[IAEP] Sugar Digest 2008-12-29
As 2008 comes to an end, it gives me an excuse to do some reflecting on what we are doing as a project and foundation. Most of the following you've read before, but it is helpful—at least to me—to revisit these ideas periodically. The world faces many seemingly intractable problems: war, a faltering economy, an energy crisis, global climate change, to name just a few. My generation has failed to solve these problems. Our children will inherit them from us. But we can leave them something in addition: the means to become a generation of critical thinkers and problem-solvers. The investment that we can make on their behalf that will have the most return is learning. It has a bearing on all of the challenges we face and is essential if our children are to excel in an ever-changing world. Providing every child with the opportunity to learn learning will allow them both to achieve a clarity of purpose and to develop independent means towards their goals. What should children and learn and how should they learn it? Information is about nouns; learning is about verbs. Of course learners should have access to power ideas (I won't debate here which ones we should teach). But they should also engage in exploration and collaboration, appropriating knowledge while engaging in authentic, open-ended problem solving. This can be accomplished within a framework of accountability, one that complements rigorous national standards where learners engage in a process of reflection, public expression, and critique—a portfolio approach. What am I learning? How did I learn it? Why is it important? Can I teach it to others? We have some simple, universal points of leverage: * Everyone is a teacher and a learner. * Humans are social beings. * Humans are expressive. You learn through doing, so if you want to learn more, you want to do more. Love is a better master than duty—you want people to engage in things that are authentic to them, things that they love. Internal motivation almost always trumps external motivations. These ideas are not immiscible with current norms within schools, but too often we fall back on what we know. I challenge you to think of a great learning moment in your life: was it sitting in a classroom, all eyes forward, listening to a lecture or was in when you were trying to solve a problem that was important to you? We know of no better tool for learning than a computer—it is a thing to think with when it is used as a means of knowledge creation. (Unfortunately, it is too often thought of and used as simply a mechanism for information retrieval and rote learning in our schools—the modern equivalent of the mimeograph machine, AKA the purple plague.) Three experiences can characterize a computer-enhanced learning platform: Sharing: The interface should always shows the presence of other learners. Collaboration is a first-order experience. Students and teachers dialog with each other, support each other, critique each other, and share ideas. Reflecting: A Journal should record each learner's activity. The Journal serves as a place for reflection and assessment of progress—the basis of a portfolio. Discovering: We can accommodate a wide variety of users, with different levels of skill in terms of reading, language, and different levels of experience with computing. It is easy to approach, yet it doesn't put an upper bound on personal expression. One should always be able to peel away layers and go deeper and deeper, with no restrictions. This allows the direct appropriation of ideas in whatever realm the learner is exploring: music, browsing, reading, writing, programming, or graphics. The student can always go further. These are the core ideas behind Sugar. By embodying these ideas directly into the affordances provided by the user interface, we can skew the odds that teachers and learners will engage in more than the accumulation and transfer of information. In Sugar, have in hand the tools to reinvent how computers are used for education. Collaboration, reflection, and discovery are readily integrated directly into the learning experience. Children and teachers have the opportunity to use computers on their own terms, reshape, reinvent, and reapply both software and content into powerful learning activities. Learning can be focused on sharing, criticism, and exploration. We have a lot of work ahead of us to refine these tools and to refine the practice around them, but we have a solid beginning. We can raise a generation of critical thinkers, armed with the complementary tools of science and the arts. (Relatively speaking, it is a trivial investment—probably less than the cost of a single bridge to nowhere. All of the necessary tools are freely available under free software licenses. But we do need to invest in engaging teachers, parents, and children in learning learning.) So let's make it happen. ===Sugar Labs=== Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Sugar Digest 2008-12-29
Walter, This is a beautiful email and very Papertian. I know that Seymour would have been delighted to read it and bless your hard work. So it brings tears to my eyes, and I thank you for taking the time to write to us all, and emphasize again and again and again the key values behind OLPC, Sugar, SugarLabs, or other such global learning projects of this kind... These few, but powerful, principals of learning learning -- and using technology to empower expressiveness, creativity, construction, programmability, and teaching during the learning learning process -- are crucial and essential for making our world a better place for years to come. My Very Best Wishes to you and your team, yours, Idit (www.WorldWideWorkshop.org) Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile -Original Message- From: Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com Date: Mon, 29 Dec 2008 09:35:55 To: community-n...@lists.sugarlabs.org Cc: iaepiaep@lists.sugarlabs.org; OLPC Sugarsu...@lists.laptop.org Subject: [Sugar-devel] Sugar Digest 2008-12-29 As 2008 comes to an end, it gives me an excuse to do some reflecting on what we are doing as a project and foundation. Most of the following you've read before, but it is helpful—at least to me—to revisit these ideas periodically. The world faces many seemingly intractable problems: war, a faltering economy, an energy crisis, global climate change, to name just a few. My generation has failed to solve these problems. Our children will inherit them from us. But we can leave them something in addition: the means to become a generation of critical thinkers and problem-solvers. The investment that we can make on their behalf that will have the most return is learning. It has a bearing on all of the challenges we face and is essential if our children are to excel in an ever-changing world. Providing every child with the opportunity to learn learning will allow them both to achieve a clarity of purpose and to develop independent means towards their goals. What should children and learn and how should they learn it? Information is about nouns; learning is about verbs. Of course learners should have access to power ideas (I won't debate here which ones we should teach). But they should also engage in exploration and collaboration, appropriating knowledge while engaging in authentic, open-ended problem solving. This can be accomplished within a framework of accountability, one that complements rigorous national standards where learners engage in a process of reflection, public expression, and critique—a portfolio approach. What am I learning? How did I learn it? Why is it important? Can I teach it to others? We have some simple, universal points of leverage: * Everyone is a teacher and a learner. * Humans are social beings. * Humans are expressive. You learn through doing, so if you want to learn more, you want to do more. Love is a better master than duty—you want people to engage in things that are authentic to them, things that they love. Internal motivation almost always trumps external motivations. These ideas are not immiscible with current norms within schools, but too often we fall back on what we know. I challenge you to think of a great learning moment in your life: was it sitting in a classroom, all eyes forward, listening to a lecture or was in when you were trying to solve a problem that was important to you? We know of no better tool for learning than a computer—it is a thing to think with when it is used as a means of knowledge creation. (Unfortunately, it is too often thought of and used as simply a mechanism for information retrieval and rote learning in our schools—the modern equivalent of the mimeograph machine, AKA the purple plague.) Three experiences can characterize a computer-enhanced learning platform: Sharing: The interface should always shows the presence of other learners. Collaboration is a first-order experience. Students and teachers dialog with each other, support each other, critique each other, and share ideas. Reflecting: A Journal should record each learner's activity. The Journal serves as a place for reflection and assessment of progress—the basis of a portfolio. Discovering: We can accommodate a wide variety of users, with different levels of skill in terms of reading, language, and different levels of experience with computing. It is easy to approach, yet it doesn't put an upper bound on personal expression. One should always be able to peel away layers and go deeper and deeper, with no restrictions. This allows the direct appropriation of ideas in whatever realm the learner is exploring: music, browsing, reading, writing, programming, or graphics. The student can always go further. These are the core ideas behind Sugar. By embodying these ideas directly into the affordances provided by the user interface, we can skew the odds that teachers and learners will engage in more than the accumulation and transfer of information. In Sugar,
Re: [IAEP] [Edu-sig] ACM Urges Obama to Include CS as Core Component ofScience, Math Education
On Fri, Dec 26, 2008 at 11:18 AM, gerry_lowry (alliston ontario canada) gerry.lo...@abilitybusinesscomputerservices.com wrote: Edward Cherlin, in part: APL is coming. NumPy is heavily influenced by APL, as are the math parts of Ada, Common LISP, FORTRAN 90 and beyond, and all functional programming languages. Therefore, J, APL'S successor in ASCII, makes sense in this regard. J has a small footprint and is brilliantly programmed by Roger Hui et al. I have a copy of their published source code from several versions back. It is amazing how Roger used the C preprocessor so that he could write much of J in APL style, essentially giving an object definition for nested arrays containing data of any mixture of types. Further, Ken Iverson was a teacher until his last breath*. With constant insistence that the right way to learn is by exploration. Try to invent tests that tell you what a function is and does before you read the definition. The J IDE makes a great environment for teacher and student experimentation. +1 from me, of course. The big question is whether Eric and Roger would be willing to GPL some version of J. The computational core would do nicely for many purposes, although I would far rather have the complete system, including object-oriented programming, graphics, and GUI development. Both Alan Graham and Arthur Whitney are working on enhanced APLs under a Free license, and have offered them for the XO. Regards, Gerry (Lowry) Best wishes to all for a healthy, happy, and safe holiday season. References: http://sugarlabs.org/go/Creating_textbooks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLPC_XO-1 * http://objectmix.com/apl/152815-ken-iverson-dead-83-a.html __ Gerry Lowry, Principal Ability Business Computer Services ~~ Because it's your Business, our Experience Counts! 68 John W. Taylor Avenue Alliston · Ontario · Canada · L9R 0E1 gerry.lo...@abilitybusinesscomputerservices.com -- Silent Thunder (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) is my name And Children are my nation. The Cosmos is my dwelling place, The Truth my destination. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/User:Mokurai ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Edu-sig] ACM Urges Obama to Include CS as Core Component ofScience, Math Education
On Mon, Dec 29, 2008 at 3:37 PM, kirby urner kirby.ur...@gmail.com wrote: Yeah, lots of pro J sentiment on this list, including by me, author of 'Jiving in J' (got some help with typos from Kenneth, though I think there're still a couple): http://www.4dsolutions.net/ocn/cp4e.html There's a bit of a disconnect with the XO in that I really do think of it as for pre-teens, given the small keys and appearance, was thinking bold designs building on XO would be in the wings by now, but apparently that's too hard a project. Actually, it's more that the computer companies don't believe in the developing country market yet, and don't take its requirements seriously. The idea of a Richard Stallings Stallman type geek using the XO as his main laptop just fills me with evil glee, I'm sorry, such an absurd image. The idea of hitting a pre-teen with Erlang and J, whereas most adults I know are still stuck on Access and Excel, is just a wee bit ludicrous, even for the child prodigy cult people (lots of Smalltalkers in that camp). Let's get a little more real, shall we? Ken would have disagreed strongly with you. He got IBM to loan a school a 360 to teach elementary arithmetic with. What laptop would you give a Peruvian or Cambodian teen, if not an XO? Of course it should run Python, and of course it shouldn't ignore the serious advances the XO represents. Take a look at the Encore Mobilis. Brazil is buying them. I worked for Encore at one time. I'm asking them about putting Sugar on it. Kirby -- Silent Thunder (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) is my name And Children are my nation. The Cosmos is my dwelling place, The Truth my destination. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/User:Mokurai ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Edu-sig] ACM Urges Obama to Include CS as Core Component ofScience, Math Education
My husband was 14 when he did the first install of APL OS for an IBM customer. He had learned APL from his friend, the son of an IBM Research scientist when he was 12, and on the strength of this, got a summer job with the APL group. The idea of hitting a pre-teen with Erlang and J, whereas most adults I know are still stuck on Access and Excel, is just a wee bit ludicrous, even for the child prodigy cult people (lots of Smalltalkers in that camp). Let's get a little more real, shall we? -- Don't think for a minute that power concedes. We have to work like our future depends on it. -- Barack Obama ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Sugar platform overview
Hi all On the threshold of discussing package related issues during next fudcon I think it demands to be pre-discussed (at least face-to-face fudcon discussion is restricted in number of participant). At first, I think just-packaging is not core problem. While packaging sugar for Gentoo, ALTLinux and TamTam for SoaS(Fedora10) I've realized that there is a lack of meta-layer of components in sugar. People package sugar for various distros, they do the same work and at the same time there is no central db for all sugar/sugar-related components. I do not mean wiki pages, I mean programmable entities with meta information about components (like system/sugar dependencies, strings, urls). activities.s.o is called to solve that lack in case of activities(see below about activities.s.o), but there are core sugar activities and system-dependencies related problems (installing valid xulrunner/pygames/...). My sketchy view on that situation: [jhbuild] [meta-db] [non-core activitie] V V [various backends] V V [GNU/Linux distros] ... [activities.s.o] ... V V [specific distros like SoaS] ... [jhbuild] Provides: dependencies, urls to obtain tarballs, etc. in XML format core-sugar-components development environment [non-core activitie] Provides: dependencies, urls to obtain tarballs, etc. in some format contributions from activities authors [meta-db] Provides: meta info for all known sugar components core part, its a collector of all distro-independent stuff: dependencies, patches, build-related issues (make/configure arguments) various content (images, .desktop files), urls to obtain sources, etc. [various backends] Provides: proper way to package sugar templates to generate .rpm .deb .ebuild .autopackage packages including any distro-specific stuff in some cases they are light templates - all specific stuff will be inherited from [meta-db] [GNU/Linux distros] ... [activities.s.o] just use generated packages [specific distros like SoaS] convenient way to generate specific distros just point out desired components and run proper backend I think having central [meta-db] has many benefits: - collaboration: everybody works in one trunk not doing the same work while packaging sugar for various distros patches/content could be moved from [backends] level to [meta-db] level and everybody could benefit from that - flexibility: we could choose any format for sugar packaging, it needs only proper templates - central db is the simplest way to discover sugar and adding new components Note: http://sugarlabs.org/go/DeploymentTeam/jhconvert could be considered as one of the possible prototypes -- Aleksey ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
