Re: [IAEP] For Sugar Everywhere, Google-ize!
On 16 Feb 2011, at 20:35, C. Scott Ananian csc...@cscott.net wrote: On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 3:26 PM, Christian Bryant christianabry...@linux.com wrote: I'm curious, is there a comprehensive requirements and/or design document for Sugar against which the recommendation is measured? I'd be curious to see a gap analysis that supports the argument to not use Python. If nothing else, I'd vote for a solid wiki page that can properly frame the idea, and the pros and cons. I would also be interested in seeing an thorough experience report from someone who has attempted to use Sugar on a touchscreen device. We already know that several major features (such as the frame and hover menus) fail completely. FWIW neither of those are particularly challenging design cases. The frame could be triggered by a hardware button, and the 'touch hold' interaction will work just great for the hover menu case. Bert tested EToys on a touchscreen a few months ago and found lots of areas that needed work (search devel@ for that thread). As I remember, the issues Bert reported were not Sugar UI related, actually he mentioned the Sugar Activity toolbar design works well with it's large finger friendly buttons. It was the EToy object HUD that proved too small for easy finger use and in need of some design work for touch screens. Like you say, a comprehensive outline of the work required would certainly help give a realistic appraisal of the current state of Sugar. Or you could decide that Sugar-on-a-touchscreen just isn't interesting/isn't part of SugarLab's mission. That would put a big fork between Sugar's work and OLPC's work, since OLPC is committed (via its funding source) to producing a touchscreen machine in its next generation. Until OLPC is ready to provide contractors and some of the community with touch enabled sample hardware this is going to move quite slowly. I use an iPad running various VNC and RDP clients back to test VMs of Sugar, but most of the UI frustrations I hit are related to the VNC/RDP client interaction. I'm hoping some XO-1.75s with the custom touch screen layer will be enough to pick up some touch related dev momentum (once its dev cycle has settled down a little). --Gary It then becomes even more important to have Sugar running well on non-OLPC hardware. Wiki pages detailing the progress of other Sugar everywhere efforts on non-OLPC machines would also help appraise the current state of the world. [These are much further advanced than Sugar-on-touchscreen, AFAIK, but I'm been assuming that SugarLabs doesn't want to allow itself to grow completely apart from the OLPC hardware effort. Perhaps my assumption is misguided.] --scott -- ( http://cscott.net/ ) ___ 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] Retweet: Thoughts on Starting a Social Revolution
vikramsurya tweets: http://bit.ly/ewkgnd Great blog post from #OLPC exec -- Thoughts on Starting a Social Revolution --http://twitter.com/vikramsurya/status/38124015075852288 ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] For Sugar Everywhere, Google-ize!
On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 8:18 AM, Gary Martin garycmar...@googlemail.comwrote: On 16 Feb 2011, at 20:35, C. Scott Ananian csc...@cscott.net wrote: On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 3:26 PM, Christian Bryant christianabry...@linux.com christianabry...@linux.com wrote: I'm curious, is there a comprehensive requirements and/or design document for Sugar against which the recommendation is measured? I'd be curious to see a gap analysis that supports the argument to not use Python. If nothing else, I'd vote for a solid wiki page that can properly frame the idea, and the pros and cons. I would also be interested in seeing an thorough experience report from someone who has attempted to use Sugar on a touchscreen device. We already know that several major features (such as the frame and hover menus) fail completely. FWIW neither of those are particularly challenging design cases. The frame could be triggered by a hardware button, and the 'touch hold' interaction will work just great for the hover menu case. This is an encouraging report. Touch and hold isn't discoverable, though (you end up clicking on the button when all you wanted to do was see the drop down) and in general sugar uses a lot of hover interaction to help kids find what the active parts of the UI are. This doesn't work on touchscreens. Also, integration of the keyboard is a huge open question. As detailed at: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/Onscreen_Keyboard One major drawback of an on-screen keyboard is that in its current design, it blocks out a part of the Sugar UI. There's no immediate answer on how to handle this problem. Activities would need to be resized to accommodate the keyboard, at the very least. I think there's a big difference between I tried it, and it sorta worked and I tried it, and it was a great experience. Is it realistic to think that Sugar can be a great experience on a touch device with only minor tweaks here and there? Or are we going to miss out on the exhilarating direct interaction feeling possible with a tablet and just produce a device that will frustrate and confuse kids? --scott -- ( http://cscott.net/ ) ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] For Sugar Everywhere, Google-ize!
On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 10:32 PM, C. Scott Ananian csc...@cscott.net wrote: This seems to me to be a red herring. What does connectivity have to do with your choice of OS? While technically possible to write all sort of sw yourself, you choose an OS based on the affordances it offers. The OSs being discussed (Android, ChromeOS) have very strong assumptions about ubiquitous connectivity to the internet and the role of the device (network client, not peer, not server). With enough work and time you may be able to provide all the missing bits and fix the broken libraries and APIs. You might even rewrite the apps in the app store to work without connectivity. m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- Software Architect - OLPC - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] For Sugar Everywhere, Google-ize!
On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 9:49 AM, Martin Langhoff martin.langh...@gmail.comwrote: On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 10:32 PM, C. Scott Ananian csc...@cscott.net wrote: This seems to me to be a red herring. What does connectivity have to do with your choice of OS? While technically possible to write all sort of sw yourself, you choose an OS based on the affordances it offers. If you used this criteria, you would say that Fedora is a rather bad choice for an OS for a mobile or touchscreen device. The OSs being discussed (Android, ChromeOS) have very strong assumptions about ubiquitous connectivity to the internet and the role of the device (network client, not peer, not server). I simply don't agree. --scott -- ( http://cscott.net/ ) ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] For Sugar Everywhere, Google-ize!
This is a tremendously interesting but increasingly technical discussion. It's difficult to weigh pros and cons of an entire OS in an e-mail discussion. Would it be possible for people to create pages on the wiki so we can get a clearer outline of: * What is each OS? Explain to a teacher using SoaS what ChromeOS and Android actually are. Avoiding conflation with Chrome browser and Droid phone. * What education apps exist already? Are there grants or challenge prizes for app developers? * Do you believe Sugar activities can make the transition? Will Native Development Kit (Android) and Native Client (ChromeOS) help? Thanks, Nick Doiron On Thu, February 17, 2011 9:49 am, Martin Langhoff wrote: On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 10:32 PM, C. Scott Ananian csc...@cscott.net wrote: This seems to me to be a red herring. What does connectivity have to do with your choice of OS? While technically possible to write all sort of sw yourself, you choose an OS based on the affordances it offers. The OSs being discussed (Android, ChromeOS) have very strong assumptions about ubiquitous connectivity to the internet and the role of the device (network client, not peer, not server). With enough work and time you may be able to provide all the missing bits and fix the broken libraries and APIs. You might even rewrite the apps in the app store to work without connectivity. m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- Software Architect - OLPC - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ 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
Re: [IAEP] For Sugar Everywhere, Google-ize!
On 02/16/2011 10:01 PM, Martin Langhoff wrote: On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 7:31 PM, C. Scott Ananian csc...@cscott.net wrote: Stepping back for a moment, the key question is: how can we get Sugar out of the window manager and network manager and activity update and UI toolkit business, where it's just not keeping up (and wasting our efforts), and concentrate on the stuff we're all really here for: enabling kids to learn and explore and share? How much can we strip away and still have Sugar? If you want to abstract away, get far away from the computer and the OS and target HTML5. You'll have some significant limitations, but that's the tradeoff. I agree. IMHO, we either rewrite the Activities in W3C standards for near-universal compatibility, or we don't rewrite them at all. In the latter case, we could consider shifting to Meego or Gnome-shell, but both are still dangerously beta. Forget about kids in those places (they'll get broadband-quality internet... eventually) and yeah, we can do it all with JS and your favourite language on the server side. FWIW, we've thought a lot about HTML as a toolkit for Activities that don't need a network or server. Lucian Branescu wrote a lot of the code as part of http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Webified With some help from Michael Stone, we even drew up some ideas for serverless LAN collaboration: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/WebCollab I think we have a lot of great options and wonderful prototypes, but without a command structure backed by cash very few of them will ever reach production. --Ben signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] For Sugar Everywhere, Google-ize!
On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 10:17 AM, Nicholas Doiron ndoi...@andrew.cmu.eduwrote: This is a tremendously interesting but increasingly technical discussion. It's difficult to weigh pros and cons of an entire OS in an e-mail discussion. I'd actually like to avoid the technical parts as much as possible (although I often can't help but respond). What I'm most interested in are the community aspects: a) What is the vision for Sugar going forward? What types of devices? What types of users? b) How much energy/tolerance do people in the community have for new things? c) If a group goes off and tries something new, will it result in a painful split in the community? d) Is SugarLabs closely tied to the idea of sugar as it is now, or do they see themselves as part of a wide variety of sugar-like projects, with more-or-less use of the legacy code? e) What are the *essential* goals of Sugar/SugarLabs? (cjb made a good start here!) f) What does SugarLabs see as their most valuable products? Activities? SoaS-type whole systems? Community? Lesson plans? Pedagogy? Support? Obviously, every reader is going to have slightly different answers to those questions, but through the multitude of voices a sense of the community spirit can be gleaned. --scott -- ( http://cscott.net/ ) ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Be It Resolved: We Need a Sweetie OS for 2015 MDG's
Scott's been away for 2 years from our global community summits but is suddenly very curious, asking lots of great and difficult questions thankfully. Several of which we've actually answered remarkably in his absence (thru http://olpcMAP.net, Realness Summit, http://olpcsf.org/CommunitySummit2010/people.php , Sugar Camp Bolzano/Paris and beyond) but many others not yet ;) Subject:Re: [IAEP] For Sugar Everywhere, Google-ize! Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2011 11:35:44 -0500 From: C. Scott Ananian csc...@cscott.net To: Nicholas Doiron ndoi...@andrew.cmu.edu CC: IAEP iaep@lists.sugarlabs.org On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 10:17 AM, Nicholas Doiron ndoi...@andrew.cmu.edu mailto:ndoi...@andrew.cmu.edu wrote: This is a tremendously interesting but increasingly technical discussion. It's difficult to weigh pros and cons of an entire OS in an e-mail discussion. I'd actually like to avoid the technical parts as much as possible (although I often can't help but respond). What I'm most interested in are the community aspects: a) What is the vision for Sugar going forward? What types of devices? What types of users? b) How much energy/tolerance do people in the community have for new things? c) If a group goes off and tries something new, will it result in a painful split in the community? d) Is SugarLabs closely tied to the idea of sugar as it is now, or do they see themselves as part of a wide variety of sugar-like projects, with more-or-less use of the legacy code? e) What are the *essential* goals of Sugar/SugarLabs? (cjb made a good start here!) f) What does SugarLabs see as their most valuable products? Activities? SoaS-type whole systems? Community? Lesson plans? Pedagogy? Support? Obviously, every reader is going to have slightly different answers to those questions, but through the multitude of voices a sense of the community spirit can be gleaned. --scott -- ( http://cscott.net/ ) ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Improving Multi-touch on Sugar
(Changed subject line to separate technical discussion from other discussion on original thread.) On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 12:12 PM, Gary Martin garycmar...@googlemail.comwrote: On 17 Feb 2011, at 14:46, C. Scott Ananian csc...@cscott.net wrote: On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 8:18 AM, Gary Martin garycmar...@googlemail.com garycmar...@googlemail.com wrote: On 16 Feb 2011, at 20:35, C. Scott Ananian csc...@cscott.net csc...@cscott.net wrote: I would also be interested in seeing an thorough experience report from someone who has attempted to use Sugar on a touchscreen device. We already know that several major features (such as the frame and hover menus) fail completely. FWIW neither of those are particularly challenging design cases. The frame could be triggered by a hardware button, and the 'touch hold' interaction will work just great for the hover menu case. This is an encouraging report. Touch and hold isn't discoverable, though (you end up clicking on the button when all you wanted to do was see the drop down) and in general sugar uses a lot of hover interaction to help kids find what the active parts of the UI are. This doesn't work on touchscreens. If 'touch and hold' becomes the UI interaction that's currently covered by right clicking or cursor hover and loiter, it would be useful to introduce this technique at an early stage, much like Apple did with their 'swipe to open' UI switches. Imagine when the tablet is first powered up, or unlocked* from a screen powered off state — the user is presented with a large central button UI 'touch and hold to unlock' that when touched rotates to an unlocked position with a satisfying unlock click feedback. If released too early the button rotates back to its locked state and a 5-10 sec before a screen off power saving sleep is triggered. This isn't entirely what I meant (although it's one component). My main objection was that there's no way to discover which elements might have a touch and hold action without actually attempting to touch and hold on every location on the screen. If the thing you just touched *doesn't* have an and hold menu, then you've just clicked the button. Oops! Hope you didn't mind the effect! There are also basic touch interactions missing, just as swipe-to-scroll. OT there are current Sugar button UI cases I've been hoping to see cleaned up (SL#2517, #2518). We have a number of buttons that only have a hover or right click interaction that should be functioning as well with a left click (pop-up palette where button has no primary action). These do cause confusion as lack of left clicking interaction leads you to believe there are hidden bits of the UI that look like buttons but don't act like them. Those are exactly the 'safe' buttons to touch-and-hold just to see what will happen! ;-) So 'fixing' the bug will cause touch interaction/discovery to actually get worse. Also, integration of the keyboard is a huge open question. As detailed at: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/Onscreen_Keyboard http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/Onscreen_Keyboard One major drawback of an on-screen keyboard is that in its current design, it blocks out a part of the Sugar UI. There's no immediate answer on how to handle this problem. Activities would need to be resized to accommodate the keyboard, at the very least. The trick here is not to resize/reflow anything, just translate the activity window vertically (and partially off screen) so that the text input area cursor always appears in the letterbox space still visible above the keyboard. I do not think this is possible without a lot of changes to Sugar and to the activity. And even after you've done this, the experience tends to be suboptimal. (Even my iPhone often botches the keyboard scroll and/or blocks the thing I need to see while I'm typing.) I think there's a big difference between I tried it, and it sorta worked and I tried it, and it was a great experience. Is it realistic to think that Sugar can be a great experience on a touch device with only minor tweaks here and there? Or are we going to miss out on the exhilarating direct interaction feeling possible with a tablet and just produce a device that will frustrate and confuse kids? I don't think there are insurmountable Sugar UI issues, though I do worry some of the upstream components we rely on may be bottlenecks, but that's just because I'm not up to speed with where Fedora, GTK, X, et al are with regard to multi touch. Also worth mentioning that smooth, fast visual feedback is critical, especially in scroll views, so good HW accelerated gfx drivers are even more important (fingers crossed for alpha compositing and maybe some 3d for simple transitions — wouldn't it be great to flip over an Activity window to edit its datastore details/tags view on the back). The short list of changes for a multitouch sugar are: a) pygtk to
[IAEP] Weekly olpc/sugar MAP Jam #1 - LA/SoCal! (1PM PST Sunday)
In 2009 Caryl Bigenho took the pioneering initiative of building the 1st known /local/ (and lowercase ;) olpcMAP, showcasing ~10 Sugar/XO projects -- long before olpcMAP.net itself reached 500 volunteer/projects -- crystallizing and catalyzing a community now made up of well over 100 Southern California volunteers: http://j.mp/erEQQJ http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/olpc-socal http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Southern_California_OLPC_Projects *Thanks OLPC Southern California OSSIE (Open Source Software in Education!) *We've come a long way Babe! Now, on Sunday 1PM PST (that's 4PM EST) we're coming together to reinforce Caryl's extensive+amazing glocal mentoring of projects around her city, and around the globe. Much of this work done silently around http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Contributors_program and not yet recognized by anyone at all! And she's not the only one. So our barn raising will introducing new larger LA/Southern Calif edutech volunteers to the next level here -- to each other -- and to each others' projects we'll work together to showcase here: http://olpcMAP.net/?go=southern_california In preparation for Feb 25-27's quite huge SCALE / Southern CA Linux Expo: http://www.socalLinuxExpo.org/scale9x/ Join us to raise !! Sunday Feb 20, 1PM PST (4PM EST) +1 866 213-2185or+1 609 454-9914 Access Code: 1671650# Backchannel: http://forum.laptop.org/chat (that's #olpc-help on irc.freenode.net) Sunday we're all about to learn how far we've come, with OLPC/Sugar/edutech with along our favorite Hollwood iBoulevards iHighways -- next week we'll be hitting the longer road exploring a new city/region each week, so think hard about those Sugar/OLPC teachers/kids projects in your own town that have done phenomenal stuff, WHY YOUR CITY IS DIFFERENT, and most important the secret dad/sister/mentors behind the scenes who deserves their fair shake / quiet honor around our global community map at long last (lowercase+UPPERCASE ;) Those who share the very most creative stories of grassroots/community accomplishment (whether told already in http://planet.laptop.org and http://planet.sugarlabs.org) or not, will receive a RED XO, as a month+ ago here, when so many similarly unknown talents were shared here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OlpcMAP/Trivia_Contest -- Help kids everywhere map their world, at http://olpcMAP.net ! ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Call for Papers Learning Technologies for the Developing World (LT4D) – Issues, Constraints and Solutions
FYI. Interesting conference to participate. Regards, Manu From: Imran Zualkernan Date: Sun, Feb 13, 2011 at 11:03 PM Subject: Call for Papers Learning Technologies for the Developing World (LT4D) – Issues, Constraints and Solutions To: m...@seeta.in Dear Manu, I hope that we can find people who are able to share their experiences with OLPC for this workshop. Please encourage your contacts to submit papers to the workshop. On another note, we would like to start experimenting with the platform here in UAE. Thanks. Best, Imran --- Call for Papers Learning Technologies for the Developing World (LT4D) – Issues, Constraints and Solutions http://cadmium.cs.umass.edu/LT4D in conjunction with the IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT 2011) http://www.ask4research.info/icalt/2011/ 6-8 July 2011, Athens, Georgia, USA The LT4D workshop aims to provide a forum for discussion of a sensible introduction of learning technologies in the developing world. Focus of the workshop is to explore the economic, social, political and cultural constraints that shape affordances for learning technologies in the developing world. The workshop invites submissions addressing all aspects of learning technologies in the context of development. Important Dates * February 20th, 2011 paper submission * March 11th,2011 Notification to the authors * March 15th,2011 Workshops authors' registration deadline * April 15th,2011 Final camera ready manuscript and IEEE Copyright form submission Best regards, Imran Zualkernan Associate Professor Computer Science and Engineering American University of Sharjah PO Box 2, Sharjah United Arab Emirates http://www.aus.edu ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] For Sugar Everywhere, Google-ize!
On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 10:17 AM, Nicholas Doiron ndoi...@andrew.cmu.eduwrote: This is a tremendously interesting but increasingly technical discussion. It's difficult to weigh pros and cons of an entire OS in an e-mail discussion. Would it be possible for people to create pages on the wiki so we can get a clearer outline of: * What is each OS? Explain to a teacher using SoaS what ChromeOS and Android actually are. Avoiding conflation with Chrome browser and Droid phone. * What education apps exist already? Are there grants or challenge prizes for app developers? * Do you believe Sugar activities can make the transition? Will Native Development Kit (Android) and Native Client (ChromeOS) help? Thanks, Nick Doiron http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_systemis a background primer on operating systems. Why not outline some more of your inquiries from a teacher interested in Sugar or Sugar-on-xyz perspective? http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Questions And the community can begin to fill in the answers. --Fred ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Reminder: STEP UP OLPC Fundraiser in DC on Feb 24th
Hi everyone, Just wanted to send a reminder about this big fundraiser that we're having for the computer program I've been helping groom in São Tomé. I just talked to one of our teachers today, who said she is praying that we have success in our fundraiser so that we can keep the program growing. If you are in the DC area or know anyone there, please spread the word as much as you can. We'll be selling t-shirts to support our cause, as well as photography done by the kids themselves. I'll be driving up there from North Carolina to give a presentation and we have a DJ coming to play São Tomean and other underground hip hop music. We're also expecting appearances from the Portuguese Embassy in DC. A wonderful org called VOICES will be holding the fundraiser exclusively for STEP UP OLPC at the Hillyer Art Space just off *Dupont Circle* in Washington DC on*Thursday, February 24th*. Live hip hop music, food and a presentation about STEP UP OLPC will take place *starting at 6pm*. I'm hoping to be there but am no sure yet. As many of you know, STEP UP OLPC has been going great and we couldn't be more proud of the teachers and students in our program. Lately, however, we have been having problems with chargers and need to get some new ones that won't break so easily during power surges. That's one of the reasons why we're having a fundraiser to get better quality materials for our class and to see if we can't grow it even more. *Here's a Facebook link to the event: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=197461426935361* Thanks for all of your continued support! Take care, Beth http://www.facebook.com/stepupolpc --- *Beth Santos* Outreach Coordinator Waveplace Foundation Tel: +1 610 797 3100 x 44 Fax: +1 610 797 3199 Cell: +1 603 661 1273 http://www.facebook.com/stepupolpchttp://www.waveplace.org Waveplace on Facebookhttp://www.facebook.com/pages/Waveplace/270512992335?ref=ts Twitter: @waveplace http://twitter.com/waveplace ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Call for Papers Learning Technologies for the Developing World (LT4D) – Issues, Constraints and Solutions
Thanks for the reminder! I'm planning to submit something and have even come as far as jotting some key words, unfortunately I'm not sure whether I'll actually have the time to turn them into something reasonable in the next 3 days... :-/ Christoph Am 17.02.2011 19:38, schrieb Manusheel Gupta: FYI. Interesting conference to participate. Regards, Manu From: *Imran Zualkernan* Date: Sun, Feb 13, 2011 at 11:03 PM Subject: Call for Papers Learning Technologies for the Developing World (LT4D) – Issues, Constraints and Solutions To: m...@seeta.in mailto:m...@seeta.in Dear Manu, I hope that we can find people who are able to share their experiences with OLPC for this workshop. Please encourage your contacts to submit papers to the workshop. On another note, we would like to start experimenting with the platform here in UAE. Thanks. Best, Imran --- Call for Papers Learning Technologies for the Developing World (LT4D) – Issues, Constraints and Solutions http://cadmium.cs.umass.edu/LT4D in conjunction with the IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT 2011) http://www.ask4research.info/icalt/2011/ 6-8 July 2011, Athens, Georgia, USA The LT4D workshop aims to provide a forum for discussion of a sensible introduction of learning technologies in the developing world. Focus of the workshop is to explore the economic, social, political and cultural constraints that shape affordances for learning technologies in the developing world. The workshop invites submissions addressing all aspects of learning technologies in the context of development. Important Dates * February 20th, 2011 paper submission * March 11th,2011 Notification to the authors * March 15th,2011 Workshops authors' registration deadline * April 15th,2011 Final camera ready manuscript and IEEE Copyright form submission Best regards, Imran Zualkernan Associate Professor Computer Science and Engineering American University of Sharjah PO Box 2, Sharjah United Arab Emirates http://www.aus.edu ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- Christoph Derndorfer co-editor, www.olpcnews.com e-mail: christ...@olpcnews.com ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] For Sugar Everywhere, Google-ize!
On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 6:49 AM, Martin Langhoff martin.langh...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 10:32 PM, C. Scott Ananian csc...@cscott.net wrote: This seems to me to be a red herring. What does connectivity have to do with your choice of OS? While technically possible to write all sort of sw yourself, you choose an OS based on the affordances it offers. The OSs being discussed (Android, ChromeOS) have very strong assumptions about ubiquitous connectivity to the internet and the role of the device (network client, not peer, not server). With enough work and time you may be able to provide all the missing bits and fix the broken libraries and APIs. You might even rewrite the apps in the app store to work without connectivity. m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- Software Architect - OLPC - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep Three points come to mind: The issue of connectivity IMO is of great importance. We typically see four scenarios: XO only XO + XS XO+XS+Internet XO+Internet The case for ChromeOS (Google-ize as the subject puts it) requires a Google to be in the mix. Internet access isn't available in most places. Even in my projects in Jamaica and India, while we do have 3G coverage, its too cost prohibitive to scale Internet access to all the XOs. In both these projects, the XS plays a major role. So, if there is no Google in the mix, there is no service (unless we do offline apps and host these on the XS). The other thing that bugs me about this approach is that there is very little talk about the end-user (children and teachers). I remember from one of Walter's posts that teachers have had a concern for a rapidly changing Sugar UI. So, the guts of a system can be Android/Meego/Fedora, but the UI should not be radically different. Else, the adoption is going to be very difficult. Third, I am not convinced about the reasons behind why there needs to be such a radical change. Maybe the reasoning exists, but its not coming forth. It appears to be supply-driven as in Tablets+Android+Cool Stuff. I don't buy that. At least not yet. Definitely interesting discussion, though. Oh, and I do wonder how many people involved in these discussions have *actually* been in the field where these dire conditions exist. Not fingerpointing, just wondering. cheers, Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Information Systems Director, Campus Business Solutions San Francisco State University http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://opensource.sfsu.edu/ http://cbs.sfsu.edu/ http://is.sfsu.edu/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] For Sugar Everywhere, Google-ize!
What does Sugar have? A vision, a community, and a codebase. But right now, we're tied to some technologies which, while they work, seem to be restricting the growth of our community. I think it's clear that HTML5 is the future. Since Sugar is python-based,[1] that means learning from the community which knows about using python on HTML5 - which is the pyjamas community. While pyjamas today is generally distributed as python-compiled-into-javascript, it is developed as native python talking to the DOM. That latter setup is called pyjamas desktop, and it works today, and the pyjamas people have a plan to make it work fully as smoothly as javascript does. So, in, say, 2 years, an installed sugar user could be running activities on python with a browser layout engine doing the UI; while a trial activity could be a somewhat-slow-to-download blob of javascript compiled from python. Jameson [1] Yes, we could consider ditching python. But I continue to believe that python is a much better learning language than either Java or Javascript (for different reasons, but clearly so in both cases). And anyway, if we can keep python, we can keep a lot of code instead of throwing it away. 2011/2/17 Frederick Grose fgr...@gmail.com On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 10:17 AM, Nicholas Doiron ndoi...@andrew.cmu.eduwrote: This is a tremendously interesting but increasingly technical discussion. It's difficult to weigh pros and cons of an entire OS in an e-mail discussion. Would it be possible for people to create pages on the wiki so we can get a clearer outline of: * What is each OS? Explain to a teacher using SoaS what ChromeOS and Android actually are. Avoiding conflation with Chrome browser and Droid phone. * What education apps exist already? Are there grants or challenge prizes for app developers? * Do you believe Sugar activities can make the transition? Will Native Development Kit (Android) and Native Client (ChromeOS) help? Thanks, Nick Doiron http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_systemis a background primer on operating systems. Why not outline some more of your inquiries from a teacher interested in Sugar or Sugar-on-xyz perspective? http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Questions And the community can begin to fill in the answers. --Fred ___ 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
Re: [IAEP] For Sugar Everywhere, Google-ize!
In response to Sameer, I'm going to expand slightly on my prior message. 2011/2/17 Jameson Quinn jameson.qu...@gmail.com What does Sugar have? A vision, a community, and a codebase. I should have said: a vision, a user community, a developer community, and a codebase. We want to move forward; that means piggy-backing on the progress of others as much as possible, without losing our important assets. Don't churn the UI, so as not to lose our users; don't churn the programming language without good reason, to keep developers and code; but do try to hill-climb towards the largest crowd making fastest progress. And that, in turn, means trying to find the shortest path between us and stuff like Android, HTML5, etc., which have large communities actively progressing on the cutting edge. That's the justification behind my pyjamas proposal. Jameson PS. while it's not really relevant, yes, I do have experience in the field; I founded and taught for two years in a rural Guatemalan public school. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] For Sugar Everywhere, Google-ize!
On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 22:01, Martin Langhoff martin.langh...@gmail.com wrote: Forget about kids in those places (they'll get broadband-quality internet... eventually) and yeah, we can do it all with JS and your favourite language on the server side. I look back at when OLPC started, and some things have changed in the world _we_ live in. But the kids we want to help with... their world hasn't changed much. They still haven't got internet for starters. It is true that the children farthest from the Internet are still far away, and that a few countries, notably North Korea, intend to keep things that way. However, since we started, several fiber optic cables have encircled Africa and landed in every coastal country, with many more cables being laid. Spurs have been run to several landlocked countries, notably Rwanda, and there are plans with some global funding to reach the rest. In a particular case, a computer school in Nigeria, the bandwidth cost was reduced from more than $1700/mo for 128 KBps via satellite to a few hundred dollars/mo for several MBps via terrestrial wireless. The resulting connectivity boom has barely begun. It means, among other things, that banks in Africa will get connected to the international digital banking network, and that their credit cards will become acceptable in global e-commerce. This means that college students will find it much, much easier to order textbooks online at the best prices. The increased bandwidth, lower costs, and improved banking will make selling local products in e-commerce much easier, also, and will support outsourcing to those countries on a much larger scale. A few countries in Africa have announced commitments to give every student in their schools an XO, and some of those have announced plans to run Internet to all of the schools, also. Some things might be a tad closer -- lower costs per laptop, tablets are possible -- but connectivity isn't any easier or any cheaper. Depends very much where you are. Technology is reducing bandwidth costs in every place that has a connection. The cost of a national WiMax network covering 90-95% of populations (depending on population density, terrain, etc.) is estimated at $10/person to install. Every country should include either WiMax or fiber optic cable in every major highway and railroad project, just as railroad companies a century and a half ago automatically included a telegraph line on every major route. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- Software Architect - OLPC - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- Edward Mokurai (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) Cherlin Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation. The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination. http://www.earthtreasury.org/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
