Thanks so much for the warm welcome. Particularly to Patricio, Harriet, and Kevin for sharing such fascinating links.
If it's okay, I'm going to use this list as a sounding board for my thoughts as I explore Sugar. Again, if there's a better place for this type of thing, please let me know! So far, I'm getting the impression that Sugar on A Stick is more or less limited to experimental university-school partnerships, and hasn't yet reached a phase of wide deployment in the hands of schools. Is this an accurate assessment? The reason I'm interested in SOAS is that I work in the traditional "computer lab" setting that is so familiar in K12 schools in the US. This setting has a lot of restrictions and drawbacks. A big one is that, even though the students are surrounded by computers in my lab, and to varying degrees at home, they have no opportunity to take ownership of these devices. They can't monkey about with the precious computers that we adults see as far to precious to fully hand over to children. A very basic symptom of this is that the students simply can't save their work. A save dialog box on most computers is very difficult to learn for the uninitiated. Add to this that all files which don't make it onto a shared network or USB drive are basically instantly lost given the shared nature of school computers. If the kids can't do something as simple as save a piece of writing, the computer is far less useful than a notebook. In this light, SOAS looks very appealing. The promise of handing a student their own _persistant_ computer where they are free to explore is exactly what I've been looking for. (to say nothing of sugar's "Journal" which I think is a brilliant answer to the above problem). I'm curious, how do my motivations match up with how you guys think about sugar? -John _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) [email protected] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
