On Tue, 11 Nov 2008, Greg Smith wrote:
Hi All,
On the question of Open Source to develop applications which are not
necessarily used by the people who write the code. That is a challenge
which I think we should address directly.
Greg D's strategy (programmers code for themselves then we re purpose it
for schools) may be the most fruitful in terms producing lots of
applications quickly. I certainly hope so.
To be clear, this is not exactly what I said. The spirit is correct --
have more developers involved more directly with Sugar -- but that really
only helps with (a) the core of Sugar itself, and (b) activities that are
not strictly educational but have educational uses (Browse, Write, Chat,
maybe some games, etc.)
I think that producing useful activities that are intended solely for
kids, with a strong pedagogical element, is still a largely unsolved
problem.
Having more developers in the ecosystem definitely helps mitigate that
problem, though. Therefore, my first goal is to create more developers
who understand Sugar and use it effectively. Making Sugar available in
all the major distros is a crucial step down this road. Seems like
orthogonal work, I know, but from my perspective it's absolutely critical.
It still leaves open the question of how to adapt the result for use in
classes and how to tie the applications in to the learning theory. Maybe
that last stage is a job for paid programmers instead of open source
volunteers. As more applications become available for the XO/Sugar we
can see which get the most demand in schools and go from there.
On the other hand, I hope David is correct that we can find people who
will work on things which the teachers and students need, even if they
don't "scratch your own itch". In addition to finding such programmers,
the challenge is to define what teachers and students need in a way that
is easily actionable.
This is a key challenge for almost every free software project. The
majority of the hard work is actually articulating what work needs to be
done, in sufficient detail to make it easily actionable. That work is
surprisingly difficult. :)
We have lots of input from the field and some input from educational
theorists. The hard part is focusing that in to something easily coded.
There is one nice synergy between the educational theory and the
development strategy. I believe that a tenet of the educational theory
is that teachers and students together choose the most relevant topics
for learning. If programmers and users also follow that strategy of
working together to choose the relevant "topics" maybe we could pioneer
a new paradigm for open source development.
I wrote a brief explanation of this strategy here:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Gregorio
Yep. Could work. Assuming enough talented and motivated developers in
the first place, of course.
On the question of asynchronous vs synchronous collaboration. If you
read the beginning of the thread
(http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-October/020588.html)
you'll see that neither Juliano nor I are opposed to synchronous
collaboration ala "CollAbiWord". Juliano was just pointing out that we
also need asynchronous collaboration (e.g. multi-kid projects) and that
wasn't on the roadmap.
We need both and my impression is that the shortest path to major new
functionality is on the asynchronous side. Any help defining the
requirements and scope of that is welcome.
Please add your input here:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#Asynchronous_collaboration
We need more input on the educational research to see if either
synchronous or asynchronous is better correlated to the theory. Any
pointers or comments welcome.
Clearly the idea of learning by creating projects is central to the
educational strategy (see
http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/41706?show=full).
So is learning by doing and working together. I'm just not sure if it
has to be real time or not.
I can say that the kids love the real time write sharing when it works
and they hate it when it fails. See:
http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/olpc-sur/2008-May/000118.html
When it worked: "they loved it ... it seemed like magic"
When the collaboration broke: "¡QUË DESILUSIÖN!!!!"
I think that's gonna be my new sig. :)
--g
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