Re: [sugar] Sugar Digest 2008-10-27
On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 8:12 PM, Walter Bender <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 15. XOCamp: Marco has written three proposals for the November XOCamp. > (I am working on one for the Portfolio as well.) There are many more > being posted on the Sugar and Devel lists. We're trying to raise money to send more developers to the XOcamp: see: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XOcamp_2/Fundraising This is your chance to help ensure that your favorite issues are represented by someone in person! You can adopt a specific developer and ensure that they attend. If you wanted to make a proposal before, but weren't sure how you could afford to attend, this might be a good time to go ahead and email your proposal to devel@ and sugar@ and add your name to the 'adopt a developer' list on the fundraising page. I hope the end result is a much more inclusive conference, that more completely incorporates the viewpoints of the community. Help out if you can! There's a paypal link to donate on the page above. --scott -- ( http://cscott.net/ ) ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] Sugar Digest 2008-10-27
On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 08:12:37PM -0400, Walter Bender wrote: >2. What would creating a Sugar Activity require from me and what >benefits would it bring? I've been pondering this question in some depth for the last week using my list summarization problem as a model. In hopes of offering something useful to other people facing this question, I have also started an outline covering some of the challenges and goals I have discovered http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/mstone/summarize-activity;a=blob;f=NOTES;hb=HEAD in preparation for a talk that I intend to give on this subject in November. Would you care to speak alongside me? >7. ¿Qué? ¿Cómo? ¿Por qué? ¿Para qui?: We also discussed the role that >a portfolio might play in Sugar. What? How? Why? For who? are >questions that are part of the teacher/student discourse in Peru. They >are also questions that are important to the "select-reflect-perform" >cycle of portfolio assessment. Scott, Rafael, Sebastian and I spend >quite a bit of time discussion possible approaches to building a >Portfolio Activity (we agreed that it makes sense to make it a >separate Activity from the Journal for the time being). My >hair-brained idea is to make a Turtle-Art-like snap-together >programing Activity to create narrative presentations from items >selected from the Journal. I'll make some sketches in the coming days >and post them to the wiki. The team at the ministry was very upbeat >about portfolio tools, regardless of the implementation details. This work sounds like it complements another talk I hope to give in November describing several conversations I've had recently with a mixed tech/learning-team audience on the subject of "how can small activities be combined to make bigger activities?". We have proceeded by identifying three model use cases: 1) Going on a hike: a) Making a manifest of what to take which can be refined for future trips. b) Recording beautiful scenes that I pass. c) Taking measurements at my destination. d) Returning and combining my measurements and observations with those of friends who went on similar hikes to other destinations. 2) Developing a recipe: a) Writing a recipe draft and recording the stages of preparation. b) Sending the draft to a friend who will try to follow the recipe and who will suggest improvements. 3) Running a physics jam: a) Preparing for the jam by snagging some sample physics-based activities. b) Making a new physics-based activity, perhaps by modifying one of the samples. c) Capturing developer commentaries and screenshots explaining the new activity as it is created. d) Publishing the results to, e.g., a wiki. which we are in the process of exploring with paper mockups. Questions: * Do you have favorite model interactions that you'd like to share? * Anyone else want to talk about this subject in November besides Walter and me? >9. On collaboration >: Juliano Bittencourt has stirred the pot regard the Sugar >collaboration model. In a discussion on the developers mailing list >(http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-October/020588.html) he >raises the issue of synchronous vs asynchronous collaboration, arguing >that too much emphasis has been given over to the former, when the >latter is generally more useful in a school setting. I agree with him >to a great extent. I agree. (Tangentially, one fundamental goal for my summarization project (described above) is to experiment with "async-collab" in the sense in which summarization "collaborates" with the data being summarized as more data accumulates over time. (If I have success in this area, then I might try something fancier too. We'll see.)) >To some extent, Juliano's point was less in regard to synchrony and >more in regard to the lack of any means within Sugar to maintain >persistence of a collaboration over a longer time frame than a single >interactive session. This omission is will in part be filled by >services external to Sugar, such as Moodle or AMADIS. However, some >aspects of the yet-to-be-implemented Bulletin Board would also meet >these needs. (Better versioning in the Journal/Datastore—in the >roadmap for 0.84—will play a role as well.) The Bulletin Board is >designed to be a place for the persistent sharing of objects and >actions between a group of collaborators. In some sense, one could >think of it as a share, persistent clipboard. Bulletin Boards would be >created in support of group projects that involve multiple activities >and multiple sessions. We should develop a requirements document and >architectural description of what is needed in order to both best >leverage existing tools and set realistic goals for any Sugar >developments. I think that the technologies you mention are all incidental to the essence of asynchronous collaboration, which I take to be diff-and-merge (or perhaps 'guide
[sugar] Sugar Digest 2008-10-27
=== Sugar Digest === 1. Lima: Sugar was well represented in Peru this past week. Rafael Ortiz and Sebastian Silva orgainzed a translation sprint at the University San Martin de Porres. SJ Klein and C. Scott Ananian then joined them to run a Game Jam. The week culminated with a Freedom and Open Source Day, in which we were joined by many members of the Peruvian Free Software community, including Nicolas Valcárcel from the Ubuntu community. My talk at the conference was titled "What the learning community can learn from Free Software." One of my slides made the point that sostenibilidad ≠ sustentabilidad. Both words translate into "sustainability" in English, but Dr. Arq. Guillermo E. Gonzolo from CEEMA in Argentina pointed out the subtle distinction to me—one that I find quite interesting: sostenibilidad is static; sustenabilidad is dynamic. Putting XP on laptops is about maintaining the status quo (sostenibilidad), while Linux, which is at the beginning rather than end of its life cycle is where the true "unlimited potential" can be found (sustenabildad). I'll post my slides on the wiki when I get a chance. 2. What would creating a Sugar Activity require from me and what benefits would it bring? I was asked this two-part question from a software developer. The Sugar Almanac is a good starting point for answering the first part (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar_Almanac). The second part is complex and rather than giving a glib answer, I want to take some time to give it some thought. The obvious answer, the chance to touch the lives of hundreds of thousands of children, is OK, but I think we need to develop more of a case. 3. Deployment roadmap: David Farning is developing a deployment roadmap with the goal to make Sugar and Sugar Activities "freely and readily available to learners everywhere." Sounds good to me. (See http://www.sugarlabs.org/go/DeploymentTeam/Roadmap). 4. Sugar on a stick: Caroline Meeks has been maintaining a page in the wiki tracking our progress with developing a turnkey USB key solution for schools (See http://sugarlabs.org/go/DeploymentTeam/School_Key ). 5. Printing : Printing was hotly debated on the Sugar list (http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-October/009403.html). There were two discussions: Should Sugar support printing and How should Sugar support printing. It seems that there is not consensus on the first question—it isn't clear that there needs to be. (Printing is not a realistic option in the Peru deployment, but that shouldn't preclude its use in other places, necessarily. To me, the most compelling argument in favor of printing that was put forth is it lets you put the work of the students on display.) As to how to do it, there is the question of what affordances we should be providing (in which Activities) and whether or not we should be supporting network printing vs the installation of print drivers. The latter question is more of a distribution question than one for Sugar to resolve. 6. Feedback from Peruvian Ministry of Education: C. Scott Ananian and I made multiple visits to the MEC office in Lima to discuss Sugar 0.82 and the OLPC XO deployment. We got some great feedback, including a healthy list of bugs, one of the most pressing being that audio files are seemingly not importing properly when trying to create a new game in the Memorize Activity. The reason this is important is that Memorize is a nice tool introducing letter and word sounds to new readers. Another bug—or point of confusion—was in regard to how the Record Activity is saved to the Journal. Record sessions and photos created by Record both show up when doing an image search in the Journal. This is fine when in browsing within the Journal itself, but caused confusion when trying to import an image into Write. If you tried to import a session instead of a photo, the import failed. It was nice to hear that was there was a distinct impression (from the user perspective) that "it is faster!!" In general the new Home View was well received: One simple idea we explored together was the use of the list view "star" option to restrict the number of Activity icons appearing on the Home View. This lets a teacher focus the class on a small set of Activities related to the goals being set for the students. It may be possible to have different collections of Activities tagged in the Journal for easy maintenance of such a scheme. The pedagogical team at the ministry has been developing some beautiful curricula guides for Sugar. They describe projects that encompass multiple activities towards a common goal, such as creating a newspaper or a story about your community. The guides are targeting different skill levels and they beautifully illustrate pedagogical goals without being overly prescriptive. The multi-page guides are intended for teachers. Single-page instructions are also being created for students. As they complete a few more, they will make them available for downloading. 7. ¿Qu
