[IAEP] Squeakfet Brazil Day 1
Greetings from Porto Alegre, Brasil! As I write this from breakfast, the sun is coming up over the city. I'll soon be joined by the ten of us who have traveled here to represent Squeakland Foundation and our respective Etoys organizations. Most of us flew in yesterday, then met last night for a wonderful dinner hosted by Intel, one of the conference sponsors. It was very nice seeing everyone last night. While we speak frequently together through Skype and Qwaq, there's nothing quite like meeting in person. At dinner we had time to discuss ours lives outside Etoys, getting to know each other in a way that's much harder to do through the Internet. Today should be quite a day. At this point, more than 280 people have registered for the conference. Given that the main conference room seats 250, it might be standing room only. We plan to chat throughout the conference on Etoys chat channel (http://chat.squeakland.org), which you can read later at the chat log (http://squeakland.org/sm/storybot). Stop by and say hello so you can be part of the event, from wherever you happen to be now. Have a look at the schedule (http://squeakland.org/squeakfest/brasil/schedule/) to follow along. We'll be getting the English translation of the schedule up soon. And remember, we're following up this conference in a few weeks with another at UCLA in Los Angeles. Please come join us there. You can register (http://squeakland.org/squeakfest/usa/register/) on the Squeakfest USA website. Special thanks to Marta Voelcker and the rest of her team for organizing this event. Their hard work really shows. Tim Falconer ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] The Children's Library On OLPC project
Scotty, I think there is a method where if you have a Journal entry you can tell Sugar to open it with the default Activity for that entry. I haven't tried to do anything like that yet. It is important to copy the book to the Journal though. You can open a book from the stick directly, but it won't save the page you stopped reading on, or let you change the title, or take a screenshot of the last page you looked at, etc. My big gripe with the Journal is even though it cannot do these things on a stick, the user interface suggests that it will. There are many ideas floating around for improving the Journal, but getting them implemented and installed on all the XO's is a big undertaking. If you can accomplish 90% of what you want by making an Activity then that's probably a better way to go. Since Deja Vu support is lacking in .82, and PDFs perform poorly, another possibility is the .cbz format using View Slides to read it. That performs quite well on the XO. The difficulty will be creating CBZs from Internet Archive books. It's possible, and I describe how to do it on the web page for View Slides. It would take some doing to convert 2,000 books. Ironically IA provides books in a flipbook format that View Slides could use as is, but the page images are too small to be readable. If they were just a bit larger they'd be fine. Try reading Jack and the Giants as a PDF with Read and as a CBZ with View Slides on an XO and you'll see what I'm talking about. James Simmons Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 12:49 PM, Scotty Aublescotty...@gmail.com wrote: Jim, thanks for the blow by blow. The idea is really taking shape into a vision of how it should work! If there's a way, it would be great to change the part where the child must open the book from within the journal as it feels like a lot of app hopping to get to reading the book. Is it possible to open journal entries without going to the journal? If so, maybe our activity could save links to those journal entries? What do you think? Also, got your copy of Gary's message, thanks. He does raise some good points re expanding journal capabilities to allow collection browsing without installing. If that were there, we wouldn't even need the activity we're talking about as it would be a done deal. We should explore working with Sugar development to aim in that direction rather than create an activity. Finally, I have not yet found any robust Read support for djvu in Sugar v.82. I did get a file to open and display a book cover, but that's it so far. It's ok to have to use PDF on Sugar .82, since it does work but the performance seems to really be lacking - 20 secs for a page load! I understand djvu is 5-10 times faster so that's the way to go IMHO. I will copy these emails the IAEP list as you suggest. Meantime if you have other thoughts let's keep in contact. Thanks Scotty On Wed, Jul 22, 2009 at 12:37 PM, Jim Simmonsnices...@gmail.com wrote: Scotty, The Journal entry that the Activity would create would be in the Journal proper, and would not point to or in any way require any files on the stick. The Activity would work like this: 1). The child inserts one of your sticks. Sugar mounts it. 2). The child uses the Journal to change views from the Journal proper to the stick. He will see your bundled files, hopefully named something more appealing to a child than Conduct of Life. He will also see the Activity. 3). The child will use the clipboard to copy the Activity to his Journal (unless he already has it). He will then Resume one of your bundles using the Activity. 4). The Activity will show a scrollable list of books. The entries in this table will be tall enough to hold the book cover thumbnail and information on each book, at minimum title and author. The information about the books might be stored in a Dublin Core XML file which the Activity reads and parses. The child will select an entry in this table and click a button in the toolbar of the Activity which will copy that book to the child's Journal. This will work somewhat like Get Internet Archive Books does. The child will see an information dialog when the Journal entry is created. He may then choose another book to copy, as many times as he wishes, or exit the Activity. 5). The child unmounts the stick from the Journal and gives it back to the teacher. 6). The child opens one of his new books using the Read Activity. There was some talk about making Browse work with zipped up websites. If you had that, you could give your files meaningful names like: The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain.djvu and maybe Browse could download them from the zip file into the Journal. But if it did the Journal would have a really ugly name starting with file:// that the child would have to clean up. You would not get any metadata either, just the filename as part of the title. Plus Browse cannot do what I have described yet, although it has
Re: [IAEP] The Children's Library On OLPC project
Hello, I imagine a final use case in which children do have hundreds of books on their XO, not two or three; they are stored compressed, and uncompressed for reading; and the Journal stores the record of reading a book, but not the uncompressed book itself. When a stick or local library with thousands or tens of thousands of books is available, it could be searched; a collection of books to be copied to your XO identified and named; and this collection added to your XO (with the name you just gave your collection added as a tag). If the Journal could implement Calibre-style views, I don't see why it couldn't function as a library organizer. SJ On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 4:07 PM, Jim Simmons nices...@gmail.com wrote: Scotty, I've been thinking about your project and have some ideas. These may be similar to what Sayamindu has already proposed. You want to distribute a couple of thousand books from Internet Archive without using the Internet. As I have said before having over a thousand files on a USB drive isn't going to work. The Journal isn't equipped to deal with that. You had mentioned (I think) the idea of creating content bundles for this stuff, but content bundles as they exist now aren't going to work either. With a content bundle the entire contents of the bundle get unpacked and stored somewhere, and on the XO there isn't room for anything that isn't going to be used. You don't want to install 818 books about conduct of life on a kid's laptop. You want to give him something that will let him browse through all of those books and pick one or two to install in his Journal. One way to make these files manageable would be to collect them by theme or topic and put the collected books in zip files. The zip files would contain the books themselves, the GIF files showing book covers, and one file containing information about the books, possibly in the Dublin Core format, more likely in some subset thereof. In the Internet Archive database there are a lot of fields that would be useful if filled in, but more often than not are not. If you had these collections prepared you could write an Activity to browse their contents (using the Dublin Core file and the images). The student would insert a thumb drive containing one or more of these collections into his XO and fire up an Activity that would read the Dublin file and create a scrolling list of the titles, including cover images, title, author, etc. The student could sort this list by title, author, etc. then select a book he wants and create an entry for it in the Journal. You could prepare sticks which had the collections on them as well as this Activity. That way everything could be done through sneakernet. The Activity would be a lot like Get Internet Archive Books except it would work offline and would show the book covers. James Simmons On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 5:39 PM, scotty...@gmail.com wrote: Jim, I see all your points and they are good ones. I'm not sure if there's a target country at this point, but I think we got our list from OLPC. Not even positive about that. It's posted on our blog site, http://sixes.net/rdc2009/iacl-collection-for-xo. I'm pretty sure it's all English. It's a good idea to distribute a preconfigured server boot to linux CD and relatively easy. We should definately try to do that for US/Developed countries. Yes, PCs that could do this are in landfills, and using a system like this is a no brainer in any american or english classroom, probably in most developed countries there's at least an old pc w/ a network card laying about. However, my idea of using an XO was not to make it a permanent server. I just thought the teacher would have one most likely and that one could be configured to temporarily serve the library, then reboot back to sugar for other purposes when done. Probably a bad idea, but then again some of the OLPC folks have already looked into it at least somewhat - see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XS-on-XO. Beauty of this is even in the bush our solution might still work. Scotty Auble ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] GPA Notes 7/23/09
GPA Notes 7/23/09 Who: Walter, Caroline, Jennifer, Anurag 10:45: Set-up computers and projector. Walter worked on Clock program in Turtle Art Walter: Today we are going to use the turtle to play with clocks. (Walter shows the kids the clock program he made in Turtle Art. The kids compare Walter's clock with the other clocks in the room. Walter: Why do we use 12 numbers on the clock instead of 10 or 6 or 5? Kids: Because there are 24 hours in the day and 12 is half of it Walter: The Egyptians came up with the idea of 12 hours at day and 12 hours at night. (Walter showed kids how to count to 12 using the different parts of their fingers. Walter talked about the Babylonians and said that they liked to use the number 60.) Walter: Today we are going to use the turtle to play with hours. The kids used the following sequence to make the turtle point in different hour directions: seth() -- forward(100) -- back(100) Note: The kids started off by experimenting with different values for seth I feel most kids struggled with this because they had not learned too much about geometry, particularily concepts involving degrees and radii. However, kids experimented with a lot of different values to better predict increments. Some kids realized that if they input a really large number they would get the same result as importing a really small number (ex: 12 and 732). As expected, the kids did not understand why that was. Perhaps we need to give a brief geometry lesson before letting the kids play with heading directions. -- Anurag Goel ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
