---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: <[email protected]> Date: Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 4:21 AM Subject: (One Laptop Per Child News) New Comment on Experiencias Pedagogicas in OLPC Uruguay with Rosamel To: [email protected]
There's a new comment on 'Experiencias Pedagogicas in OLPC Uruguay with Rosamel' : http://www.olpcnews.com/countries/uruguay/experiencias_pedagogico_in_olp.html From: mavrothal ?at Sugar Labs we are looking for concrete ways to enhance the level of collaboration and communication between developers and teachers. Any suggestions are welcome!!? Then I?ll give it a try? FOSS developers/project care about/listen to users that know how to interface with the developer world. Teachers on the other hand can tell you what they would like to teach and maybe how. In most cases however, they are trained to follow strict guidelines on ?what? and a specific tradition of ?how?, so may not even volunteer this information. So if the initiative is left to the teachers and/or developers, direct interface can only be limited and spotty at best. What is needed is an ?interface team? that will go ASKING (groups of) teachers what specifically they would like to teach, what kind of material they could provide, what kind of defined goals or tests they have for the class and if they have any idea on how a computer (or Sugar in particular) may help them. They must have the technical knowledge then to formulate ideas or request in a language that developers can ?understand?. E.g. file bug reports, or feature requests for existing activities or Sugar, or draft activity proposals for a new activity/infrastructure in a developer-friendly form and if possible adapt it to Sugar principles (constructivism, collaboration etc). They should NOT do the development themselves (it bias the user input) but they should be able to do/help the alpha-testing. This might exist in some form already but I think the _key issue_ is that the initiative for the contact should lay in an ?interface team? that should go ?hunting?, and not the teachers or the developers. Should be local or on location and the interaction with the teachers should be face to face (that?s the way teachers communicate best, by trait). Should try to organize meetings at school level, having a couple of XOs and/or SoaS-enabled netbooks for an exhibition or visit deployments, and have a predefine but unbiased questioning outline that should trigger input. Should be a group with characteristics from the Education-, Deployment-, Marketing-, Design Team and Bug squad and certainly the ability to communicate effectively with all of these teams. Is short the goal of these team(s) is to extract/stimulate user/putative-user input in personal contacts and direct it to the appropriate channel for action. Like a front-desk that is not waiting for the customers but it goes to them. I guess the last point is how do you find the people for these teams and how to you keep them active and productive. Here comes the work of all the other teams. These people must have the sense that they can make a difference. E.g. that their (the users?) suggestions will be seriously considered, prioritized and implemented, otherwise they?ll loose interest fast (unless you pay them ?:-). If you no longer wish to receive notifications, please click here: http://www.olpcnews.com/mt/plugins/CommentSubscribe/commentsubscribe.cgi?action=unsub&id=420 -- Walter Bender Sugar Labs http://www.sugarlabs.org _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) [email protected] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
