'To make Sugar and Sugar activities freely and readily available to learners everywhere'
This is Sugar Lab's first education goal. It is an ambitious yet worthy goal. We are making progress towards this goal. To help get my mind around the issues, I have split the work into four phases: planning, packaging, partnering, and placing. Even if we have the most pedagogically sound and technically correct platform, we have nothing until Sugar is in the hands of students. Before I get ahead of myself, this discussion does not ignore OLPC, rather it focuses on growing the users and developers beyond OLPC. Phase 1. Planning The first phase is planning and communicating. Sugar Labs needed to increase it's development transparency, making it easier for our partners to develop with us and build on top of the Sugar platform. Marco has been doing good work on a road map and establishing a release cycle. This is not something that we necessarily get right on the first try:( By working together Sugar Labs, OLPC and our other partners will improve the process. Phase 2. Packaging. The second phase is packaging. Sugar Labs needed to reduce the barrier to entry to test and use Sugar. Greg and his team have been getting Sugar prepared on Fedora. Jonas has been shouldering the load at Debian. Morgan, Luke and James have been getting Sugar ready to ship on Ubuntu. We are a few weeks away from Fedora based liveCDs and liveUSBs. Ubuntu will follow when some abi-word version issues are resolved. We have still have a way to go before Sugar is available on all desktops. Our next step in the packaging phase is to work on the server side Phase 3. Partnering The third phase is partnering. Sugar Labs needs to partner with existing open source in education projects. Some of the most successful projects are SkoleLinux, a Debian based project that has had good penetration in Northern Europe. In the next few months they will be join Linex , a distribution which originated in the Extremadura region of Spain. K12Linux, formally know as k12LTSP, is base on the Linux Terminal Server Project. Edubuntu is Ubuntu's education projects. There are many other project that are either regionally based, distribution based, or hardware based. The biggest advantage of partnering is our ability to leverage their existing marketing, customer support, and feedback processes. Phase 4. Placing The end goal is placing Sugar in front of students. Realistically, I think we are six months away from non-OLPC turn-key deployments. In the meantime, we need to start developing a network of early adopters and technically proficient teachers to pull us forward. --- If anyone is interested in helping we could use your time, skills, and energy. As always suggestions and criticizes are welcome thanks david
_______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) [email protected] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
