On Sun, Apr 9, 2017 at 7:56 PM, Dave Crossland <d...@lab6.com
<mailto:d...@lab6.com>> wrote:
Hi
Thanks Walter. I'd like to better understand some additional
context before diving in :)
Does this mean Sameer you have stopped the project planning
process you started, and we should not expect you to restart it again?
At the most recent SLOB meeting Samson brought up the fact that we
were still waiting and so I volunteered to write something up to get
the conversation going again.
Walter, are these the goals for this year, or are they your
proposal for the goals for this year?
Not sure I understand what you are asking. I wrote up a draft of goals
but they are not "the goals" until we agree to them.
regards.
-walter
On Apr 9, 2017 3:31 PM, "Walter Bender" <walter.ben...@gmail.com
<mailto:walter.ben...@gmail.com>> wrote:
As per the discussion in the last Suagr Labs Oversight Board
Meeting, I had agreed to write a draft statement of goals for
2017. The document below includes feedback from Samson G. I
hope this document can serve to revitalize our discussion from
2016 that never reached resolution.
Sugar Labs Plans, Goals, Aspirations
What is Sugar Labs?
Sugar Labs creates, distributes, and maintains learning
software for children. Our approach to learning is grounded in
Constructionism, a pedagogy developed by Seymour Papert and
his colleagues in the 1960s and 70s at MIT. Papert pioneered
the use of the computer by children to help engage them in the
“construction of knowledge.” His long-time colleague Cynthia
Solomon expanded up his ideas by introducing the concept of
engaging children in debugging as a pathway into
problem-solving. Their 1971 paper, “Twenty things to do with a
computer”, is arguably the genesis of contemporary movements
such as the Maker Movement and Hour of Code.
At the core of Constructionism is “learning through doing.” If
you want more learning, you want more doing. At Sugar Labs we
provide tools to promote doing. (We focus almost exclusively
on tools, not instructional materials.) However, we go beyond
“doing” by incorporating critical dialog and reflection into
the Sugar learning environment, through mechanisms for
collaboration, journaling, and portfolio.
Sugar Labs is a spinoff of the One Laptop per Child (OLPC)
project and consequently it has inherited many of its goals
from that project. The goal of OLPC is to bring the ideas of
Constructionism to scale in order to reach more children. A
particular focus is on children in the developing world. In
order to meet that goal, Sugar, which was originally developed
for OLPC, was by necessity a small-footprint solution that
required few resources in terms of CPU, memory, storage, or
network connectivity. The major change on focus from the OLPC
project is that Sugar Labs strives to make the Sugar desktop
available to multiple platforms, not just the OLPC XO hardware.
Who develops Sugar?
Sugar Labs is a 100% volunteer effort (although we do
occasionally raise money for paid student internships). Sugar
development and maintenance is incumbent upon volunteers and
hence we strive to provide as much control as possible to our
community members, including our end-users. (In fact, one of
our assertions is that by enabling our users to participate in
the development of the tools that they use will lead to deeper
engagement in their own learning.) Towards these ends, we
chose the GPL as our primary license. It has been said of the
GPL that it “restricts my right [as a developer] to restrict
yours [as a user and potential developer]”, which seems ideal
for a project that wants to engage a broad and diverse set of
learners. But at Sugar Labs we go beyond the usual goals of
FOSS: a license to make changes to the code is not enough to
ensure that users make changes. We also strive to provide the
means to make changes. Our success in this goal is best
reflected in the number of patches we receive from our
community. (We achieve this goal through providing access to
source code and development tools within Sugar itself. We also
actively participate in workshops and internship programs such
as Google Summer of Code, Outreaching, and Google Code-In.)
Who uses Sugar?
Ultimately, our goal is to reach learners (and educators) with
powerful tools and engage them in Constructionist learning.
Currently we reach them in many ways: the majority of our
users get the Sugar desktop preinstalled on OLPC XO hardware.
We have a more modest set of users who get Sugar packaged in
Fedora, Trisquel, Debian, Ubuntu, or other GNU/Linux
platforms. Some users get Sugar on Live Media (i.e., Sugar on
a Stick). Recently Sugarizer, a repackaging of some of the
core Sugar ideas for the browser, has been finding its way to
some users. There are also a number of Sugar activities that
are popular outside of the context Sugar itself, for example,
Turtle Blocks, which has wide-spread use in India. Harder to
measure is the extent to which Sugar has influenced other
providers of “educational” software. If the Sugar pedagogy is
incorporated by others, that advances our goal.
Who supports Sugar?
When we first created Sugar Labs, we envisioned “Local
Labs”—hence the name “Sugar Labs”, plural—that would provide
local support in terms of local-language support, training,
curriculum development, and customizations. This model has not
ever gained the scale and depth envisioned (we can debate the
reasons why), although there are still some active local
communities (e.g., Educa Paraguay) that continue to work
closely with the broader community. There are also individual
volunteers, such as Tony Anderson and T.K. Kang, who help
support individual schools in Rwanda, Malaysia, et al. An open
question is how do we support our users over the long term?
What is next for Sugar?
We face several challenges at Sugar Labs. With the ebb of
OLPC, we have a contracting user base and the number of
professional developers associated with the project is greatly
diminished. How can we expand our user base? How can we
attract more experienced developers? Why would they want to
work on Sugar as opposed to some other project? The meta issue
is how do we keep Sugar relevant in a world of Apps and small,
hand-held devices? Can we meet the expectations of learners
living in a world of fast-paced, colorful interfaces? How do
we ensure that it is fulfilling its potential as a learning
environment and that our users, potential users, and imitators
are learning about and learning from Sugar. Some of this is a
matter of marketing; some of this is a matter of staying
focused on our core pedagogy; some of this a matter of finding
strategic partners with whom we can work.
We have several near-term opportunities that we should leverage:
* Raspian: The Raspberry PI 3.0 is more than adequate to run
Sugar—the experience rivals or exceeds that of the OLPC XO 4.0
hardware. While RPi is not the only platform we should be
targeting, it does has broad penetration into the Maker
community, which shares a synergy with our emphasis on
“doing”. It is low-hanging fruit. With a little polish we
could have an image available for download from the RPi website.
* Trisquel: We have the potential for better leveraging the
Free Software Foundation as a vehicle for promoting Sugar.
Their distro of choice is Trisquel and the maintainer does a
great job of keep the Sugar packages up to date.
* Sugarizer: The advantage of Sugarizer is that it has the
potential of reaching orders of magnitude more users since it
is web-based and runs in Android and iOS. There is some work
to be done to make the experience palatable on small screens
and the current development environment is—at least my
opinion—not scalable or maintainable. The former is a
formidable problem. The latter quite easy to address.
* Stand-alone projects such as Music Blocks have merit as long
as they maintain both a degree of connection with Sugar and
promote the values of the community. It is not certain that
these projects will lead users towards Sugar, but they do
promote FOSS and Constructionist principles. And they have
attracted new developers to the Sugar community.
* School-server: The combination of the School Server and
Sugar desktop is a technical solution to problems facing small
and remote communities. We should continue to support and
promote this combination.
Specific actions: After last year’s Libre Planet conference,
several community members discussed a marketing strategy for
Sugar. We thought that if we could reach influencers, we might
be able to greatly amplify our efforts. There are several
prominent bloggers and pundits in the education arena who are
widely read and who might be receptive to what we are doing.
One significant challenge is that GNU/Linux remains on the far
periphery of the Ed Tech world. Although the “love affair”
with all things Apple seems to be over, the new elephant in
the room—Chromebooks and Google Docs—is equally difficult to
co-exist with. Personally, I see the most potential synergy
with the Maker movement, which is building up momentum in
extra-curricular programs, where FOSS and GNU-Linux are
welcome (hence my earlier focus on RPi). (There are even some
schools that are building their entire curriculum around PBL.)
We can and should develop and run some workshops that can
introduce Sugar within the context of the Maker movement.
(Toward that end, I have been working with some teachers on
how to leverage, for example, Turtle Blocks for 3D printing.)
It is very much a tool-oriented community with little overall
discussion of architectural frameworks, so we have some work
to do. But there is lots of low-hanging fruit there.
regards.
-walter
--
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org
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--
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org
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