, I started to discuss the work flow of copy and paste from one write instance to another with Julian from Birmingham yesterday and he stopped me. He said, first you should make what you have work. I asked if he would accept no new features for 6 months in return for much greater reliability and he replied yes without hesitation. Aside from that, the priorities from users related to moving data are around how to upload content to the Internet, how to get it off the internet and on to the XO for editing and how to move files from one XO to another. The first three suggestions on the Uruguay forum (http://www.mediagala.com/rap/foro/viewforum.php?f=12) are requests to build a TamTam lesson plan, simplification of getting files off the internet and better tools for posting content to the internet. Since they are on build 656, some of those issues may be solved. Nonetheless its necessary input which tells us what they are most interested in doing. I want to make sure that all of our work is grounded in specific requests and user goals. That has to come first before we design code or GUIs. Part of my work is to explain what is most important to users so I apologize for falling behind on making that clear. As usual, engineering has gotten ahead of me. I did post a few ideas on the file moving area here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0#File_Management We urgently need to listen to the input we have so far. Everything we do must be tied to a high level goal and to specific input and users. That is my most fundamental request! BTW I'm not trying to cast aspersions on your work. The 8.2 release has been getting great reviews with respect to the new GUI. Its by far the strongest new feature set in the release. Thanks, Greg S PS sorry for the long e-mail. Not time to edit as we need to make a real release candidate for 8.2 ASAP! Eben Eliason wrote: On Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 4:19 PM, Greg Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi Eben, There's already a lot of feedback. Start sifting :-) Please post anything you aggregate and think we should work on to the 9.1 page: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0 None of us have time to aggregate, if we even find out where we might pull info from. That's the point I'm getting at. I want a way to make this info readily accessible to everyone, without devoting half of my week to scouring scattered sources. That could be a full time job. Also, I'm not sure that aggregating on the 9.1 page is a good solution. That's a good way for a lot of good feedback to get lost in 6 months. I'd rather have a mailing list, or forum, or some other form of database from which we can reference individual responses on trac tickets, so that the feedback can live on as a reference in a place we won't
Re: [IAEP] Teacher in Uruguay enchanted to see his ideas integrated, into global Sugar update
Hi Eben, Thanks for your constructive comments! I'll work with Seth and anyone else to better coordinated a heap of aggregated input without regard to release timing. That's a good point. One last thing: When I edited the roadmap page, I didn't mean to call anything unwanted. They just need a home with a goal or motivation. I think copy from XO to XO would fall in the collaboration bucket. I didn't see it at the top level but I haven't had a chance to read all the sub-tending pages. Feel free to move them around, add more motivation or comments, and change or add to the goals as you see fit. IMHO you really listen well, even when I shout at you over the monitor! Your open mind, super-design skills, and technical acumen make working with a pleasure. Thanks, Greg S ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Teacher in Uruguay enchanted to see his ideas integrated, into global Sugar update
Hi Eben, There's already a lot of feedback. Start sifting :-) Please post anything you aggregate and think we should work on to the 9.1 page: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0 In addition, a feedback activity seems like an easy short term win. Could be posted and shared quickly and easily. If it gets traction it would help motivate a solution built in the core OS/UI. Thanks, Greg S Eben Eliason wrote: On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 12:53 PM, Greg Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi All, On this: Perhaps you would be interested in http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/6950. I think all these things would go together nicely. Changed 2 months ago by gregorio milestone deleted Milestone Never Assigned deleted When I started at OLPC one of the first things I did was clean up the roadmap in Trac. There were a handful of vague may want to do it in the future milestones. I deleted a few of those before I realized that it would also remove them from the bug IDs. That's why you see these messages. We do need to figure out where to put it on the roadmap and I'm not opposed to this idea. On the subject of gathering input from users its been a recurring theme of the lists and I have commented on it several times. Its an important problem which we must grapple with. Initially I thought we need more input and information. Then in December I started to realize how much input is already available. I collected some of them on my talk page at: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User_talk:Gregorio There are wikis, forums, moodles and other sites already full of suggestions and comments about the product. Aside from the ones on my talk page I can mention - Moodle out of Peru: http://www.innovavirtual.org/moodleperu/ - Forum in Uruguay http://www.mediagala.com/rap/foro/ - Our OLPC forum http://en.forum.laptop.org/ and of course the olpc-sur list. This is fantastic; was I among few who didn't know of their existence? I might be, but we could probably do a better job exposing this kind of information. Also I understand that kids in Uruguay and elsewhere have been downloading this activity: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XoIRC and it has a default channel which has been very active. There is also a spanish IRC channel which has seen a lot of use. Even the question of which is the right tool to gather more suggestions is something we should ask people to suggest! If you want people to give input, its better to ask them what works best for them than to decide that yourself. I have been mulling over the best communication channels with Pablo out of Uruguay for 9 moths and we still don't have a definitive answer. For me, the question is not so much how do we gather more input as how do we respond to the input already expressed. I think this misses a very crucial element, which is locating/aggregating the data. If there's no channel through which the data can be collected, searched, or organized, we have little hope of responding to it. The main reason I think that something in the realm of a Suggestion Box activity is needed is not *only* so that kids and teachers have a place to express their thoughts, but just as much so that their efforts can be collected and reviewed by all who are interested, in a common place. (Which, in turn, should ensure that their thoughts are more likely to effect change.) The requests do not generally come in like: I want a button on the right. The people using the XO are teaching or learning so the request is usually more like: its too slow make it faster or I need better tools to teach geometry. See the Sur list for some comments like that. This is true, of course. It could lead to a lot of feedback, much of it not succinct or strictly targeted, but at least we'd have it in a place where all can find it. If our biggest problem is sifting through *too much* feedback, then we're in good shape. Let's find a way to put it all to good use! - Eben After an intial suggestions, you need a further discussion befoe it gets to exactly what code needs to be written. In terms of how we engage that dialog, I wrote a brief explanation of how I think it should work at: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Gregorio We're now engaged in the practice of it and we need that piece along with the theory to get it right. In terms of building in a please fix it button, I'm in favor of that. I think it should be an activity not a piece of the OS until we can prove the concept and show that we can collect good feedback, generate a meanigful dialog and most importantly respond in a constructive way to the requests. Lastly, if a user has asked for something which is documented and well defined and we think it should be built then go ahead and put it on the 9.1 page: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0 I just ask that you sign it or put it on the talk page. To Christoph's original point. They already asked, now we need to deliver on that. How about
Re: [IAEP] Teacher in Uruguay enchanted to see his ideas integrated, into global Sugar update
Hi All, On this: Perhaps you would be interested in http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/6950. I think all these things would go together nicely. Changed 2 months ago by gregorio milestone deleted Milestone Never Assigned deleted When I started at OLPC one of the first things I did was clean up the roadmap in Trac. There were a handful of vague may want to do it in the future milestones. I deleted a few of those before I realized that it would also remove them from the bug IDs. That's why you see these messages. We do need to figure out where to put it on the roadmap and I'm not opposed to this idea. On the subject of gathering input from users its been a recurring theme of the lists and I have commented on it several times. Its an important problem which we must grapple with. Initially I thought we need more input and information. Then in December I started to realize how much input is already available. I collected some of them on my talk page at: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User_talk:Gregorio There are wikis, forums, moodles and other sites already full of suggestions and comments about the product. Aside from the ones on my talk page I can mention - Moodle out of Peru: http://www.innovavirtual.org/moodleperu/ - Forum in Uruguay http://www.mediagala.com/rap/foro/ - Our OLPC forum http://en.forum.laptop.org/ and of course the olpc-sur list. Also I understand that kids in Uruguay and elsewhere have been downloading this activity: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XoIRC and it has a default channel which has been very active. There is also a spanish IRC channel which has seen a lot of use. Even the question of which is the right tool to gather more suggestions is something we should ask people to suggest! If you want people to give input, its better to ask them what works best for them than to decide that yourself. I have been mulling over the best communication channels with Pablo out of Uruguay for 9 moths and we still don't have a definitive answer. For me, the question is not so much how do we gather more input as how do we respond to the input already expressed. The requests do not generally come in like: I want a button on the right. The people using the XO are teaching or learning so the request is usually more like: its too slow make it faster or I need better tools to teach geometry. See the Sur list for some comments like that. After an intial suggestions, you need a further discussion befoe it gets to exactly what code needs to be written. In terms of how we engage that dialog, I wrote a brief explanation of how I think it should work at: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Gregorio We're now engaged in the practice of it and we need that piece along with the theory to get it right. In terms of building in a please fix it button, I'm in favor of that. I think it should be an activity not a piece of the OS until we can prove the concept and show that we can collect good feedback, generate a meanigful dialog and most importantly respond in a constructive way to the requests. Lastly, if a user has asked for something which is documented and well defined and we think it should be built then go ahead and put it on the 9.1 page: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0 I just ask that you sign it or put it on the talk page. To Christoph's original point. They already asked, now we need to deliver on that. How about starting with this one: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0#Touchpad or this one: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0#Longer_Battery_Life :-) I hope that's constructive. I want to see more feedback and more responsiveness to requests. My main point is that the ball is in our court. Once we find people to engage with the only way to get there is with a rich dialog where we learn about the users and they learn about building software. Thanks, Greg S ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
