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=UTF8&s=books&qid=1222092782&sr=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!) [email protected] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
