Re: [IAEP] [Marketing] Los Angeles ditching Apple/Pearson iPad program
Gee, I had forgotten about the scandal surrounding the Birmingham, AL mayor who had massively deployed OLPCs in his city schools until you raised this LA Apple program. When will some enterprising politician drive a stake into the heart of this monster we call public education and replace it with an education program which leverages the amazing low-cost "generic" digital technology we now enjoy to connect home-based learners with a nation/world-wide "cafeteria" of service providers who have to compete with one another or go bust? On 4/17/15, Caryl Bigenho wrote: > Wow! > Thanks for gathering this all into one place Sean. My family has long-term > ties to LAUSD as both teachers and students for 3 generations so we are > always interested in what is happening there. > When I was still working there I received several technology grants and I > can tell you that the bidding and purchase problems have been going on for > at least 30 years! When we had grant monies to spend we were given a list of > approved devices and vendors we could use. If we wanted something else, the > bidding process was rigged in such a way that sometimes funds were lost > because they delayed too long in approving an order. If an item wasn't > delivered by a certain date, the money went back to the state! > There was a time when Apple was not on the approved list... you had to buy > only IBM! Then, suddenly Apple managed to sell the district thousands of the > Apple iic+ (which were about to be discontinued... a practice Apple also > used when selling about to be discontinued models to teachers at an > "educator's discount"). > Those iic-pluses had what everyone called a "Chiclet" keyboard, and the keys > popped off very easily. At most schools they were installed in the typing > room, replacing typewriters. Classes in "keyboarding" (instead of "typing" > were offered). Bored students soon discovered that the keys could be popped > off and, before long, most of the machines became pretty useless. > Caryl > > > > From: sdaly...@gmail.com > Date: Fri, 17 Apr 2015 14:39:02 +0200 > To: iaep@lists.sugarlabs.org; market...@lists.sugarlabs.org > Subject: [IAEP] Los Angeles ditching Apple/Pearson iPad program > > A large-scale ($1.3 billion budget for iPads, pearson software, wifi > infrastructure, target 650K students) education ICT project started in 2013 > and meant to eliminate the digital divide which has gone awry. The > superintendent resigned and is under FBI and SEC investigation for corrupt > bidding process, although the board stated they did not believe there was > wrongdoing, only mismanagement. > > Only 5% of the students (in 2 of the 69 schools) are able to use the Pearson > software on an iPad. > > Interestingly, it seems many of the problems were related to wifi/networking > infrastructure (see last link for gory details). > > Sean. > > http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-ipad-curriculum-refund-20150415-story.html > http://www.scpr.org/news/2015/04/15/51027/lausd-ipad-program-ditching-pearson-software-reque/ > http://www.laweekly.com/news/lausd-chief-john-deasy-resigns-5152268 > http://www.pearsoned.com/news/pearson-lausd-statement/ > http://www.npr.org/blogs/ed/2014/08/27/343549939/the-l-a-school-ipad-scandal-what-you-need-to-know > http://laschoolreport.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Instructional-Technology-Initative-Pearson-Update.pdf > > > > ___ > IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) > IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org > http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Education science resources
Hello, I'd like to bring your attention to a high-brow, edited, monthly-updated, online resource published by Oxford University Press, the "Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education." The description at https://global.oup.com/academic/product/oxford-research-encyclopedias-education-9780190264093 notes that, for the present, its content (now 91 articles) can be read without payment. Find the actual encyclopedia content at: http://education.oxfordre.com/ Among the article(-stub)s which might interest readers of this mailing list are: School Culture Self-Directed Education—Unschooling and Democratic Schooling Alternative Education International Cooperation for Education in Developing Countries (BTW, I alerted the author of the last article to a typo I found in scanning it.) As I write, the only article in the "Technology and Education" category is Assistive Technology to Enhance Inclusive Education Allow me to change the subject by also bringing your attention to an online resource which first alerted me to the existence of the Oxford encyclopedia above, namely a web site dedicated to the life's work of the late "unschooling" pioneer John Holt. Find it at https://johnholtgws.squarespace.com/ and learn more about this influential person at https://johnholtgws.squarespace.com/who-was-john-holt/ Ron Feigenblatt ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Marketing] ASUS Eee PC X101 @ $199: A worthy non-XO platform for Sugar?
On 5/30/11, Christoph Derndorfer wrote: > it's still early days but it looks like the ASUS Eee PC X101 presented > at a pre-Computex press event today could be a good platform for Sugar. > ...Since it runs Meego I would assume that on the software side of things > getting other Linux distributions to run on it shouldn't be too hard, > but others will know more here. What will happen to Meego now that Nokia is "going steady" with Microsoft? How interested is Intel in carrying Meego forward with its other partners? As a point of interest, the Wikipedia article on Intel's Classmate PC lists five operating systems for the Classmate - but none of them is Meego. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Marketing] ASUS Eee PC X101 @ $199: A worthy non-XO platform for Sugar?
Hello, Christoph Derndorfer wrote: > Asus Germany just announced that the X101 should become available in > Austria and Germany in mid-August and with a price tag of €169 (~$241). > > I think this might just become my next impulse purchase;-) > > ...As an aside, my personal interest in the X101 is more closely related to > education projects rather than Meego itself. People and organizations > are regularly approaching me about using XOs and Sugar for projects but > the defacto non-availability of classroom-sized XO purchases tends to > kill their motivation rather quickly. Having another very inexpensive > solution in this space might just be the catalyst many folks need! :-) If the X101 runs Sugar on a Stick (SoS), isn't most of what you need accomplished? In recent years, I have not closely followed OLPC and Sugar. Does SoS exclude any important features, e.g. networking multiple PCs? The EEE netbook family is about four years old; millions have been sold. You might even borrow one at TUW right now, to try booting SoS. By the way, what about Sugar do you like best? The user interface? The suite of existing activities? The zero licensing costs? The ease of developing new activities? The brand equity? Something else? Ron F ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Raspberry PI
Hello, First, a short detour of interest to all the friends of Sugar Labs (SL). Applying the "5 Whys": Now and then, I have participated in OLPC and SL ever since the former effort debuted, but today is the very first time I have looked at this IAEP Mailing List. Why? Likely because when I discovered http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/index.php?title=Education_Team , the lack of activity there led to the impression that, curiously, few people at SL cared about the education angle! (You can find several of my remarks embedded there long ago.) Lesson 1: It would be good if the Education Team page prominently linked to http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep and thus, I have just made that happen. Lesson 2: Might the Wikimaster (or helper) examine other Wiki pages, trying to discover ones which also give a false impression of topical inactivity, and correct same? Thus, nearly all my previous interaction with SL has been via the Marketing Team. Because the Raspberry Pi has recently come up here, I would direct those interested in the RPi to a lengthy post I made about it (and other platforms) in July 2011 on the Marketing mailing list at http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/marketing/2011-July/003307.html As time allows, I expect I will find reviewing the IAEP ML archives interesting. emocleW! Ron ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Essay on applying netbooks to high school ("secondary") education, especially STEM
Having now discovered this mailing list, I will point you at a lengthy
essay I wrote last spring on applying netbooks to high school
("secondary") education, especially STEM ("Science Technology
Engineering Mathematics" - see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STEM_fields ). It was inspired by a USA
federal program deploying netbooks at a rural Georgia high school
sited in the transition zone between exurban Atlanta and Appalachia.
It is the sort of place which, almost incredibly, only recently
"discovered" and started respecting settled federal case law an entire
half-century old, see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qaFZwXaY8o . No
doubt when stubborn reactionaries in other USA regions started
screaming about this now-long-ago rollback of unconstitutional
theocracy, the people here were too busy screaming about having to
finally attend public schools with Nigerians - only that wasn't the
word they used.
Defying federal law is an old vice in Haralson County, as illustrated
by a Web page about its history of alcohol production, prepared for a
recent Smithsonian Museum-on-Main-Street exhibit, online at
http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~gahchs/KeyIngredients/Moonshine.htm
I did not move here until middle age, for the sake of enjoying
isolation from others. Happily, I spent the childhood years of my
minority elsewhere in the USA, where kids learned to take care of
themselves if they wanted to grow up, as illustrated by a
now-forgotten film set there not many years before I came along:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydwARWNMuVI
Find the essay in question at
http://bellsouthpwp.net/d/o/docdtv/Education/HCHSnetbooks/
Ron
___
IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Raspberry PI
On 2/2/13, Chris Leonard wrote: >... Please just make the changes you think need to be made, that is why we > keep information on a wiki, so that anyone can contribute to improving > it's quality or discoverability. Chris, are you the "wikimaster"? I can't seem to use the wiki to find out who is! Going to the home page of the wiki or to the http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Wiki_Team page does NOT help. Some years back I used Wikispaces for several wikis. As its wiki system model evolved, the administrator of a wiki gained the power to lock out changes on a page-by-page basis (and maybe even to delegate such powers to chosen sub-administrators?) Is that possible within the MediaWiki system we use here at Sugar Labs? The reason I ask is that just the other day, Sean Daly, leader of the Marketing Team, lamented as follows (cf. http://meeting.sugarlabs.org/sugar-meeting/2013-02-01#i_2768391 ) "last time i tried to make a wiki page more readable for teachers, a community member wiped out all my edits, after 3 days i gave up was very disheartening" Of course, allowing individuals or subgroups within SL to edit certain pages exclusively implies that an arbitrator (like the wikimaster) is needed in case of conflict with others. For the present, Sean could simply establish a free account at an outside wiki provider like Wikispaces, have full control of his content there, and link to it from Sugar Labs wiki pages. Changing subjects: As for my previous remarks above, the subtext of my "Lesson 2:" was that I was too lazy to carry out the suggestion I was making. Sorry. Ron ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Wiki editing
On 2/2/13, Frederick Grose wrote: > Be assured that all changes saved in a wiki can be recovered from the 'View > history' tab for a page. Indeed. But sometimes one has worthy reasons for assigning pre-emptive editorial power over a page to an individual. For example, shouldn't the current leader of the Marketing Team have exclusive write-control over the Marketing Team page? That need not prevent petitioners from making change suggestions on its Discussion page, as you noted immediately below. > While one is reconstructing an existing page, it is often best to copy it > to a separate page as content details are worked out. Open discussion (on > the associated 'Discussion' page) with other interested authors will > generally lead to improvements. Having a "watch" set on a page is not the same as having the time to respond to changes every week, much less every hour. I think it would be useful if everyone with wiki login credentials had a quota of space for creating content they ALONE can write. Not only could they create NEW content they alone control, but they could also create and nominate full-blown REVISIONS of content OTHER people alone control for linking from the respective Discussion page of the latter. The Wikipedia article on the Wiki at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki interprets Wiki creator Ward Cunningham's book so: "A wiki is not a carefully crafted site for casual visitors." If one accepts this, then it might be useful for a heading on EVERY page of the wiki to state just that and link to a conjugate non-Wiki Website for such casual visitors. That way, e.g., Sean Daly's prospective wiki-illiterate teachers would not be denied the chance to peruse the wiki, but at the same time would be properly served by immediate referral to the material intended for their eyes. I hope you will also consider the Wiki education suggestion I made on your personal page. For about a third decade, between summer 2005 and late 2008, I tried to seed wiki literacy in my literacy-phobic rural USA community. It started with a digital technology course I gave at a new local public library, whose remarks about wikis lie within the lesson on asynchronous groupware at http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~gahchs/BHPL/FOTL/DigTech/Chapter4/ I only managed to get two people to attempt wiki writing. One was a woman in her 30's with a Bachelor's degree in Russian who commuted to work in India, and had experience as an exchange student in Russia. The other woman, in her 40's, was a non-degreed engineer who manages a state highway construction crew, and whom I think recently became a member of the county development authority. Both gave up almost immediately due to the challenge, rather than their disbelief in the utility of wiki-writing. (I had them try using Wikispaces.) The first public evidence of wiki literacy in this part of the state I encountered was a link to a staff-only wiki on a public Web page of the regional public library system within the last couple of years. (Aside: I must say that I was shocked that as C-SPAN's BookTV programming celebrated its fifth anniversary some years ago, I discovered that the assistant director of this regional system had never heard of its existence.) Let me close by assuring you that my previous inquiry was not rhetorical: Frederick, is it possible to give an individual user the exclusive power to write a particular wiki page within the MediaWiki system we use here at Sugar Labs? Thanks. Ron ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Sugar Digest 2013-02-04
http://walterbender.org/?p=641 says: "Our goal is to build an interface between the Sugar Journal and several on-line services." Maybe I don't get a vote in this discussion, because I haven't written Sugar code and am unlikely to do so in the near future. But please accept that I have friendly intentions. I was an advocate of such notions when I first made contact with Sugar Labs through the Marketing Group three years ago now. Details follow below.. On 2/4/13, Walter Bender wrote: >...on the one hand, I filled a ticket with Youtube regarding >enabling the uploading of .ogv files. On the other hand, when I post >videos, I use Dailymotion, because it supports .ogv. And yet I admit >to still watching the occasional Youtube video. | Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2010 20:16:34 -0500 | Subject: Re: Sugar and OLPC | From: Ron Feigenblatt | To: Sean Daly | | ...On 1/12/10, you wrote: | ... | > we are not using YouTube because they don't support free formats - we | > use DailyMotion, who does. The Sugar Labs channel is here: | > http://www.dailymotion.com/sugarlabs | | You know, I noticed that when I used Internet Explorer 6 on | Microsoft Windows 98 to access your Web site, your Web [server] | failed to block your usual content and instead post a message | reading something like: | | "Please uses a kosher open source | platform to access our content. Thanks!" | | It's fine if you use Daily Motion so you can publish using an | open-source codec, but why not ALSO simply transcode and | DUPLICATE all videos on YouTube, as the hosting is free | and the site is INCREDIBLY popular? Don't think of YouTube | as JUST [] a hosting site - think of it as a SEARCH ENGINE: | http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/12/31/technology/internet/31tubeGrfx/articleInline.jpg | ... http://walterbender.org/?p=641 says: "Specifically, Raul and I are working on an interface between the Journal and Facebook and Bernie is working on an interface between the Journal and Google Drive..." | Date: Tue, 2 Feb 2010 12:39:09 -0500 | Subject: Idea: Sugar Live CD uses Cloud-based Journal, courtesy Google Docs? | From: Ron Feigenblatt | To: Sean Daly - Sugar marketing coordinator , JT4sugar | Cc: wal...@sugarlabs.org | | ...I just want to [flesh] out the idea I suggested in the latest | Sugar marketing meeting. | | You guys think about Sugar being used in a school setting. | I think it might be fun to try out at home, too. | | Most homes in the US, among other nations, now have broadband... | | The idea is to mail Sugar Live CDs for kids to try out on any | PC at home attached to the Internet. Besides being cheaper | to provide than flash drives, not a few home users know how | to copy CDs (not always for nice reasons) and blanks are | cheap. Each CD can bear the legend "PLEASE COPY ME!" | (Aside: Who will ever forget the CD carpet-bombing AOL did?) | | It is easy to generate identifiers unique to a PC, based on | its hardware. Microsoft uses this technique to identify PCs | and reduce piracy, through its "activation" procedure. | | Unique identifiers can provide the automated credentials | needed to access online storage, which can hold Journals. | (This means one Journal store per PC, unless one mandates | user involvement.) When Sugar boots, it would check if the | online store already existed, and if not, would establish it. | | Among other firms, Google now provides a limited amount of free | online storage; in its case, 1GB for Google Documents users, see: | http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2010/01/upload-and-store-your-files-in-cloud.html | I think signing up for an account could be automated, save for the | need for a human to recognize a CAPTCHA image ONCE. (People | had already created software to exploit Google Gmail for storage.) | | Unlike a thumb drive, a kid could not lose online storage (unless | the PC dies, or is upgraded in a way which changes its credentials.) | And while availability may only be 3 to 5 nines, one much doubts Google | storage is as likely to totally die as is a flash drive. See the remarks at: | http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Education_Team#Soas_thoughts | ... Oh, I had forgotten to caution that Live CDs would not be NEARLY as popular as thumb drives. You see, you can't reformat a read-only disk to store the free movies some folks download from the Internet or rip from DVDs. (They tell me that all-day suckers are made out of sugar. ;-P ) On 2/4/13, Walter Bender wrote: > We need to tread lightly here. The FB terms of service require 13+ > yrs. Our children are younger than that. Maybe the Scratch team thinks > it is OK, but I am uncomfortable with encouraging children to violate > the terms of service. If a child's parent can open a Facebook account, he can let his child's computer access same without violating the TOS (I think). FWIW, the other season, I
[IAEP] First WSIS+10 Review Meeting, February 25-27, UNESCO (Paris)
On 2/19/13, Sean DALY wrote: > First WSIS+10 Review Meeting: Towards Knowledge Societies for Peace and > Sustainable Development... Remote participation: > http://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/flagship-project-activities/wsis-10-review-event-25-27-february-2013/remote-participation/ Has anyone found a link which lets one download, install and test the remote access software in advance? Or are they going to make the typical teleconferencing beginner's mistake of posting such a link at the 11th hour? ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Questions for SCaLE 11X
Hi Caryl, On 2/20/13, Caryl Bigenho wrote: > 1) What is the latest total number of XOs of all types "deployed" around the > world, including developer machines, G1G1, large deployments, and small > deployments.? > (The wiki says 2 million as of March 2011… two years ago.) Last month at CES, OLPC's Giulia D'Amico said 2.8 million; evidenced in the video (743 views now) at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fa5pKmhCgd4 > 2) Has the production of the XO-4 begun? If not, when is it expected to > start? See the cited video: "In the next few months, Australia is going to roll out 55,000" [XO-4s] > 3) What are the various options that will be offered with the XO-4? See the cited video: About $20 for an optional Neonode IR Touch framing touchscreen. > 4) What is the projected cost of the XO-4? See the cited video: @$206 (with touchscreen) FOB China, 10,000+ units. > 5) Will small orders (100 or more machines) still be considered for well > thought-out projects? See the cited video: Evidently not. If you could persuade a retailer, e.g. Tiger Direct, that they could sell 10,000 units almost @$300 within a year, they might invest the $2M up front. > Don't forget to add your ideas for questions and, if possible, their > answers. It's well worth watching the cited video as well as its companion video (823 views now) at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4pvFSG10R8 The big news is that OLPC reports potential buyers have expressed interest in Android, so it has a plan to move the XO-4 that way by YE2013. This poses an implicit challenge to Sugar Labs, namely, could Sugar sit on top of Android rather than Linux Fedora by then? Ron ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Sugar on Android (was Questions for SCaLE 11X)
> On 21 February 2013 09:35, Ron Feigenblatt wrote: >> The big news is that OLPC reports potential buyers have expressed >> interest in Android, so it has a plan to move the XO-4 that way... >> could Sugar sit on top of Android rather than Linux Fedora by then? On 2/21/13, Daniel Narvaez wrote: > I think that's never going to happen unless we come up with a plan. >... I just hope people will realize > that it's urgent to do something about this... Let me hazard mockery by citing a very obvious incentive to getting Sugar to run on Android. If Sugar could be an Android .apk, it could not merely run on some future Android-based OLPC, but on over a million new devices EVERY DAY, closing in on a total of a billion - and be trivial to install in the bargain. Isn't that worth lots more attention than a million Raspberry Pi's, which aren't even full appliances, but merely boards mainly of interest to DIY embedded system guys? Moving to Android would also address OLPC's new Android-tablet line. (Perhaps one might even partner with profit-seeking hardware keyboard aftermarket vendors, by encouraging them to conceptually bundle Sugar.) The game console market has been off-limits to Sugar due to large developer license fees. But what if an Android-based project like the Ouya (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouya ), with zero fees, can prove successful? On the other hand, with limited developer staffing, maybe Sugar Labs should just dig in its heels and concentrate on supporting the nearly 3 million units to which the educational systems of at least two nations have made deep and expensive commitments. Few things have given the information technology industry a worse name than the rate at which it often tries to force users to migrate away from legacy systems, rather than perfect their flaws. The REALLY BIG CHANGE is not from one electronic learning system to a newer one, but from one based on printed matter, blank paper and pencils, to one based on electronics - thereby enabling audio, animation, photography, interactivity, zero-inventory-zero-unit-cost courseware, and total portability. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Questions for SCaLE 11X
On 2/20/13, Caryl Bigenho wrote: > Also, if you think of anything else people are likely to ask that > isn't listed here, please include the question and, if you know it, the > answer. Q. I thought this was (circa 2005) a "$100 laptop" whose price could "only go down over time due to Moore's Law." A. When it was complete, it first turned out to be a $188(?) laptop. And the MINIMAL configuration model unit price STILL (2013) is something like that. Why? To figure this out, I'd start by asking what do the components cost, and what does manufacturing. If component costs were not falling, I'd ask if OLPC was raising the hardware base over time, rather than staying with the equivalents of the original components, if still available. Does holding the sticker price help reduce TCO over time, or is this a matter of aiming at the price point where incipient demand is greatest (affordably better user experience)? Q. I thought this was a machine for the world's "poorest" children. According to http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Deployments, as of January 2011, at which point there were roughly 2 million XOs units, the biggest deployments, accounting for over 3 of 4 machines, were in Uruguay (420,000 + 100,000 + 40,000) = 560,000 and Peru (290,000 + 580,000 + 110,000) = 980,000 And per http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product , the (non-PPP) numbers for these countries and the world in 2011 were: Uruguay--US$13,866 Peru-US$5,904 World---US$10,359 = ( US$69.11 trillion / US$79.39 trillion ) x US$11,900. So that the OLPC seems to be overwhelmingly (3/4+) for children whose nation has a nominal GDP per capita no less than 43% below the world average. While it is wonderful to try helping so-called middle-income countries, is this what OLPC had in mind all along? And if the price of the machine hasn't fallen in 8 years, what sort of help can the masses in poor countries expect, and when? Are machines like the Aakash aka Sakshat just pipe dreams? A. An important strength of the OLPC XO series is how rugged and compatible with hostile rural environments it is, and how easy it is to repair, something the new low-cost tablets don't begin to address. It is not impossible that simpler machines, e.g. those based on audio alone, could do a lot of good in helping the very poorest people in the world. The growing availability of cellphones, even in the poorest countries, is surely a potential platform for learning materials. With the advent of the new tablet, it is clear that OLPC seems to be raising, rather than lowering, the mean income level of its target market spread - new unit sales of tablets to homes in high-income nations, plus the traditional bulk sales of rugged laptops to school systems mainly in middle- (but also in some high- & low-) income nations. Q. Is the OLPC XO series still needed? Since it was on the drawing-board, the price of entry-level computers and appliances (e.g. ebook readers) has plummeted, with a whole world of netbooks come and gone, and an ever-increasing supply of tablets and smartphones. A. Again, the XO is a ruggedized machine - not a trivial consideration when dealing with K-6 students. It is easy and cheap to do basic repairs. And it is backed by a suite of free software based on Sugar and a community of developers. Two entire nations have made deep and expensive commitments to using the XO, and OLPC has a moral responsibility to see that they are not pushed off a cliff due to the evaporation of needed hardware. (At the same time, Sugar Labs has made Sugar available for free for installation on commodity PC gear.) Even today, a nation like Australia, which could afford to spend much more money on PCs, has elected to buy 55,000 XO units. Q. Will OLPC license key technologies to for-profit laptop makers? Have any for-profit firms expressed an interest in doing that? A. ??? Q. Are used XOs resold on eBay et alia? What price do they fetch these days? A. ??? Caryl, I assume you were a G1G1 person. If you ever go somewhere to do demos, I think it would be interesting if you could bring along BOTH an XO and a low-end laptop, showing how easy and quick it is to use SoaS on the latter in a non-conflicting way. This would also allow you to show how networking between the two machines works. With sufficient scripting, I think this would also make a great DailyMotion/YouTube/whatever video for Sugar Labs. Good luck! Ron ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Sugar on Android (was Questions for SCaLE 11X)
On 2/21/13, Sean DALY wrote: > The Sugar Labs Oversight Board confirmed Android compatibility as a > strategic goal at the January 14 meeting [1]... > 1. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Oversight_Board/Meeting_Minutes-2013-01-14 Thanks, Sean. You're the best! ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] [Marketing] Sugar 0.100 or 1.0
On 5/17/13, Daniel Narvaez wrote: > Hello, > we need to decide if we want the next release to be 1.0 or 0.100. One asks, what should one call the software to be released? I will not bore people by repeating why I think "Sugar" is a bad name. By now, its use is fait accompli. But I think one should still mitigate what is perhaps its biggest drawback, the generic character. This can be done by always qualifying the names of products, e.g. via "Sugar by Sugar Labs", or "sugarlabs.org Sugar" or some other convention, as long as the one chosen is NEVER changed again. Now on to the specific question about the version number. About 27 years ago, a credible person teaching the use of PC-based "office suites" to the employees of what was then the world's biggest computer firm told me an amusing story about software version numbers. Today, I find this story is attested to by text on page 389 of "Encyclopedia of Microcomputers", Volume 4 (CRC Press, 1989) online at: books.google.com/books?id=2uy5NlyIzmkC&pg=PA389 , which says: "dBASE is the most well-received database management software package for popular types of microcomputers as well as one of the most popular software programs for microcomputers to date... dBASE, then known as Vulcan, was developed by Wayne Ratliff in 1980. Ratliff had created Vulcan at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California... Almost immediately, a marketing decision was made to change Vulcan's name to dBASE II. Using a lower case character in the name of a microcomputer software package had never been done before... The 'II' was added to imply an improved product, even though dBASE I never existed." With the subsequent rise of Microsoft in the 1990s, many people would soon adopt the rule of thumb that one should never buy the first two versions of any type of software from Microsoft. And with the chronic online security issues which dominated the early years of this century, popular wisdom became that all mass-market software was "beta" (version 0.x) software, i.e. that all of it would need much patching before it was finally abandoned as obsolete. Today was are nonplussed by the frequent, irregular, Internet-mediated notices to upgrade at no charge the version of Acrobat, Java or what not one uses. Version numbers spin like the odometers of racing automobiles. We just grin and bear it, and when practical, archive backup images so that, even without the cooperation of our software purveyors, we can always elect to rollback the "improvements" which may break key stuff. And you can go ask the Redmond people about their recent "new Coke" experience with "version 8" of their flagship product. A new number won't make a product succeed. The bottom line is that by now, I think savvy people in decision-making positions are pretty cynical about the guiding value of version numbers per se. Instead, personally, I am disinclined to update/upgrade any usable software, unless doing so is loudly advocated by trusted, disinterested, third parties. Only then will I look at the release note promises and inquire how fully third-party opinion weighs in on its veracity. And even after that, I will still pause to weigh the opportunity costs of any proposed change. The only reason I will accept at once a recommended "free upgrade" for adequately working software is if the machine in question is attached to the Internet (not all are!), it also holds or handles sensitive data, and the purveyor also screams "mea culpa" that the security-issue boogeyman is hiding under my bed once again. So, someone like me says software publishers can KEEP their "version" numbers. Just give me the build date (so that I know if the same version is running on different machines or not) and if they like, the sequential integer build number (it is shorter, albeit less informative). I never forgot the dBASE story from a quarter-century ago! Maybe many others haven't, either. At this point, the thing which will sell Sugar (or not) to savvy folks is the experience of the national education systems which have adopted it and keep using it. - Ron ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Sugar Digest 2013-08-22
On 8/23/13, fors...@ozonline.com.au wrote: > ...Spirituality for Kids seems to be closely associated with the Kabbalah > Center. > See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabbalah_Centre > > Tony I cannot resist observing that screenwriter Akiva Goldsman, who penned the script for "The DaVinci Code" (which featured lots of "Kabbalistic" anagrams et alia), had earlier written the screenplay for "A Beautiful Mind," about another "coder" - with an MIT colleague named Bender. Need I mention the "Masonic" checkerboard in front of the Media Lab, or from which universities the architect of the Pyramide du Louvre graduated? ;-P Ron ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Monty Python code
On 8/29/13, Walter Bender wrote: > John Nash was a good friend of my algebra professor at Harvard, George > Mackey, my mentor at MIT, Marvin Minsky, and my daughter's diff eq. > professor at MIT, Arthur P. Mattuck. And I have a cousin who lives in > Paris. And my son has been to Giza > > -walter In an age when atoms rather than bits ruled the world, I listened to Prof. Mattuck in 10-250. At long last one knows why the words inscribed on MIT's building 10 (and 7) always use "V" for the letter "U". It never made sense that English words would use a Latin alphabet! (Happy belated beaVer Day.) Anyway, it's comforting to know that Templar riches can be tapped if Sugar Labs ever runs short of funds. - Ron ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
