Re: [IAEP] Design ideas for a.sl.o and sugarlabs
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 10:36:46AM -0700, ,Josh williams wrote: I'm pretty sure that I'm subscribed under the email of j...@tucson-labs.com , I accidentally sent an email through this account so I signed up on it as well. I'll have to check again, thanks. A trick (to all of you): If you use multiple addresses but only want to receive a single copy of each list post, then after subcribing additional addresses you can go into the subscription page and disable sending to it. (I would prefer spam approaches that was not punishing users like this, but that's harder to do) - Jonas Your mailinglist clerk - -- * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist og Internet-arkitekt * Tlf.: +45 40843136 Website: http://dr.jones.dk/ [x] quote me freely [ ] ask before reusing [ ] keep private -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAkmpG6QACgkQn7DbMsAkQLg1AACeMAX7unLv9rxxg9kBt1YOV4Z6 0rIAn36I4x+6GOuV1q99NvFoPNPqu5o5 =AQXo -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Observations and feature requests based on watching a preK class use a computer lab
Hi, Check out http://voicethread.com. I think that is the next level you were refering to. Tony Caroline wrote: Today I visited a computer lab at a school in Boston where 3-5 year olds (the PreK class) were using the computers in the computer lab. The teacher tried to get them to use Kidspirations to look at and stamp bugs but they rebelled. All they wanted to do was use KidPix. We need a paint program that is as cool as KidPix or we will suffer the same fate. They will turn off Sugar and go back to Windows to use KidPix! In Kidpix the students learned that they need to use the mouse and not the keyboard. By the time I left all students had managed to learn to use the mouse to make something on the screen. I saw some kids make the connection that they had done something with the mouse and it had appeared on the screen. Some were painting with colors, others were stamping with images. Some kids had learned how to erase the screen and start over. Clearly learning was going on. I thought to myself, what would take this lesson to the next level for these students. I think, based on the interactions the teachers were having as they spent individual time with the students, that it would be valuable to these students to begin to tell stories about their pictures. It would be cool if the kids could record a voice note when they saved a picture in the journal. This could help the teachers move them towards telling stories about thier pictures. I think that would in turn motivate them to want to control what they did with the picture more. Our goal with the journal is to get kids to reflect on thier work. For many of the students in the age range we serve typing that reflection is going to be a challenge and we might well get more thoughtful reflection if they could speak it. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] New Sugar on a Stick image available
On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 21:25, Carol Farlow Lerche c...@msbit.com wrote: Is there a place/page to watch to discover what is blocking SOAS from working as an SD/USB boot on the XO hardware? I believe someone posted recently that there were a few blockers that were being worked on. Is this correct? Did some light testing, and the only big issue I found was font size. But is also annoying that about half of the boot attempts failed because of a mmc stack trace. But removing and inserting the sd card again before booting seems to work 100% Regards, Tomeu On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 12:15 PM, Simon Schampijer si...@schampijer.de wrote: Weeeh! A new Soas-1 is out. It contains all the bug fixes that made it into head in the last days. And you can use Wade Brainerd's fabulous Typing Turtle to get you going in 10 finger typing - /me won already a Gold Medal. Get it [1] when it is still sticky! News: Sugar - Don't add_bundle on activity dir change when installed already #442 - Make mute sound code togglable - Keyhandler: Map XF86Search to the journal search - Keyhandler: Catch all exceptions (thanks to silbe) - Give time for atexit to execute when closing the emulator #435 - Dont hardcode the maximum amount of entries to cache in the journal #72 - Add standard 'Print' shortcut to take a screenshot - Use keyboard specific keys to set the volume #430 - Update to new DBus policy #307 - Fix palette appearance on right-click #403 - Switch to existing instance of an activity if it's already running #410 Sugar-toolkit - Process .py files in subdirectories './setup genplot' #391 (alsroot) - Improve error handling of calls to XGrabKey #431 - Cleanup temp files at exit #435 - Let activities provide their own implementation of get_preview() #152 - Show/Hide the color palette correctly (#374) - Support setting None as the secondary text #384 - Only display one line in the secondary text of a clipping palette #384 - Switch to existing instance of an activity if it's already running #410 - Reveal the palette on right click on an activity icon #409 [1] http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/snapshots/1/Soas-200902271904.iso In behalf of the Sugar community, Your Soas Team ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. -- Upton Sinclair ___ Sugar-devel mailing list sugar-de...@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] new site feedback
Hi, I must recognize that I like the new site ;) Though frankly I cannot say much about its performance with the different groups of people it is targeted to. Perhaps we could get some feedback from tests with teachers, random parents, kids, journalists, etc? Check out how well this people can get to know what sugar is, etc? Something I really love is Dongyun Lee's illustrations, they are very beautiful. I would like to see some more graphical stories about different aspects of learning with Sugar, from different authors with very different styles, that would get added to the right side of other pages, and perhaps also aggregated from one single page. And perhaps one day published on a paper book, even if I'm not a big fan of killing trees ;) About the video, it's a pity that the free-form view in the home view is featured there, as users haven't liked it much (we held a votation) and we were planning to remove it. AFAIK this was an unilateral decision from NN that never was explained properly. Any chance to get that changed? Perhaps could help to the debate about this site favouring stylish-ness over functionality to point out to one nice example of what a functional project site may be in today's open source circles: http://do.davebsd.com/ Thanks all for your hard work and your frank opinions, I'm really thrilled to see so much effort put towards showing off what Sugar is intended to become. HTH, Tomeu ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Which Activities should we promote and create our first trainings on?
Based on Sean's feedback on the new site, and the work I'm doing with Terri trying to create training materials, I'd like to ask for a discussion as to which activities we want to put forward and why as we introduce Sugar to people. Currently most of our materials discusses the generalities of the platform. But as we extend our target audiances to parents and teachers they just don't have the background in what computers can do to be able to grasp the generalities. I think we need to build from specific activities, experiences using those activities, then guided reflection on those experiences to help them understand the general principals. In simpler terms, what are the activities that best show off Sugar. What should people do with them to get how Sugar is different. The goal will be to create a professional development sylabus. We will probably also create a series of cards on each activity. So please voice what Activitiy you think we should focus on, why, and what specific experience we should guide a parent or teacher through. My request is that you go for depth, talk about a only a few activities, or only one, but really explain how it shows off Sugar and what sort of experience with that activity is valuable. Thanks! -- Caroline Meeks Solution Grove carol...@solutiongrove.com 617-500-3488 - Office 505-213-3268 - Fax ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Fwd: [Sugar-devel] [Bugs] #448 UNSP: Addons.sl.o doc category should be changed
Just forwarding the below to IAEP to catch more educator/teacher type eyeballs: Begin forwarded message: From: Gary C Martin g...@garycmartin.com Date: 28 February 2009 15:54:17 GMT To: Tomeu Vizoso to...@sugarlabs.org Cc: sugar-de...@lists.sugarlabs.org Subject: Re: [Sugar-devel] [Bugs] #448 UNSP: Addons.sl.o doc category should be changed On 28 Feb 2009, at 14:46, Tomeu Vizoso wrote: Hi, maybe the activity team can discuss and implement a new set of Categories for activities? I just copied the existing ones at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activities/All Aha, I did wonder where the category list came from. I'm sure the activity team would be happy to discuss, but if anyone, I think educators/teachers should be providing us input on this concrete list. The current categories are: Search Discovery Documents News Chat, mail and talk Media creation Programming Maths Science Maps Geography Media players Games Teacher tools In the addons site these categories work like tags (un-like the original presentation at the wiki), so an Activity can now be tagged in multiple categories. To get the ball rolling; this list does seems a little on the technical side, built around activity code that happened to appear at the time. I'd quite like to see things simplified to cover more regular study areas (reading, writing, art, maths, science, programming, geography, communication, games, etc). --Gary Regards, Tomeu On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 19:00, SugarLabs Bugs bugtracker-nore...@sugarlabs.org wrote: #448: Addons.sl.o doc category should be changed -- +- Reporter: cafl | Owner: dfarning Type: enhancement| Status: new Priority: Unspecified by Maintainer | Milestone: Unspecified by Release Team Component: activities.sugarlabs.org |Version: Unspecified Severity: Minor | Keywords: Distribution: Unspecified| Status_field: Unconfimed -- +- reading writing? words? Needs to encompass word games, reading, writing... -- Ticket URL: http://dev.sugarlabs.org/ticket/448 Sugar Labs http://sugarlabs.org/ Sugar Labs bug tracking system ___ Bugs mailing list b...@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/bugs ___ Sugar-devel mailing list sugar-de...@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel ___ Sugar-devel mailing list sugar-de...@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] http://www-testing.sugarlabs.org/
On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 11:56 AM, Benjamin M. Schwartz bmsch...@fas.harvard.edu wrote: I forcefully object to everything about this website. It is ugly, off-putting, unnavigable, unreadable, buggy, empty of any helpful information, and in many other ways among the worst websites I could possibly imagine for this purpose. It is a very cool javascript tech demo, which is not at all useful here. +1. 'It should be immediately evident where the things people actually want are, like what's up with you and OLPC? and how do I help and how do I get the latest version' - Thomas Doggette The current setup overwhelms the reader with a wall of text, and very few items are relevant to most people. -- Luke Faraone http://luke.faraone.cc ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Which Activities should we promote and create our first trainings on?
On Sat, Feb 28, 2009 at 6:33 AM, Caroline Meeks carol...@solutiongrove.com wrote: Based on Sean's feedback on the new site, and the work I'm doing with Terri trying to create training materials, I'd like to ask for a discussion as to which activities we want to put forward and why as we introduce Sugar to people. Currently most of our materials discusses the generalities of the platform. But as we extend our target audiances to parents and teachers they just don't have the background in what computers can do to be able to grasp the generalities. I think we need to build from specific activities, experiences using those activities, then guided reflection on those experiences to help them understand the general principals. In simpler terms, what are the activities that best show off Sugar. What should people do with them to get how Sugar is different. The goal will be to create a professional development syllabus. We will probably also create a series of cards on each activity. This fits well with the Earth Treasury plan to create digital textbooks on every subject using embedded Sugar software. So please voice what Activity you think we should focus on, why, and what specific experience we should guide a parent or teacher through. I am using Turtle Art to teach a variety of math and programming topics. Alan Kay's VPRI has a lot of teaching materials in Smalltalk (Squeak, Etoys). We will use Measure and Record in science. The music and art programs stand on their own merits. Write and Browse are general-purpose tools. TAPortfolio will be important for classroom presentations. The OLE Nepal counting program is credited with bringing children from 2nd grade to 6th grade performance in arithmetic, a remarkable achievement that shows off more than the current Sugar software. Actually finding out what the educational deficiencies are in a system, and building tools to deal with them, is revolutionary stuff. We can look forward to software to address individual learning issues, which students will be able to create for each other or themselves. My request is that you go for depth, talk about a only a few activities, or only one, but really explain how it shows off Sugar and what sort of experience with that activity is valuable. I'm not ready yet, but I should have something to show next month. Thanks! -- Caroline Meeks Solution Grove carol...@solutiongrove.com 617-500-3488 - Office 505-213-3268 - Fax ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- 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://earthtreasury.net/ (Ed Cherlin) ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] First competitor?
Christian Marc Schmidt writes: On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 8:58 AM, Caroline Meeks solutiongrove at gmail.comwrote: On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 8:56 AM, Christian Marc Schmidt christianmarc at gmail.com wrote: I think we'd need to know the specific points of contention. I can't imagine which design decisions might work less well on PCs. Sugar remains significantly easier to use than standard PC operating systems... Put Sugar in front of the average adult sitting alone, without any instruction, for 20 minutes. I doubt many of them would agree with you. Caroline, I agree this is a challenge. Of course I would argue that this is due to our familiarity with current desktop-based operating systems and the difficulty of breaking old habits. Sugar was designed from the ground up, and hence does require a bit of a learning curve for those of us who use other systems (but for new users should prove much easier to learn). So our marketing needs to continuously address that Sugar is not designed for adults, but for children! Never mind the adults. Think of the children! should prove much easier is a hope, not a fact. Children struggle HORRIBLY with Sugar, especially if they don't have a real mouse to use. They do like playing with it, sure, at least until the frustration sets in. I have never seen a child successfully use the journal. That's not surprising; it is a black hole for data as far as I can tell. I have never seen a child successfully use the hover palettes. They also totally kill user efficiency and are incompatible with the long-awaited touchscreen. I have never seen a child successfully use the frame. It's always there when you don't want it, and usually not there when you do. Regular computers have an interaction device that is essentially always there but leaving at least two sides of the screen free of trouble. (original MacOS menu, OS/2 Presentation Manager thing, Windows taskbar, fvwm GoodStuff, etc.) I guess the thing to learn is that getting rid of time-tested GUI design is unlikely to produce good results. Uh, now what? ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Adults and Sugar
Caryl Bigenho writes: One man sat in front of the XO for several minutes with a puzzled look on his face. Finally he asked, Where is your file manager? I explained that he needed to forget everything he knew about computers and just pretend he was a child again. He got up in disgust and left. He asked a simple question and you blew him off. Adults use communication to avoid wasting time. Had you tried to explain, you might have gotten better feedback. Of course, then you need to avoid being dismissive of the feedback. Meanwhile, nearby, a little boy, about 8-years-old was happily exploring Sugar. I'm sure he was, but exploring is not the same thing as being productive. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Price point plus sales to individuals
On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 6:37 PM, Mitch Bradley w...@laptop.org wrote: Okay, so those of you who are keen on there being a way for individuals to buy XOs at $2xx dollars should place a volume order, set up a web site, and start raking in the dough. Earth Treasury has wanted to do that for more than a year, although raking in the dough was not part of the vision. It would be hard work for a thin margin at the best. It has not been possible, for several reasons. o Initially, it was cash in advance with no delivery date. Sixty days later, we would get a date within the next year. So delivery within three months is a great improvement. o We never got the same terms twice when we asked. o We didn't have and couldn't get the financing. o GiveMany/Save the World for orders of 100 or 1,000 units was cancelled. I will now assume some fudge factors that can be replaced with real numbers with some research. So we can say that we can order 10,000 units @ $200 and change, or $2 million+. There is a volunteer support gang, which we assume we can work with. Amazon is willing to handle fulfillment, in principle, if OLPC asks nicely, but only if we can assure delivery of orders within a month. That means we have to place our order at least two months before we can start selling. I will also suppose that we can get firm terms so that we can present a real plan to any potential funding source. Then it turns out that we are able to begin the discussion with several possible sources, and we have in fact started a discussion, and will start others. This is not to say that we have a full business plan, and we certainly don't have funding lined up, but we are in the range where we can discuss the possibility. So if anybody wants to help write the details of a business plan and some funding applications (commercial or non-profit). The plan also has to include setting up paid support services for buyers to deal with necessary infrastructure, training, developing teaching materials, and the like. We have started the Digital Textbook project with various partners, and we have a good idea where we can get the other partners needed. Obviously you guys know something about making a few bucks per machine that has eluded the OLPC organization, so go for it. As the old canard says, put your money where you mouth is. I'll have to see if I can get someone who actually has money to do that. I'll let you know. -- 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://earthtreasury.net/ (Ed Cherlin) ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] CurrWiki, documenting deployments (was Re: IAEP Digest, Vol 11, Issue 47)
On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 9:54 PM, Bryan Berry br...@olenepal.org wrote: Some comments, Most of the folks running deployments are so busy running them that they don't have time to document their work or share their experiences. Greebo is a notable exception and I am continually astounded by her productivity and quality. I think it would be extremely helpful for someone outside of a deployment to go to a well-run one-- and not necessarily large one-- and document their work. I would particularly like to learn about David Leeming's experiences in Oceania. He may be doing the best job of running deployments in the world right now but he doesn't have time to document his work. I would be delighted to do that, and so would FLOSS Manuals. Let's talk offline. Christoph Derndorfer is coming to Nepal for the summer and we hope that he can help us better document our work and communicate our requirements. I will try to make a better effort at joining the IRC meetings for deployments. When are they again? From Michael's questions: * Is there anything we could spend our time on which would yield a greater return on investment? The most helpful thing I can think of right now would be a special-purpose website/wiki only for curricula. +1 Earth Treasury would be happy to host that on our new server, as part of our Digital Textbooks initiative. Each curriculum should map to a course in moodle.sugarlabs.org. We need to start the process of mapping standard curricula to the open-source resources (quizzes, readings, activities) that are available in some sort of intelligible order. Then an interested developer or educator could start plugging in the holes. Really, all is needed is some kind of special-purpose wiki mapped to moodle. No special software. The hard and incredibly *unsexy* work is uploading the n curricula from X states/countries and mapping it to sequenced materials. We can talk about quality, pedagogy ad infinitum but the vast majority of teachers don't have a starting point to even provide mediocre education beyond what they are currently provided by their own governments. -- 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://earthtreasury.net/ (Ed Cherlin) ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] http://www-testing.sugarlabs.org/
On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 2:55 PM, Carol Farlow Lerche c...@msbit.com wrote: I second Michael's suggestion about a web design that echoes the Sugar design. Think how useful this would be if carried to school servers. And as a basis for web-served Sugar-like activities. This would be delightful. * No text on the main page * Single-keypress return to the main page * Personalizable main page navigation : determining which sections of the site are linked from your main page * A neighborhood view showing who else is browsing the site at the moment * Pop-up user preferences, including your username and colors SJ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Adults and Sugar
Date: Sat, 28 Feb 2009 15:17:23 -0500 Subject: Re: [IAEP] Adults and Sugar From: acaha...@gmail.com To: cbige...@hotmail.com; iaep@lists.sugarlabs.org Caryl Bigenho writes: One man sat in front of the XO for several minutes with a puzzled look on his face. Finally he asked, Where is your file manager? I explained that he needed to forget everything he knew about computers and just pretend he was a child again. He got up in disgust and left. He asked a simple question and you blew him off. Adults use communication to avoid wasting time. Had you tried to explain, you might have gotten better feedback. Of course, then you need to avoid being dismissive of the feedback. No, I didn't blow him off at all. I started to explain it to him and as you might say he blew me off. Meanwhile, nearby, a little boy, about 8-years-old was happily exploring Sugar. I'm sure he was, but exploring is not the same thing as being productive. It was his first experience. He took a picture and was delighted. Other children came by who had used the XO before and actually showed some of the adults how to create things in Squeak and Synth Lab. This is not what I would call not being productive in either case. The next time you spend an entire weekend managing a booth, alone most of the time, with 7 XOs and hundreds of visitors and no lunch breaks I will give more credence to your remarks. Thank goodness Jonathan Pfeiffer came to help out on Sunday and my non-techie husband handed me food as I was talking to people about the XO, Sugar, the CP, volunteering and the like. Sorry for the rant folks, those of you who know me know this is very rare. Caryl ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] First competitor?
On Sat, Feb 28, 2009 at 12:04 PM, Albert Cahalan acaha...@gmail.com wrote: Christian Marc Schmidt writes: On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 8:58 AM, Caroline Meeks solutiongrove at gmail.comwrote: On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 8:56 AM, Christian Marc Schmidt christianmarc at gmail.com wrote: I think we'd need to know the specific points of contention. I can't imagine which design decisions might work less well on PCs. Sugar remains significantly easier to use than standard PC operating systems... Put Sugar in front of the average adult sitting alone, without any instruction, for 20 minutes. I doubt many of them would agree with you. Caroline, I agree this is a challenge. Of course I would argue that this is due to our familiarity with current desktop-based operating systems and the difficulty of breaking old habits. Sugar was designed from the ground up, and hence does require a bit of a learning curve for those of us who use other systems (but for new users should prove much easier to learn). So our marketing needs to continuously address that Sugar is not designed for adults, but for children! Never mind the adults. Think of the children! should prove much easier is a hope, not a fact. Children struggle HORRIBLY with Sugar, especially if they don't have a real mouse to use. They do like playing with it, sure, at least until the frustration sets in. I have never seen a child successfully use the journal. That's not surprising; it is a black hole for data as far as I can tell. I've seen several children in Khairat (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Khairat_school) use the Journal quite deftly. They pulled up videos from two months ago and showed it to me when I was there last year. This was build 656. I also saw them use the zoom keys quite naturally. What surprised me the most was that they had *no* prior exposure to computers whatsoever. The teacher (Mr. Surve) would yell out in Marathi Go to the neighborhood, join the mesh. The children not knowing what neighborhood or meshmeans, would press the zoom key and join the shared activity. I personally found their level of ease somewhat incredible, considering that they had the XOs for 10 months at that point. BTW, to see the typical din of this classroom, here's a clip http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gL3OXaM9s0c I have never seen a child successfully use the hover palettes. They also totally kill user efficiency and are incompatible with the long-awaited touchscreen. Again, I didn't see Khairat children struggle with palettes. They actually used it while I watched over their shoulders and drew scenes quite nicely. Here's one http://www.zooomr.com/photos/sameerverma/6300776/ I have never seen a child successfully use the frame. It's always there when you don't want it, and usually not there when you do. Regular computers have an interaction device that is essentially always there but leaving at least two sides of the screen free of trouble. (original MacOS menu, OS/2 Presentation Manager thing, Windows taskbar, fvwm GoodStuff, etc.) I guess the thing to learn is that getting rid of time-tested GUI design is unlikely to produce good results. Not so sure, because what you are saying is that time tested GUI designs are a finite set, and all the good designs are taken. Sameer Uh, now what? Keep plugging away :-) Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Information Systems San Francisco State University San Francisco CA 94132 USA http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://opensource.sfsu.edu/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Activities Under Emulation
Hi All, I am working on a presentation I will be doing about OLPC and Sugar at a huge educator's conference in Palm Springs next week. I realize I need some nitty-gritty type info about the current state of Sugar emulation on PCs and Macs. Can anyone fill me in on the latest, most up-to-date answers to these questions? Maybe Luke? Anyone else? Will the latest Live CD work with both PCs and Macs? (most educators prefer and have Macs) Will the latest SOAS work with both PCs and Macs? Regarding various Activities...which run best under emulation? Will the following specific activities work under emulation: Record (on machines with built in cameras and mics)? Measure (on machines with built in mics)? Distance (on machines with bluetooth)? Write? Paint? EToys? Squeak? TurtleArt? The TamTam suite of activities? I have heard there is a way that other types of computers running under emulation can collaborate. Has anyone tried this successfully. What did you use and how did you do it? Was the neighborhood view and inviting collaborators enabled? I'm sure I haven't thought of everything, but this will give me a start. Thanks, Caryl ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Adults and Sugar
On Sat, Feb 28, 2009 at 12:17 PM, Albert Cahalan acaha...@gmail.com wrote: Caryl Bigenho writes: One man sat in front of the XO for several minutes with a puzzled look on his face. Finally he asked, Where is your file manager? I explained that he needed to forget everything he knew about computers and just pretend he was a child again. He got up in disgust and left. He asked a simple question and you blew him off. Adults use communication to avoid wasting time. Had you tried to explain, you might have gotten better feedback. Of course, then you need to avoid being dismissive of the feedback. Meanwhile, nearby, a little boy, about 8-years-old was happily exploring Sugar. I'm sure he was, but exploring is not the same thing as being productive. Why does it have to be about being productive, and not about exploring? I deal with plenty of college students who all try to be productive, but never really learned to explore. Guess what? We have become a sausage factory of sorts! Crank the handle and out comes ground meat, ready to be packaged and sold. Critical thinkers? No. Analytical? No. Monkey see, monkey do? All the time! Seeing children in Khairat use the journal with ease removed any doubts in my mind as to why Sugar doesn't have a file manager. These kids don't even know what a file looks like! Why bother with a metaphor that is as clear as mud for them? Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Information Systems San Francisco State University San Francisco CA 94132 USA http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://opensource.sfsu.edu/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Adults and Sugar
On Sun, Mar 1, 2009 at 8:20 PM, Sameer Verma sve...@sfsu.edu wrote: Monkey see, monkey do? Heh! That's how *I* learn program! Perl by reading cpan modules, php by working on moodle, bash by hacking on git, erlang by working on ejabberd, etc, etc. -- martin.maca...@gmail.com ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
