The video of Walter's talk at the Goa Instutute of Management are available in three parts, at the links given below:
Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jj6awWWLoN0 Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juaN4El1mC8 Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjcDTuqeBvk Salil. On 6 September 2012 23:28, Walter Bender <walter.ben...@gmail.com> wrote: > == Sugar Digest == > > 1. Just back from two exhilarating weeks in India. Along with Harriet > Vidyasagar, I visited with Sugar and OLPC aficionados in Delhi, Goa, > Mumbai, and Guwahati. It was quite eye-opening. > > The first stop was Delhi. Harriet had arranged meetings with Sesame > Street India, which is using Sugar in an after-school program. They > were blown away when I told them the history of the Simple Graph > program, one of their favorites. Then we went to JNU where I met with > Dr. Ajith Kumar. Kumar works at the inter-university particle > accelerator center, but is also the inventor of ExpEyes [1], a > peripheral device similar to Arduino (or Lego WeDo) but for more > serious EE work (it has a signal generator and a buffer for doing > precise sampling of signals). Of course, I could not resist writing a > Turtle Art plugin for his device [2]. > > I also attended a seminar on Digital Literacy sponsored by the > Hindustan Times, Intel, and Microsoft. The seminar itself was pretty > depressing: a very paternalistic approach to providing government > services to the masses. But I met a number of good people there whom I > will be following up with. > > Also in Delhi, I got a chance to see Manusheel Gupta, who had interned > for me in the very early days of OLPC. It was very nice to catch up. > > The next stop was Goa, where there is a small OLPC deployment. One of > the highlights of the trip was finally meeting Salil Konkar, who has > been maintaining the deployment on a volunteer basis. There are not > enough laptops for each child to get their own, so before each class, > a selected group of students retrieve then (XO 1.0s) from a charging > station (designed at the Homi Bhabha Centre) for use in the class. The > students, perhaps seven to eight years old, were using the Numbers > activity that day, and although it was somewhat of a traditional class > in format--desks in rows facing forward--they were actively engaged > and helping each other. I had a prototype of XO Touch with me, so I > did a small study with some of the kids to see how they took to it. > (Although it is unfair to compare with the erratic touchpad of the > first-generation XO 1.0s, it was nonetheless obvious that touch will > make a big difference: they interface, which had been getting in the > way was suddenly in background; all focus was on the math.) > > Another highlight in Goa was the opportunity to meet Rita Paes, who > directs the Nirmala Institute, a teacher-training college [3]. I got a > chance to talk to the students about Sugar (who welcomed me with a > lovely ceremony) and with Rita about the potential for establishing a > center of excellence for teacher training to support our efforts in > India. I saw great potential. Rita also introduced Harriet and me to > some locals who have interest in helping with the localization of > Sugar into Konkani. It was interesting to me that some people write > Konkani using Latin script, while others use Devanagari script. It is > somewhat of a political issue, so Chris Leonard has enable both > communities to work in pootle ([4], [5]). > > From there, I went to the University of Goa [6], where I gave a > lecture to the engineering students. The next evening, I gave a > seminar on how to write a Sugar activity to about seventy students. > Clearly there is some latent interest in the project. I also have a > lecture at the local meeting of the ACM, which happened to coincide > with my visit. Finally, I travelled an hour out of town to the Goa > Institute of Management [7], a beautiful campus on a hill top, to talk > to the students on the theme of "learning to change the world." We > discussed strategies for making Sugar (and OLPC) take hold on the > Peninsula. > > From Goa I travelled to Mumbai, where I was hosted by the Homi Bhabha > Centre for Science Education Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, > specifically G Nagarjuna and his students at the Gnowledge Lab [8]. > G's students are well versed in Sugar, having been active in > supporting the OLPC deployment in Khairat [9]. Their principal project > is metastudio.org [10], a peer-to-peer collaborative workspace that > utilizes many semantic features. We discussed the possibility of > folding some of their work into future School Server designs. > Hopefully they will be able to participate (mostly likely on line) in > the discussions at the SF summit [11]. > > From Mumbai, I visited two schools: a school for children with > disabilities and the village school in Khairat. At the former, I > discussed with the computer teacher the possibility of using Sugar > instead of Microsoft Windows XP as a way to engage the children more > directly. While Sugar is attractive from the learning perspective, one > concern is that a good deal of the computer training is geared towards > an exam that is based on master of Microsoft products that is a hurtle > the children must jump over in order to enter the job market. Of > course, for most populations of learners, master one word processor > means that one can quickly master any other, but it is still to be > demonstrated that such a transfer would occur with this population. > > At the school in Khairat, I got a chance to see what has sprouted from > the seed that Carla Gomez Monroy planted four years ago. Khairat was > one of the early OLPC deployments and, although the program has as yet > to take off in India as a whole, this program is still going strong. > Harriet and I were welcomed to the village with a traditional ceremony > that included beautiful garlands of flowers. We sat with some of the > mothers and preschool children, whom I immediately presented the XO > Touch. The children took to it immediately. One child, using paint, > kept looking at his finger for the ink. But the real fun was visiting > the classroom. The children took turns standing in front of the class > to talk about their work: often drawing, custom-made memory games, > writing (in both English and Marathi--they are completely fluid in > switching between scripts on the XO keyboard), and Turtle Art. I got > to watch as a child figured out how to scale his drawings in Turtle > Art. I got a chance to present to the class, so I thought I would > engage them in something a bit different. Daniel Drake has written a > yet-to-be-released activity that features some animated dance and > exercise moves. I showed them some dances and they did not need > prompting to follow along. But then I asked them to some me some of > the local dance steps. I challenged them to make their own dance > videos and coached them through the process using Turtle Art (See > [12]). They quickly grasped the concept behind the various media > blocks (they had previously been using an old version of Turtle Art > that did not yet have these features). Together we engaged in some > "hard fun." > > My next stop was IIT Guwahati. I gave the keynote at Techniche [13], > the annual techno-management festival. Interestingly, as I was staying > at the university guest house, I had a chance to interact with much of > the staff, particularly in the kitchen (did I mention I love Indian > food?). They were really taken with the XO and we discussed how we > might get some for their children. As it turns out, the students at > the IIT run a school for the children of the workers, so perhaps it is > not out of the question. > > I spent another 24 hours in Delhi. Harriet and I spent much of the day > with Satyaakam Goswami and his students at JNU and members of the > local FOSS community. In addition to being very active in helping to > translate Sugar into Hindi, Satyaakam has been working in an urban > school in Nithari, using Raspberry PI [14]. I visited the school and > only have admiration for the teachers and students who seem to be > thriving despite very difficult circumstances. As with the school for > the disabled, much of the emphasis in the school is for the children > to pass their exams, so in discussion with the teachers, we talked > about trying to establish some extra-curricular activities for the > children using Sugar. > > India opened my eyes both to the possibilities and the challenges of > Sugar and OLPC. Many thanks to Harriet for her support. And to the > numerous volunteers I met who are trying to give the opportunity of > learning to so many children. > > 2. In response to feedback from FZT [15], I released a new version of > the Nutrition activity [16]. Also, in the spirit of eating my own dog > food, as usual I gave my talks in India using Turtle Art. In the > process, I uncovered some corner cases in some of the new features I > had introduced in Version 154. Version 156 has some bug fixes [17]. > > 3. I just got the galley back from the publisher of a book I am > writing (with Chuck Kane) about OLPC [18]. I hope to do justice to the > project. > > === In the community === > > 4. There are plans to hold the next OLPC SF summit [11] in San > Francisco the weekend of October 19-21. We are looking into organizing > a Sugar Camp ''following'' the summit. > > === Tech Talk === > > Misc. > > * The last of Hippo is removed from the shell!! > * Work on 13.1 is under way. > > === Sugar Labs === > > Visit our planet [19] for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments. > > -walter > > ---- > > [1] http://expeyes.in > [2] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Turtle_Art/Plugins#Expeyes > [3] http://www.nirmala-institute.com/ > [4] http://translate.sugarlabs.org/gom/ > [5] http://translate.sugarlabs.org/gom@latin/ > [6] http://www.unigoa.ac.in/department.php?adepid=10&mdepid=3 > [7] http://www.gim.ac.in > [8] http://lab.gnowledge.org/ > [9] http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_India/DBF/Khairat_Chronicle > [10] http://metastudio.org > [11] http://olpcsf.org/ > [12] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/images/7/71/Dancedance.png > [13] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Techniche > [14] > http://vinaychaddha.blogspot.in/2012/08/presentation-at-electronics-rocks-2012.html > [15] http://www.fundacionzt.org/ > [16] http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4555 > [17] http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4027 > [18] > http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Change-World-Social-Impact/dp/0230337317 > [19] http://planet.sugarlabs.org > > -- > Walter Bender > Sugar Labs > http://www.sugarlabs.org > _______________________________________________ > Sugar-devel mailing list > sugar-de...@lists.sugarlabs.org > http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel >
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