On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 01:56:39PM +1000, David Brown wrote: > this note embraces several different emails from >Aleksey and <Walter> > > <The Sugar learner engages in the cycle of > activities by using the Sugar tools as individual building blocks,> > > ah.... if the objective were to produce sugar-literacy, that would > make sense, but if sugar were merely a tool to facilitate learning of > things that are going to be of use to the kid in the outside world, > then every effort should be made to make sugar itself as transparent > as possible, rather like google chrome tries to get out of the way > just as internet explorer tries to get in the way with thousands of > toolbars
A couple of general thoughts. My own background, when I started contributing to Sugar Labs, was that I didn't see how Sugar Shell might be particular useful in educational process (but I saw technical potency of having community of "doers" targeted to learning platform, whatever it might be at the end). At the same time, Sugar Shell has OLPC roots when OLPC needed, in my mind, "desktop" environment for XO laptops. And, Sugar Shell is much better, imho, option than regular desktops existed in the past and present right now. I mean, attempt to create entire desktop environment should not be dominant effort on Sugar Labs level when there is no urgent need in having desktop environment (different to "office" desktops) to install on particular hardware. Obviously, high aged students, most likely, will prefer not Sugar Shell as a regular desktop environment. Low aged students, at least in my mind, don't exactly need desktop environment, but rather some environment (maybe pretty isolated from the rest of current desktop) that will be useful for them from teacher's pov. In other words, it will be useful if software, created within the Sugar Labs, will run on regular desktops to give more flexibility for people in the field. For example, particular school/region might decide to spread tablets on Android among students. The "lets port Sugar [as a desktop environment] on Android" sounds scary for me. Much better if there will be a way to launch some Sugar activities as a regular Android apps and having a kind of shell (most likely created from scratch to make it more Android) for cases when students [low aged] need limited/restricted environment. -- Aleksey _______________________________________________ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel