Re: [IAEP] [Olpc-open] Fwd: Defining success
Marta, Thank you again for elucidating the broader issues around evaluating OLPC impact. I am going to keep these emails as they are so well written and your points so well made. Let us all broadly distribute this rich contribution. I like your direction, not just a grant to test, but to develop an system of evaluation for the 21st century. As we are in fact implementing learning that doesn't fit into the 19th century practices we inherited, It does go back to Piaget. In Kenya many leading educators agree that the system of exams and evaluation is failing Kenyan children, and that the system needs to connect learning to life. The school population in Kenya is so large that many children are being left behind. See the site http://amstref.org ... a Kenyan making math relevant. Sandra Thaxter www.smallsolutionsbigideas.org san...@smallsolutionsbigideas.org (617) 320-1098 - Original Message - From: Marta Voelcker To: 'Sandra Thaxter' Sent: Tuesday, January 31, 2012 3:52 PM Subject: RES: [Olpc-open] Fwd: Defining success Hi Sandra and list, ( sorry for writing such a long message again J ) I liked your comments! I have a suggestion You wrote: What we need is a big grant to do some field research and get the data. I would say: or, a system that would do that! The system would keep versions of kids productions, and track kids´ progress, and also kids´ attitudes to get to the final product (collaboration, creativity, communication, leadership, initiative, problem solving) . not easy , I know. but if technology allows that each learner develops its own project, we should not evaluate all learners with the same test or exam, should we? So we need new systems of evaluation that might be based on kids productions and peer review. Things like the 21st century skills could be used to name some of the possible outputs, and there is research behind each one of the skills to support the choose of criteria of success. Another good point of developing a system instead of or besides conducting a research is that the system would stay for the schools as a resource to evaluate each child and keep their records through the time, also a database for the educational system evaluate the schools. But to do that there is the need of leaders (educational system reps) that think on the use of technology to innovate teaching and learning. I wonder what is the context on the deployments? they probably respond to regular country/state evaluation? Do any of them have as a clear goal to change and innovate on education? have they defined what is this change and the criteria to identify new outputs? At this moment, we have available the greatest technology ever made to enable the change in education. Change from traditional education ( 19th century) to the currently desired education, which in fact, is a change that is desired since the early decades of the 20th century, when child psychology evolved (Dewey, Piaget) and many things happened - since that time there are moves to renovate school , to prioritize teamwork, learning by doing, problem solving , creativity. but that was an impossible thing to do by the time that all students had to read the same book and go through the same exercises and questions because only one teacher ( without technology) was not able to guide a whole class of students with different motivation, learning in a different pace and creating projects about the subject. But now that technology could enable a systemic change on education, I have the feeling that few people remember that desire of change, or maybe they have tried so hard ( to change), before the technology, that they gave up and don´t want to try anymore? Or maybe few people understand what is the change and why is it desired... I´ve been studying this lately and realized that there are so many things and motivations involved. The willing for change is frequently present on National or state standards or guidelines for education, but is not present on the kids evaluation or assessment. There is an important need for teachers and families to understand what are the outputs of the new education. Once reps from an educational system have the courage to say: Yes we want to change! Let´s use technology to enable change! Then it would be possible to think, develop and continuously improve a system to evaluate attitudes, skills development. Or maybe not, maybe the system should be developed before, and then shown to leaders ( educational system reps) to convince them to experiment change (including change on evaluation using the new system) ? Marta De: olpc-open-boun...@lists.laptop.org [mailto:olpc-open-boun...@lists.laptop.org] Em nome de Sandra Thaxter Enviada em: segunda-feira, 30 de janeiro de 2012 10:38 Para: Samuel Klein;
[IAEP] Sugar Digest 2012-02-02
== Sugar Digest == 1. I spent some time working on the nutrition plugin for Turtle Blocks last weekend. I'm actually quite intrigued by the potential. So far, I have built a small database of foods (banana, apple, chocolate cake, and a chocolate chip cookie), where each object has an associated simple polynomial with value for calories, protein, carbohydrates, fiber, and fat. These values are respectable on the help palette and there are inspector blocks that can get these values as numeric values in Turtle Block programs. You can do arithmetic operations on the object, e.g., banana * 3 + cookie / 2 and you can use the component values in other operations, e.g., forward by get_calories apple. Finally, there is an eat method that consumes the nutritional values fed to it and accumulates aggregate totals for each component. Using those values, I wrote a simple Weight Watchers(TM) Points calculator. You can play with all of this by downloading the plugin from [1]. Next up is to create a palette with foods that are actually meaningful within the context of a deployment. There is a nice database to map foods to their nutritional components available at [2] so the real work is coming up with a representative list of foods and the artwork for the blocks. Anyone one interested in exploring this further with me? A screen shot is available at [3]. 2. I am a little late in relaying this, but Caryl Bigenho wrote up a nice summary of SCaLE 10X a week ago. You can read about it here: [4] 3. I am please to announce that Robert Fadel will be taking over as finance coordinator for Sugar Labs. Robert has a wealth of professional experience in finance and, having previously been a part of the core team at One Laptop per Child, he is very familiar with Sugar Labs and its mission. Robert has been in communication with Bradley Kuhn at the SFC in order to get brought up to speed on our finances--Bradley had been distracted by an end of year audit report, so things are a bit behind on the finance front. Once he gets the lay of the land, I am certain that Robert will have many recommendations on how we can improve our financial processes. Robert and Bradley both have expressed interest in helping Sugar Labs identify funding opportunities. 2. John Tierney spent the fall semester working closely with a team of students participating in the OWL Jr. project at Oakland University under the supervision of Dr. Dana Driscoll. The students evaluated different aspects of Sugar and the use of Sugar in the classroom and have written up very thoughtful recommendations. John is working with them to get these materials into the wiki and to mine them for potential feature requests. Stay tuned. === In the community === 6. There will be an eduJAM! in the week of May 7-12 in Montevideo. Details to follow. 7. The week following eduJAM! will be a Squeakfest, also in Montevideo (May 16-18). === Tech Talk === 8. The patches for new features for Sugar 0.96 [5] have (for the most part) landed. Under the hood, we'll see a migration to GTK-3. This is particularly important in future-proofing Sugar, ensuring that we remain in sync with our upstream and opens the door to much of the work in the GNOME community around topics such as accessibility and touch. Many thanks to everyone who has contributed to this major effort. Other new features include a global text-to-speech mechanism, written by Gonzalo Odiard. You'll be able to highlight text in any activity and send it to the voice synthesizer with a simple keyboard shortcut. Manuel Quiñones and Simon Schampijer have been porting Browse to Webkit as its back end. Simon helped me with write to journal anytime, a feature that enables the user to takes notes stored in the Sugar journal from within any activity. And Sascha Silbe, Anish Mangal, and Aleksey Lim have added proxy configuration to the network entry in the Sugar control panel. Lots of QA to do, but the heavy lifting is done. === Sugar Labs === Gary Martin has generated SOMs from the past few weeks of discussion on the IAEP mailing list: 2012 Jan 21st-27th [6] (41 emails) 2012 Jan 14th-20th [7] (28 emails) Visit our planet [8] for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments. [1] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:Food-plugin.tar.gz [2] https://www.choosemyplate.gov/SuperTracker [3] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/images/0/01/Food-plugin.png [4] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2012-January/014837.html 0.96/Feature_List [6] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:2012-Jan-21-27-som.jpg [7] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:2012-Jan-14-20-som.jpg [8] http://planet.sugarlabs.org -walter -- Walter Bender Sugar Labs http://www.sugarlabs.org ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-news] Sugar Digest 2012-02-02
On Thu, Feb 2, 2012 at 3:51 PM, Fred juma fredwa...@yahoo.com wrote: Bungoma OLPC HIV/AIDS XO project has introduced more activities.Now there is internet connection on XO for children in primary Schools.Community outreach using XO machines has been introduced.the rural community is so excited.This courtesy of Sandra Thaxter of Solutions in USA.She is visiting the Kenyan OLPC XO projects to ensure there success.Hands of Charity has reached over 7 schools in Bungoma Kenya.The Maths programme has progressed too.I has changed the perfomance in Maths in Butonge Primary School in Bungoma County.Its a very good idea for learners. Very interested to learn more about what activites you find useful and more about the HIV/AIDS-specific efforts. regards. -walter --- On *Thu, 2/2/12, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com* wrote: From: Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com Subject: [Sugar-news] Sugar Digest 2012-02-02 To: community-n...@lists.sugarlabs.org Cc: iaep iaep@lists.sugarlabs.org, Sugar-dev Devel sugar-de...@lists.sugarlabs.org Date: Thursday, February 2, 2012, 2:10 PM == Sugar Digest == 1. I spent some time working on the nutrition plugin for Turtle Blocks last weekend. I'm actually quite intrigued by the potential. So far, I have built a small database of foods (banana, apple, chocolate cake, and a chocolate chip cookie), where each object has an associated simple polynomial with value for calories, protein, carbohydrates, fiber, and fat. These values are respectable on the help palette and there are inspector blocks that can get these values as numeric values in Turtle Block programs. You can do arithmetic operations on the object, e.g., banana * 3 + cookie / 2 and you can use the component values in other operations, e.g., forward by get_calories apple. Finally, there is an eat method that consumes the nutritional values fed to it and accumulates aggregate totals for each component. Using those values, I wrote a simple Weight Watchers(TM) Points calculator. You can play with all of this by downloading the plugin from [1]. Next up is to create a palette with foods that are actually meaningful within the context of a deployment. There is a nice database to map foods to their nutritional components available at [2] so the real work is coming up with a representative list of foods and the artwork for the blocks. Anyone one interested in exploring this further with me? A screen shot is available at [3]. 2. I am a little late in relaying this, but Caryl Bigenho wrote up a nice summary of SCaLE 10X a week ago. You can read about it here: [4] 3. I am please to announce that Robert Fadel will be taking over as finance coordinator for Sugar Labs. Robert has a wealth of professional experience in finance and, having previously been a part of the core team at One Laptop per Child, he is very familiar with Sugar Labs and its mission. Robert has been in communication with Bradley Kuhn at the SFC in order to get brought up to speed on our finances--Bradley had been distracted by an end of year audit report, so things are a bit behind on the finance front. Once he gets the lay of the land, I am certain that Robert will have many recommendations on how we can improve our financial processes. Robert and Bradley both have expressed interest in helping Sugar Labs identify funding opportunities. 2. John Tierney spent the fall semester working closely with a team of students participating in the OWL Jr. project at Oakland University under the supervision of Dr. Dana Driscoll. The students evaluated different aspects of Sugar and the use of Sugar in the classroom and have written up very thoughtful recommendations. John is working with them to get these materials into the wiki and to mine them for potential feature requests. Stay tuned. === In the community === 6. There will be an eduJAM! in the week of May 7-12 in Montevideo. Details to follow. 7. The week following eduJAM! will be a Squeakfest, also in Montevideo (May 16-18). === Tech Talk === 8. The patches for new features for Sugar 0.96 [5] have (for the most part) landed. Under the hood, we'll see a migration to GTK-3. This is particularly important in future-proofing Sugar, ensuring that we remain in sync with our upstream and opens the door to much of the work in the GNOME community around topics such as accessibility and touch. Many thanks to everyone who has contributed to this major effort. Other new features include a global text-to-speech mechanism, written by Gonzalo Odiard. You'll be able to highlight text in any activity and send it to the voice synthesizer with a simple keyboard shortcut. Manuel Quiñones and Simon Schampijer have been porting Browse to Webkit as its back end. Simon helped me with write to journal anytime, a feature that enables the user to takes notes stored in the Sugar journal from within any activity. And Sascha Silbe, Anish Mangal, and
[IAEP] What makes examples good for novices? and How do we tell if an example is good for novices?
So I am taking a P2PU course On How to Teach Web Programmin to Free Range Learnershttp://p2pu.org/en/groups/how-to-teach-webcraft-and-programming-to-free-range-students/and a couple of questions came up: So I pose them to the community: 1. What makes examples good for novices? 2. How do we tell if an example is good for novices? Also where can I find a good set of examples for learning programming? It would be nice to have a curated set of Great literature. Pointers to any research on the topic would be appreciated. Stephen ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] What makes examples good for novices? and How do we tell if an example is good for novices?
Steve, Your question made me think about research I read about a couple of years ago. The researcher was investigating narratives between patients and doctors. Their major finding was that patients naturally needed to narrate what they were experiencing, and that close to 100% of the time, the doctor stopped them from talking. What makes the examples good is that are narrative, rather than functional. For example, I want to do this, instead of here's how you define a class. I hope this helps. Gerald On Thu, Feb 2, 2012 at 7:56 PM, Steve Thomas sthom...@gosargon.com wrote: So I am taking a P2PU course On How to Teach Web Programmin to Free Range Learnershttp://p2pu.org/en/groups/how-to-teach-webcraft-and-programming-to-free-range-students/and a couple of questions came up: So I pose them to the community: 1. What makes examples good for novices? 2. How do we tell if an example is good for novices? Also where can I find a good set of examples for learning programming? It would be nice to have a curated set of Great literature. Pointers to any research on the topic would be appreciated. Stephen ___ 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] Replacing Textbooks server working again
The Replacing Textbooks server, http://booki.treehouse.org/ is back up on its new hardware. Everything is functioning as before, as far as I can tell. -- 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://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Replacing_Textbooks ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [squeakland] What makes examples good for novices? and How do we tell if an example is good for novices?
Lawson, On Thu, Feb 2, 2012 at 10:16 PM, Lawson English lengli...@cox.net wrote: I can't give you any stats other than positive feedback I have gotten, but the Salman Khan style of video teaching seems to work well for programming as well as for math. I generally like the Salman Khan video's and think they have their place (flame away folks :). The ability to watch at my your pace and on your own time is a big plus and my kids use them sometimes when they are struggling with a concept. While it is preferable to struggle with the concepts ourselves, who has the time (or the ability) to re-construct all that knowledge. So, I think there is a role for a good explanation. Of course, it would be nice if he had more Sugar like artifacts to play and learn with. That said I really didn't like his Programming videos. Programming, I believe, is much better if taught with lots of hands on opportunities and problems. Videos could be used after the learner has a chance to work on a problem. Perhaps to show different ways to solve a problem and/or Providing a Guided Tour through good literature (well written code) and perhaps bad as well or something like Java Puzzlers, to let kids learn where the pitfalls are and get a better understanding of how things work. My video series, Squeak from the very start, is a very conscious effort to duplicate his style: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6601A198DF14788Dfeature=view_all Friends characterize my video style as being like a mentor in a pair-programming session. I like the idea of kids pair-programming although I would think you would need to set some ground rules like (the advanced kid can't touch the keyboard). FYI, I like your videos and have used them for myself. Thanks, Stephen On 2/2/12 5:56 PM, Steve Thomas wrote: So I am taking a P2PU course On How to Teach Web Programmin to Free Range Learnershttp://p2pu.org/en/groups/how-to-teach-webcraft-and-programming-to-free-range-students/and a couple of questions came up: So I pose them to the community: 1. What makes examples good for novices? 2. How do we tell if an example is good for novices? Also where can I find a good set of examples for learning programming? It would be nice to have a curated set of Great literature. Pointers to any research on the topic would be appreciated. Stephen ___ squeakland mailing listsqueakland@squeakland.orghttp://lists.squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/squeakland ___ squeakland mailing list squeakl...@squeakland.org http://lists.squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/squeakland ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [squeakland] What makes examples good for novices? and How do we tell if an example is good for novices?
Hi... RE the Khan Academy programming video... I have tried some of them in parallel with hands-on, and while they do teach some concepts well, they aren't particularly exciting. Perhaps that is why I stopped working on them. I really believe that the Khan Academy videos, and other video instructional videos, work best in the flip your class type situation. Watch the video first, individually as an introduction to a topic. Repeat and rewind as much as you need to feel comfortable with the subject matter. Then follow up in a class situation where there are other learners (and perhaps a teacher or mentor) to help you practice the skill or process you have been practicing. This could just be with a friend, in a club or a group of other interested learners. It might even work well with one of Sugata Mitra's Granny clouds. Hummm I wonder anyone want to be this Grannie''s Granny? Caryl (aka sweetxogrannie or GrannieB) Date: Fri, 3 Feb 2012 01:18:47 -0500 From: sthom...@gosargon.com To: lengli...@cox.net CC: iaep@lists.sugarlabs.org; squeakl...@squeakland.org Subject: Re: [IAEP] [squeakland] What makes examples good for novices? and How do we tell if an example is good for novices? Lawson, On Thu, Feb 2, 2012 at 10:16 PM, Lawson English lengli...@cox.net wrote: I can't give you any stats other than positive feedback I have gotten, but the Salman Khan style of video teaching seems to work well for programming as well as for math. I generally like the Salman Khan video's and think they have their place (flame away folks :). The ability to watch at my your pace and on your own time is a big plus and my kids use them sometimes when they are struggling with a concept. While it is preferable to struggle with the concepts ourselves, who has the time (or the ability) to re-construct all that knowledge. So, I think there is a role for a good explanation. Of course, it would be nice if he had more Sugar like artifacts to play and learn with. That said I really didn't like his Programming videos. Programming, I believe, is much better if taught with lots of hands on opportunities and problems. Videos could be used after the learner has a chance to work on a problem. Perhaps to show different ways to solve a problem and/or Providing a Guided Tour through good literature (well written code) and perhaps bad as well or something like Java Puzzlers, to let kids learn where the pitfalls are and get a better understanding of how things work. My video series, Squeak from the very start, is a very conscious effort to duplicate his style: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6601A198DF14788Dfeature=view_all Friends characterize my video style as being like a mentor in a pair-programming session. I like the idea of kids pair-programming although I would think you would need to set some ground rules like (the advanced kid can't touch the keyboard). FYI, I like your videos and have used them for myself. Thanks,Stephen On 2/2/12 5:56 PM, Steve Thomas wrote: So I am taking a P2PU course On How to Teach Web Programmin to Free Range Learners and a couple of questions came up: So I pose them to the community: What makes examples good for novices? How do we tell if an example is good for novices? Also where can I find a good set of examples for learning programming? It would be nice to have a curated set of Great literature. Pointers to any research on the topic would be appreciated. Stephen ___ squeakland mailing list squeakl...@squeakland.org http://lists.squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/squeakland ___ squeakland mailing list squeakl...@squeakland.org http://lists.squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/squeakland ___ 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
