Outstanding kernel patches
Stuck in tin cans again, I've been looking at building an OLPC kernel based on 2.6.24, starting by going through the diffs between our stable tree and 2.6.22 (on which it's based). Ideally, we should be committing almost nothing directly to our tree -- it should _all_ be going upstream. As much as possible, I try to commit to the git tree which I'm going to ask Linus to pull from and _then_ cherry-pick those commits into the OLPC tree. If we don't do it like that, we need to remember to chase our changes upstream. Here's a quick summary of what looks like it needs to be (cleaned up and) pushed upstream... dwmw2: some olpc_battery changes libertas private ioctls jffs2 crc noise Jordan: [PATCH] Add a configuration option to avoid automatically probing VGA scx200_acb: Add a module option to tune the SMB_CLK [PATCH] Add a notifier list for VT console modes geode video support DCON (or maybe this is dwmw2's) Jon Corbet: Some cafe_ccic.c changes Andres / other: cs5535audio promfs DISABLE_SUSPEND_VT_SWITCH make config_noninteractive sysprof pci: do not delay when changing power states on OLPC atkbd/i8042 hacks olpc touchpad Core OLPC platform support: - Need to clean up the device-tree handling. Can we use fdt? - PCI support - EC support - Power management I'm willing to take on the core platform support and try to get that upstream -- we really ought to get at least the basics of that ready for when the 2.6.25 merge window opens. That's only a quick pass; if you know you've committed something to the OLPC tree which you haven't also sent to Linus, please think about what needs doing to get it ready for the (imminent) 2.6.25 merge window. -- dwmw2 ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
xo root passwd
Dear all, I did reflash my OLPC NAND into joyride 1501, and afterward rebooted it. When I did login as root, it asked me password. Can you kindly let me know what the password is? Thanks, Sung-Hyuck On Sun, 2008-01-13 at 20:45 -0500, Albert Cahalan wrote: Bernardo Innocenti writes: Albert Cahalan wrote: Bernardo Innocenti writes: What we're actually doing is just to disable them in the default installation so that malicious activities cannot login as root or olpc and basically own the system. This is NOT needed at all. I wrote and tested an /etc/pam.d/su modification that will prohibit all non-wheel users from getting su to work. What use is it if an application can login, su or sudo as user olpc with no password and _then_ su to root? No use, but the application can't do that, so the point is moot. That rule will block an su to/from any UID. Note that I did not use pam_wheel, which fails to protect user olpc. I used pam_succeed_if to require the wheel group. This is even easier: chown root:wheel /bin/su chmod 4550 /bin/su ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: xo root passwd
On Mon, Jan 14, 2008 at 07:42:55AM -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Dear all, I did reflash my OLPC NAND into joyride 1501, and afterward rebooted it. When I did login as root, it asked me password. Can you kindly let me know what the password is? root's locked -- log in as olpc and sudo su - to get to root. Sung-Hyuck Martin pgpwsOXIRbDNP.pgp Description: PGP signature ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
New joyride build 1535
http://xs-dev.laptop.org/~cscott/olpc/streams/joyride/build1535/ -ohm.i386 0:0.1.1-6.1.20080102git.fc7 +ohm.i386 0:0.1.1-6.2.20080102git.fc7 --- ohm.i386 0.1.1-6.2.20080102git.fc7 --- - Attempt to keep the DCON from waking up in sleep mode. -- This email was automatically generated Aggregated logs at http://dev.laptop.org/~bert/joyride-pkgs.html ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Outstanding kernel patches
David Woodhouse [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: If we don't do it like that, we need to remember to chase our changes upstream. Here's a quick summary of what looks like it needs to be (cleaned up and) pushed upstream... [...] Jon Corbet: Some cafe_ccic.c changes Actually, I've sent all of my changes into the mainline; I *believe* that things need to go the other way. There were some things I put in which ran afoul of a freeze on the OLPC side. jon ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Activity Handbook
Hello all, we finally managed to finish the first few chapters of the Activity Handbook that we've been working on. The purpose of this handbook is to provide you with all the information you need in order to get started with software development for the OLPC XO. The current draft includes the first four chapters... # Welcome to the Activity Handbook! # Introduction to Sugar # Preparation # Sugar Basics ..which basically serve as an introduction to Sugar, to setting up your machine for Sugar development (emulation, sugar-jhbuild, Live-CDs) and writting a simple HelloWorld activity. We're going to expand the handbook over the coming weeks to include chapters about using the journal, collaboration, using the various XO input devices and sugarizing software. So stay tuned for updates! You can find the Activity Handbook project page (with more information about the project, how you can contribute, etc.) at http://www.olpcaustria.org/mediawiki/index.php/Activity_handbook and in case you're feeling lazy you can simply click on the following link for a direct pdf download: http://www.olpcaustria.org/mediawiki/upload/a/af/Handbook_20080113.pdf Please let us know what you think! Best regards, Christoph ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Classroom tools
The idea of activity sharing supports several important forms of classroom interaction, and can be stretched to accommodate many more. However the focus on constructionism means there's a lack of support for teacher-centric interactions, even ones which are useful in constructionist learning. Raising hands The fundamental model that's missing is the idea of questions or assignments, posed by the teacher and answered separately by each student or team of students. It is possible to accomplish this 'manually', but the technical shuffling makes it impractical to do so in a real-time, classroom situation, especially if it is desirable to keep data for later. For instance, I as a teacher want to be able to pose a question and have each student individually type a response. I could see, and record for later, who responded what and who didn't respond. After giving a brief interval, I could 'call on' a student either by my choice or randomly, and continue the discussion based on their answer. There are several obvious variations on this pattern - for instance, instead of typing a complete answer they could just indicate whether they have an answer, ie, 'raise their hands'; teams could present shared answers; etc. The software would help the teacher to keep track of each student's participation and to 'call on' students in a systematic manner. This type of interaction is so fundamental that it would be great to have it available independent of the currently shared activity. The obvious place to put it, therefore, would be in the bulletin board. This means the bulletin board would have to have some support for active logic. There are 3 ways to do this that I can see: somehow using AJAX for the bulletin board (advantages: highly flexible, tools exist; disadvantages: memory and processor hog, needs some server technology on the teacher's side); hard-coding this one case into the bulletin board (advantage: can be optimized better; disadvantage: inflexible); or somehow making a plugin system for the bulletin board (advantage: flexible; disadvantage: security issues, the world doesn't need yet another plugin architecture) (One disadvantage of using the bulletin board is that it could perpetuate the UI chasm between on-line and off-line communication. In-class questions are no more then small versions of out-of-class assignments, and the interface should be as similar as possible. But that is a bigger problem, one which permeates the XO, and deserves a separate discussion.) Homnq http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Homunq 08:12, 14 January 2008 (EST) [edithttp://wiki.laptop.org/index.php?title=Software_ideasaction=editsection=16 ] Classroom management Motivation and interest are the best ways to achieve engagement, but social pressure and good examples are also a part of the picture, and these are impossible without transparency. If there is no easy way for teachers (or, for that matter, other students) to tell the difference between a student who is working on the laptop, and one who is playing DOOM, bad things happen. Intel/Microsoft's Classmate competitor is rumored to have tools for the teacher to freeze or take over the student's laptop, to guide them through the interface. Regardless of whether this is a desirable relationship, it would be hard to accomplish within the security model and memory constraints of the XO. However, it would be good to have tools for all members of a shared activity to see the current state and recent history of all other current members. This protects privacy (after all, you can just quit the shared activity for privacy) while creating transparency. For it to be useful, it has to be simple and fast. Useful things to see are which activities have been used, and whether out-of-band communication has happened, over the last minute. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Outstanding kernel patches
On Mon, 2008-01-14 at 06:48 -0700, Jonathan Corbet wrote: Actually, I've sent all of my changes into the mainline; I *believe* that things need to go the other way. There were some things I put in which ran afoul of a freeze on the OLPC side. Sounds good to me; I'll just drop any cafe_ccic changes when I update to 2.6.24 then, and bug you if we see any regressions. :) Thanks. -- dwmw2 ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Outstanding kernel patches
On 14/01/08 19:21 +0800, David Woodhouse wrote: Jordan: [PATCH] Add a configuration option to avoid automatically probing VGA I still stand by this - but I'm not sure how it will be received upstream - and it will have to be aggressively refactored for the brave new world of the combined 32 and 64 bit + the new boot code from HPA scx200_acb: Add a module option to tune the SMB_CLK This isn't upstream yet? Totally my bad - I thought Jean had taken it. [PATCH] Add a notifier list for VT console modes Yes - this is very useful for upstream geode video support Most of the LX support is upstream with the exception of the power management code. I don't have a problem if we push this up. DCON (or maybe this is dwmw2's) I assume that Andres will have a plan for the purely XO code. Andres / other: cs5535audio These are the hacks for the input mode, right? Core OLPC platform support: - Need to clean up the device-tree handling. Can we use fdt? - PCI support This will be an interesting battle to fight. :) I'll work with Andres to get my stuff ready to go. -- Jordan Crouse Systems Software Development Engineer Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: xo root passwd
On Mon, 14 Jan 2008, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Date: Mon, 14 Jan 2008 07:42:55 -0500 From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: devel@lists.laptop.org, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: xo root passwd Dear all, I did reflash my OLPC NAND into joyride 1501, and afterward rebooted it. When I did login as root, it asked me password. Can you kindly let me know what the password is? you can do 'sudo passwd' to set the password to a known value David Lang Thanks, Sung-Hyuck On Sun, 2008-01-13 at 20:45 -0500, Albert Cahalan wrote: Bernardo Innocenti writes: Albert Cahalan wrote: Bernardo Innocenti writes: What we're actually doing is just to disable them in the default installation so that malicious activities cannot login as root or olpc and basically own the system. This is NOT needed at all. I wrote and tested an /etc/pam.d/su modification that will prohibit all non-wheel users from getting su to work. What use is it if an application can login, su or sudo as user olpc with no password and _then_ su to root? No use, but the application can't do that, so the point is moot. That rule will block an su to/from any UID. Note that I did not use pam_wheel, which fails to protect user olpc. I used pam_succeed_if to require the wheel group. This is even easier: chown root:wheel /bin/su chmod 4550 /bin/su ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Classroom tools
My mother-in-law is an 8th grade teacher in Nobleboro, ME. Maine has had an Apple laptop program for the past few years in which all 8th graders receive personal iBooks that they can take home with them. She has a feature where she can silently watch a single student's screen at a time via a VNC connection (a simplified Apple Remote Desktop). She uses it when kids look distracted, and simply calls across the room to ask them if what they're doing is appropriate after checking out their screen. Plus, the child's knowledge that they *can* be watched at any time is generally enough to prevent them from doing anything really bad during class time. A secure remote screenshot utility should be considered essential for teachers to maintain control of their classrooms (IMO). A TV wall view showing a number of kids screens would be even better. I'm not sure if remote control is needed, as this would be a much greater security risk. I'm not an educator, but I think the idea of a room full of kids looking down at their screens waiting to be called on virtually seems a little strange when you can just look up and talk. Perhaps if you guys are thinking about much larger classrooms and/or remote education it would be worthwhile, but these things can be accomplished through chat as well. The question / answer idea does seem useful though, perhaps a Pop Quiz activity where the teacher's instance shows a different interface from the student. BTW, if you haven't already, I think it's absolutely worth studying these existing US programs to determine how a classroom is run with this kind of technology present before designing systems around usage patterns. If you would like to talk with her (or other teachers) I'd be happy to try and set something up! Best regards, -Wade 2008/1/14 Jameson Chema Quinn [EMAIL PROTECTED]: The idea of activity sharing supports several important forms of classroom interaction, and can be stretched to accommodate many more. However the focus on constructionism means there's a lack of support for teacher-centric interactions, even ones which are useful in constructionist learning. Raising hands The fundamental model that's missing is the idea of questions or assignments, posed by the teacher and answered separately by each student or team of students. It is possible to accomplish this 'manually', but the technical shuffling makes it impractical to do so in a real-time, classroom situation, especially if it is desirable to keep data for later. For instance, I as a teacher want to be able to pose a question and have each student individually type a response. I could see, and record for later, who responded what and who didn't respond. After giving a brief interval, I could 'call on' a student either by my choice or randomly, and continue the discussion based on their answer. There are several obvious variations on this pattern - for instance, instead of typing a complete answer they could just indicate whether they have an answer, ie, 'raise their hands'; teams could present shared answers; etc. The software would help the teacher to keep track of each student's participation and to 'call on' students in a systematic manner. This type of interaction is so fundamental that it would be great to have it available independent of the currently shared activity. The obvious place to put it, therefore, would be in the bulletin board. This means the bulletin board would have to have some support for active logic. There are 3 ways to do this that I can see: somehow using AJAX for the bulletin board (advantages: highly flexible, tools exist; disadvantages: memory and processor hog, needs some server technology on the teacher's side); hard-coding this one case into the bulletin board (advantage: can be optimized better; disadvantage: inflexible); or somehow making a plugin system for the bulletin board (advantage: flexible; disadvantage: security issues, the world doesn't need yet another plugin architecture) (One disadvantage of using the bulletin board is that it could perpetuate the UI chasm between on-line and off-line communication. In-class questions are no more then small versions of out-of-class assignments, and the interface should be as similar as possible. But that is a bigger problem, one which permeates the XO, and deserves a separate discussion.) Homnq http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Homunq 08:12, 14 January 2008 (EST) [edithttp://wiki.laptop.org/index.php?title=Software_ideasaction=editsection=16 ] Classroom management Motivation and interest are the best ways to achieve engagement, but social pressure and good examples are also a part of the picture, and these are impossible without transparency. If there is no easy way for teachers (or, for that matter, other students) to tell the difference between a student who is working on the laptop, and one who is playing DOOM, bad things happen. Intel/Microsoft's Classmate competitor is
Re: Classroom tools
On Mon, 14 Jan 2008, Wade Brainerd wrote: My mother-in-law is an 8th grade teacher in Nobleboro, ME. Maine has had an Apple laptop program for the past few years in which all 8th graders receive personal iBooks that they can take home with them. She has a feature where she can silently watch a single student's screen at a time via a VNC connection (a simplified Apple Remote Desktop). She uses it when kids look distracted, and simply calls across the room to ask them if what they're doing is appropriate after checking out their screen. Plus, the child's knowledge that they *can* be watched at any time is generally enough to prevent them from doing anything really bad during class time. A secure remote screenshot utility should be considered essential for teachers to maintain control of their classrooms (IMO). A TV wall view showing a number of kids screens would be even better. I'm not sure if remote control is needed, as this would be a much greater security risk. I'm not an educator, but I think the idea of a room full of kids looking down at their screens waiting to be called on virtually seems a little strange when you can just look up and talk. I think the thought is to replace the useual situation where the teacher asks a question and then calls on a single student to answer with one where the teacher asks a question and then everyone provides an answer, and the teacher then picks an answer to proceed with. David Lang Perhaps if you guys are thinking about much larger classrooms and/or remote education it would be worthwhile, but these things can be accomplished through chat as well. The question / answer idea does seem useful though, perhaps a Pop Quiz activity where the teacher's instance shows a different interface from the student. BTW, if you haven't already, I think it's absolutely worth studying these existing US programs to determine how a classroom is run with this kind of technology present before designing systems around usage patterns. If you would like to talk with her (or other teachers) I'd be happy to try and set something up! Best regards, -Wade 2008/1/14 Jameson Chema Quinn [EMAIL PROTECTED]: The idea of activity sharing supports several important forms of classroom interaction, and can be stretched to accommodate many more. However the focus on constructionism means there's a lack of support for teacher-centric interactions, even ones which are useful in constructionist learning. Raising hands The fundamental model that's missing is the idea of questions or assignments, posed by the teacher and answered separately by each student or team of students. It is possible to accomplish this 'manually', but the technical shuffling makes it impractical to do so in a real-time, classroom situation, especially if it is desirable to keep data for later. For instance, I as a teacher want to be able to pose a question and have each student individually type a response. I could see, and record for later, who responded what and who didn't respond. After giving a brief interval, I could 'call on' a student either by my choice or randomly, and continue the discussion based on their answer. There are several obvious variations on this pattern - for instance, instead of typing a complete answer they could just indicate whether they have an answer, ie, 'raise their hands'; teams could present shared answers; etc. The software would help the teacher to keep track of each student's participation and to 'call on' students in a systematic manner. This type of interaction is so fundamental that it would be great to have it available independent of the currently shared activity. The obvious place to put it, therefore, would be in the bulletin board. This means the bulletin board would have to have some support for active logic. There are 3 ways to do this that I can see: somehow using AJAX for the bulletin board (advantages: highly flexible, tools exist; disadvantages: memory and processor hog, needs some server technology on the teacher's side); hard-coding this one case into the bulletin board (advantage: can be optimized better; disadvantage: inflexible); or somehow making a plugin system for the bulletin board (advantage: flexible; disadvantage: security issues, the world doesn't need yet another plugin architecture) (One disadvantage of using the bulletin board is that it could perpetuate the UI chasm between on-line and off-line communication. In-class questions are no more then small versions of out-of-class assignments, and the interface should be as similar as possible. But that is a bigger problem, one which permeates the XO, and deserves a separate discussion.) Homnq http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Homunq 08:12, 14 January 2008 (EST) [edithttp://wiki.laptop.org/index.php?title=Software_ideasaction=editsection=16 ] Classroom management Motivation and interest are the best ways to achieve engagement, but social pressure and good examples are also a part of the
Re: Classroom tools
Yeah, I was thinking along these lines with the Pop Quiz activity. The teacher (the activity initiator) gets a screen showing a box for a question, a box for the answer, and a box for every student that is sharing the activity. She types in a question, it is posed to the children, they type in their answers. When done, she types in her answer, which is delivered to the students, and their boxes are marked correct or incorrect on her screen. At this point she can manually adjust correct/incorrect/partially correct answers for individual students. Then she clicks the Next button, and the interface is reset for the next question. The students see a vertically scrolling list of question/answer pairs with a current correct and incorrect count at the bottom. When the teacher's question is posed, they will see the question followed by an input box to enter their answer. This would be a massive improvement over the standard write test, photocopy test, pass out test, receive test, grade test system as the questions could be adjusted in realtime based on how well the class is doing. This should be implementable using the current activity interface, right? It just means that the initiator of the activity receives a different interface than the participants, which is easy to do. Regards, Wade 2008/1/14 [EMAIL PROTECTED]: On Mon, 14 Jan 2008, Wade Brainerd wrote: My mother-in-law is an 8th grade teacher in Nobleboro, ME. Maine has had an Apple laptop program for the past few years in which all 8th graders receive personal iBooks that they can take home with them. She has a feature where she can silently watch a single student's screen at a time via a VNC connection (a simplified Apple Remote Desktop). She uses it when kids look distracted, and simply calls across the room to ask them if what they're doing is appropriate after checking out their screen. Plus, the child's knowledge that they *can* be watched at any time is generally enough to prevent them from doing anything really bad during class time. A secure remote screenshot utility should be considered essential for teachers to maintain control of their classrooms (IMO). A TV wall view showing a number of kids screens would be even better. I'm not sure if remote control is needed, as this would be a much greater security risk. I'm not an educator, but I think the idea of a room full of kids looking down at their screens waiting to be called on virtually seems a little strange when you can just look up and talk. I think the thought is to replace the useual situation where the teacher asks a question and then calls on a single student to answer with one where the teacher asks a question and then everyone provides an answer, and the teacher then picks an answer to proceed with. David Lang Perhaps if you guys are thinking about much larger classrooms and/or remote education it would be worthwhile, but these things can be accomplished through chat as well. The question / answer idea does seem useful though, perhaps a Pop Quiz activity where the teacher's instance shows a different interface from the student. BTW, if you haven't already, I think it's absolutely worth studying these existing US programs to determine how a classroom is run with this kind of technology present before designing systems around usage patterns. If you would like to talk with her (or other teachers) I'd be happy to try and set something up! Best regards, -Wade 2008/1/14 Jameson Chema Quinn [EMAIL PROTECTED]: The idea of activity sharing supports several important forms of classroom interaction, and can be stretched to accommodate many more. However the focus on constructionism means there's a lack of support for teacher-centric interactions, even ones which are useful in constructionist learning. Raising hands The fundamental model that's missing is the idea of questions or assignments, posed by the teacher and answered separately by each student or team of students. It is possible to accomplish this 'manually', but the technical shuffling makes it impractical to do so in a real-time, classroom situation, especially if it is desirable to keep data for later. For instance, I as a teacher want to be able to pose a question and have each student individually type a response. I could see, and record for later, who responded what and who didn't respond. After giving a brief interval, I could 'call on' a student either by my choice or randomly, and continue the discussion based on their answer. There are several obvious variations on this pattern - for instance, instead of typing a complete answer they could just indicate whether they have an answer, ie, 'raise their hands'; teams could present shared answers; etc. The software would help the teacher to keep track of each student's participation and to 'call on' students in a
Re: Controlling the Glide/Pressure sensor
I'm the student Mike mentioned who will be working on this project. Does anyone have any more details on how much low level work needs to be done? I know there will need to be work done to map the input from the tablet to X events. Is the device driver fully functional? I'd appreciate any more details that people could give me. Thanks, Pat -- Patrick Dubroy http://dubroy.com/blog - on programming, usability, and hci On 1/10/08, Mike C. Fletcher [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I have a student who's interested in doing a term project on the UI for the track sensor. I've put together this quick summary. Deadline looms for starting the project, so if people have don't do that or we've already done that feedback, please speak up ASAP. Background: * XO has two different devices, resistive glide-sensor and pressure-sensitive tablet o Both of these are currently showing up as core pointer events in X AFAIK o Changes between pressure and glide-sensor activity have the potential to cause jumps of the cursor (absolute versus relative mode) * There is currently no UI to map the pressure-sensitive tablet's area into a particular area on the screen (nor, AFAIK an API to accomplish the mapping) o Use case: use the entire drawing area to draw into a small area of a drawing in Paint * Activities currently do not have control over the mapping of the area o Use case: in a penmanship course, collect samples of the child's letters in special widget areas within a test, focusing a new area should remap the pen to that area Trackpad UI Design Requirements: * API for configuring the resistive/pressure sensor allowing control of all the major features o Note that there will likely be some X11 hacking here, to get the pointer mapping working * Standard UI controls for redirecting input areas o Standard GTK UI for positioning, and scaling o Standard GTK widget for e.g. handwritten text entry, provide access as a bitmap (or a series of strokes optional) + Allow for capturing all data (full resolution) or just scaled data as configuration option o Intuitive (HIG-compliant) standard mechanisms for controlling the various configuration parameters o A 6 year old should be able to figure out how to direct their drawings, written text and the like into the desired areas o Standard feedback on where the tablet area is bounded on screen when drawing with the tablet * System level (possibly on Sugar's Frame) trigger to bring up the control mechanisms (optional) o Most pen-aware applications will likely use internal logic and the API to determine position and the like, but a general trigger to the functionality should be useful for non-pen-aware activities * Paint Controls o Work with Paint's authors to provide intuitive controls to make using the pen/tablet intuitive within the context of paint Obviously we would need to find a machine to work on to make the project feasible. I'll see if we can repurpose one that's local to the task. Discussions welcome, Mike -- Mike C. Fletcher Designer, VR Plumber, Coder http://www.vrplumber.com http://blog.vrplumber.com ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Controlling the Glide/Pressure sensor
You can watch the output of the PT by downloading and compiling evtest: wget http://david.woodhou.se/evtest.c gcc -o evtest evtest.c ./evtest /dev/input/event5 0 It's event5 on my XO, you might have to use a different number. Anyway, then drag something around on the PT and watch the output. This is the output from the olpc.c driver in the kernel. So the driver appears to be working, but there is something preventing X (possibly the HAL?) from recognizing the events as mouse movement. I'm not sure whether the driver correctly reports the GS's (quite limited) pressure sensitivity though. If you want to see the raw data, just boot the XO with the left gamepad key held down and run through the firmware tests to the one which tests the tablet, it lets you see both GS and PT input as well as pressure. Best, Wade On Jan 14, 2008 11:29 AM, Patrick Dubroy [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm the student Mike mentioned who will be working on this project. Does anyone have any more details on how much low level work needs to be done? I know there will need to be work done to map the input from the tablet to X events. Is the device driver fully functional? I'd appreciate any more details that people could give me. Thanks, Pat -- Patrick Dubroy http://dubroy.com/blog - on programming, usability, and hci On 1/10/08, Mike C. Fletcher [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I have a student who's interested in doing a term project on the UI for the track sensor. I've put together this quick summary. Deadline looms for starting the project, so if people have don't do that or we've already done that feedback, please speak up ASAP. Background: * XO has two different devices, resistive glide-sensor and pressure-sensitive tablet o Both of these are currently showing up as core pointer events in X AFAIK o Changes between pressure and glide-sensor activity have the potential to cause jumps of the cursor (absolute versus relative mode) * There is currently no UI to map the pressure-sensitive tablet's area into a particular area on the screen (nor, AFAIK an API to accomplish the mapping) o Use case: use the entire drawing area to draw into a small area of a drawing in Paint * Activities currently do not have control over the mapping of the area o Use case: in a penmanship course, collect samples of the child's letters in special widget areas within a test, focusing a new area should remap the pen to that area Trackpad UI Design Requirements: * API for configuring the resistive/pressure sensor allowing control of all the major features o Note that there will likely be some X11 hacking here, to get the pointer mapping working * Standard UI controls for redirecting input areas o Standard GTK UI for positioning, and scaling o Standard GTK widget for e.g. handwritten text entry, provide access as a bitmap (or a series of strokes optional) + Allow for capturing all data (full resolution) or just scaled data as configuration option o Intuitive (HIG-compliant) standard mechanisms for controlling the various configuration parameters o A 6 year old should be able to figure out how to direct their drawings, written text and the like into the desired areas o Standard feedback on where the tablet area is bounded on screen when drawing with the tablet * System level (possibly on Sugar's Frame) trigger to bring up the control mechanisms (optional) o Most pen-aware applications will likely use internal logic and the API to determine position and the like, but a general trigger to the functionality should be useful for non-pen-aware activities * Paint Controls o Work with Paint's authors to provide intuitive controls to make using the pen/tablet intuitive within the context of paint Obviously we would need to find a machine to work on to make the project feasible. I'll see if we can repurpose one that's local to the task. Discussions welcome, Mike -- Mike C. Fletcher Designer, VR Plumber, Coder http://www.vrplumber.com http://blog.vrplumber.com ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
libglade?
I'm still noodling around, trying to settle on a good design for develop. It looks as if libglade would be nice to have. The interfaces it uses are loaded directly from XML, which makes them separate from the source code. I did a naive 'yum install libglade' and my XO pulled 100k for the library and about 3.5 MB (uncompressed) of dependencies. For our purposes, under .5MB of those dependencies are really needed. If, after rebuilding to remove dependencies on gnome-libs and the like, the whole thing came in at less than half a megabyte of uncompressed code, do people think it should be included in the base system? Obviously, the OLPC version would include all the sugar widgets... ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Classroom tools
Teacher screen grab: that would be good. A view of which people use what applications is also useful, because it can fit the whole class on screen - and it's pretty close to what you already get in the friends view. So, is it possible under Bitfrost for a background activity to grab the screen AND see the net? I would be surprised and upset if it were, so it probably needs a special permission - and one that can't be set for an unsigned activity. (note that this also protects against student hackers who would like to write a version that always shows the teacher the screen the student wants...) Pop quiz: yes, this could be done as its own activity. The idea is maximum flexibility - teacher can open or close questions in any order, can 'grade' in real-time or offline, can reveal grades to students in real time, offline, or never, has tools for choosing a random student to call on, can let students see all or some of each others' answers. It would make sense for these two activities to be rolled into one. Otherwise you'd have to tell your students 'all right, now log into my shared Big Brother activity, or else...'. Also it should be integrated with some kind of gradebook/attendance sheet/etc. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: libglade?
--- Original message --- From: Benjamin M. Schwartz [EMAIL PROTECTED] Until you have released the above, please avoid spending time on version control (which might be solved by the Journal), translatable code, fancy automatic typo detection, GUI builders, and all the other proposed advanced functionality. That stuff is hard, and it can wait. This is exactly right. Hear, hear. -- Ivan Krstic (via mobile) | http://radian.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Classroom tools
--- Original message --- From: Jameson \Chema\ Quinn [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note that this also protects against student hackers who would like to write a version that always shows the teacher the screen the student wants...) It most pointedly doesn't. Bitfrost activity signing is not a 'trusted computing' enforcement mechanism; it's there to aid the user when the user so desires. The user retains full control of the machine, including the abilities to make his activities lie, cheat and steal. This is a Feature. -- Ivan Krstic (via mobile) | http://radian.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: libglade?
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Jameson Chema Quinn wrote: I'm still noodling around, trying to settle on a good design for develop. It looks as if libglade would be nice to have. Prior to this summer, I had never written a GUI. I was creating an Activity, so I tried Glade and Anjuta. I found them difficult, cumbersome, and unreliable. I gave up and wrote it by hand with PyGTK. It was easy, much easier than I expected. I don't see any reason to include Glade, unless you also intend to include complete a complementary graphical interface builder tuned for Activities. That would be a multi-year project. I feel strongly that you are making Develop too ambitious. A simple Python editor that supports collaboration and editing copies of installed activities would be groundbreaking, and cause for celebration. It would be the most revered Activity of all. Until you have released the above, please avoid spending time on version control (which might be solved by the Journal), translatable code, fancy automatic typo detection, GUI builders, and all the other proposed advanced functionality. That stuff is hard, and it can wait. - --Ben -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFHi9uAUJT6e6HFtqQRAjwSAJ4wH/uSLQNoAu0hDPjR99qb3fM6uQCgojyK 4Gmp+ZYuQn1VXyLo9WgsymE= =ypqQ -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: libglade?
On Mon, 2008-01-14 at 15:41 -0600, Jameson Chema Quinn wrote: I'm still noodling around, trying to settle on a good design for develop. It looks as if libglade would be nice to have. The interfaces it uses are loaded directly from XML, which makes them separate from the source code. I did a naive 'yum install libglade' and my XO pulled 100k for the library and about 3.5 MB (uncompressed) of dependencies. For our purposes, under .5MB of those dependencies are really needed. If, after rebuilding to remove dependencies on gnome-libs and the like, the whole thing came in at less than half a megabyte of uncompressed code, do people think it should be included in the base system? Obviously, the OLPC version would include all the sugar widgets... Use GtkBuilder instead. It is based off of libglade the biggest difference is instead of a widget tag there is an object tag. It also loads files a bit differently as you don't need to have top level windows like you do in LibGlade but there is no way to say load from a specific root in the xml tree so you end up having to split the file into different pieces depending on how you structure your UI. -- John (J5) Palmieri [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Classroom tools
2008/1/14 Wade Brainerd [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Yeah, I was thinking along these lines with the Pop Quiz activity. The teacher (the activity initiator) gets a screen showing a box for a question, a box for the answer, and a box for every student that is sharing the activity. She types in a question, it is posed to the children, they type in their answers. When done, she types in her answer, which is delivered to the students, and their boxes are marked correct or incorrect on her screen. You are making important assumptions here. The first is that the teacher is only asking questions that have right answers. The second is that the right answer is actually correct. This is frequently not the case, particularly outside the realms of math and physics. But even in math, teachers and textbooks frequently give incorrect information. The notion that you can't add apples and oranges, for example. This is what algebra is *for*. It is true that when you add apples and oranges, you don't get a total that is all one or the other, but to claim that you just can't do it is simply insane. According to Richard Feynman, the books used in the Los Angeles Unified School District in his day were appalling, and I don't know of any reason to suppose that any others are any better, except the few written by serious mathematicians like Ken Iverson. I am interested in the case where the teacher asks an open-ended question for the children to explore in some manner. I am also interested in other cases, such as the original out of the box puzzle, which asks for the minimum number of connected straight lines that can be drawn to cover nine dots in a 3 x 3 square. Five is trivial; four is the classic outside the box solution; children have discovered solutions in three lines and one line. It is nothing short of a miracle that modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiousity of inquiry.--Albert Einstein The world we have made, as a result of the level of thinking we have done thus far, creates problems we cannot solve at the same level of thinking at which we created them.--Albert Einstein At this point she can manually adjust correct/incorrect/partially correct answers for individual students. Then she clicks the Next button, and the interface is reset for the next question. The students see a vertically scrolling list of question/answer pairs with a current correct and incorrect count at the bottom. When the teacher's question is posed, they will see the question followed by an input box to enter their answer. This would be a massive improvement over the standard write test, photocopy test, pass out test, receive test, grade test system as the questions could be adjusted in realtime based on how well the class is doing. This should be implementable using the current activity interface, right? It just means that the initiator of the activity receives a different interface than the participants, which is easy to do. Regards, Wade 2008/1/14 [EMAIL PROTECTED]: On Mon, 14 Jan 2008, Wade Brainerd wrote: My mother-in-law is an 8th grade teacher in Nobleboro, ME. Maine has had an Apple laptop program for the past few years in which all 8th graders receive personal iBooks that they can take home with them. She has a feature where she can silently watch a single student's screen at a time via a VNC connection (a simplified Apple Remote Desktop). She uses it when kids look distracted, and simply calls across the room to ask them if what they're doing is appropriate after checking out their screen. Plus, the child's knowledge that they *can* be watched at any time is generally enough to prevent them from doing anything really bad during class time. A secure remote screenshot utility should be considered essential for teachers to maintain control of their classrooms (IMO). A TV wall view showing a number of kids screens would be even better. I'm not sure if remote control is needed, as this would be a much greater security risk. I'm not an educator, but I think the idea of a room full of kids looking down at their screens waiting to be called on virtually seems a little strange when you can just look up and talk. I think the thought is to replace the useual situation where the teacher asks a question and then calls on a single student to answer with one where the teacher asks a question and then everyone provides an answer, and the teacher then picks an answer to proceed with. David Lang Perhaps if you guys are thinking about much larger classrooms and/or remote education it would be worthwhile, but these things can be accomplished through chat as well. The question / answer idea does seem useful though, perhaps a Pop Quiz activity where the teacher's instance shows a different interface from the student. BTW, if you haven't already, I think it's absolutely
Re: MP3 and the OLPC
On Jan 14, 2008, at 18:03 , Wilhelm Fitzpatrick wrote: I'm trying to understand the legal state of MP3 versus the OLPC platform. Looking at this wiki page: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Restricted_Formats Seems to indicate that handling MP3 requires a license, and thus an MP3 decoders is not packaged by default, yet I know I can open and play MP3s within eToys, which implies there is an MP3 decoder. Anyone have any insight into this situation? MP3 support was removed in the joyride and update.1 builds. - Bert - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
MP3 and the OLPC
I'm trying to understand the legal state of MP3 versus the OLPC platform. Looking at this wiki page: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Restricted_Formats Seems to indicate that handling MP3 requires a license, and thus an MP3 decoders is not packaged by default, yet I know I can open and play MP3s within eToys, which implies there is an MP3 decoder. Anyone have any insight into this situation? -wilhelm ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: MP3 and the OLPC
On Mon, 2008-01-14 at 15:03 -0800, Wilhelm Fitzpatrick wrote: I'm trying to understand the legal state of MP3 versus the OLPC platform. Looking at this wiki page: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Restricted_Formats Seems to indicate that handling MP3 requires a license, and thus an MP3 decoders is not packaged by default, yet I know I can open and play MP3s within eToys, which implies there is an MP3 decoder. Anyone have any insight into this situation? To be shipped on the OLPC platform, code and binaries must be a few things: 1) Open Source 2) Free of known patent encumbrance 3) Redistributable/transferrable Yes, you can ask the MP3 licensing association for a license for your MP3 decoder/encoder, even pay them a flat fee of $50,000 for an unlimited license IIRC. But that license is _NOT_ transferable to other parties. After having paid for that license, you can distribute the MP3 software to your friend, but that friend cannot then give that software to another friend without buying a license himself. And that's the problem with MP3 and open-source. As a small digression, most standards are usually RAND (Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory). MPEG (and hence MP3) is such a standard. That does _NOT_ mean that the standard is free of patent protection, or that licenses are not required to implement the standard. It simply means that the owners of the intellectual property on which the standard is based cannot charge everyone a wildly different amount of money, and cannot refuse to license the technology to somebody just because they don't like them. But that doesn't mean the standards are free and clear to implement and redistribute. Dan ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Classroom tools
2008/1/14 Wade Brainerd [EMAIL PROTECTED]: My mother-in-law is an 8th grade teacher in Nobleboro, ME. Maine has had an Apple laptop program for the past few years in which all 8th graders receive personal iBooks that they can take home with them. Is your mother-in-law interested in discussing this program with us? Would she be willing for us to talk with her students? For OLPC students around the world to talk to her students? Please extend these invitations not only to her, but to anybody else you know who is in any way involved in this program, and ask them to pass them on. -- Edward Cherlin End Poverty at a Profit by teaching children business http://www.EarthTreasury.org/ The best way to predict the future is to invent it.--Alan Kay ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: libglade?
Thanks for the reality check. But: I don't see any reason to include Glade, unless you also intend to include complete a complementary graphical interface builder tuned for Activities. That would be a multi-year project. I disagree, it's just a matter of making a widget catalog. The reason I ask now, at the start, is that if eventually I plan to do this - and there ARE real advantages, for instance it makes it much easier to make an app which works on Sugar and other platforms - I want to do Develop itself with libglade. I do not plan to spend any time making the GUI editor until I have a usable release. I feel strongly that you are making Develop too ambitious. A simple Python editor that supports collaboration and editing copies of installed activities would be groundbreaking, and cause for celebration. It would be the most revered Activity of all. Version control is at the heart of real collaboration. How many real-world programs are done with pair programming? How many of them use version control? But actually, both of these are gravy. I want to first make something with neither. But I'd rather know what I'm working towards before I start. As for copies of installed activities, you're right. I was wasting time worrying about copy-on-write hard links, I should just copy for now and get to that later. Still, for all my talk, I was not coding any Bazaar in, just copy-on-write. As for translatable code, sorry, that's the horse I rode in on. It's the reason I first looked at the wiki and learned about the project beyond the headlines. It's not in step one, but personally speaking its what I want to contribute, and what I'll be working on as soon as step 1's done. Jameson ps. I'd feel better about how source control 'might be solved by the journal' if I had more of a sense of the plans and priorities there. Even the most basic possible Develop is going to be pushing the envelope (and helping fine-tune the spec) with both Bitfrost and the Journal. Yet the only coherent docs for either are way out of date, and though both are heavy with promise, even the present reality is underdocumented, let alone the future plans. If there are any secret archives on these, it would be great to know. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
[ANNOUNCE] Beta release of Creative Commons licensing activity
I'm happy to announce a beta release of the Creative Commons licensing activity for the XO. This activity is a comic reader that includes simple English text to explain the images. This is based on a comic we published a few weeks back that was written with the XO audience in mind: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Sharing_Creative_Works It also includes a license chooser; right now, the results of that license choice aren't used by anything, but we hope to work with XO developers who want to integrate CC license choosing into their activities - they can perhaps use the license chooser we bundle, and they can perhaps use as a default the license chosen by the child at the end of the CC Licensing activity. You can download the .xo at http://labs.creativecommons.org/~paulproteus/olpc/License-3.xo . It even has a proper NEWS file. I encourage you all to grab the .xo and give it a whirl! -- Asheesh. P.S. If you want to know how this compares to the release a few weeks ago, here's the NEWS file: 3 * Fix .xo packaging and MANIFEST to include everything necessary and not more. (paulproteus) * First beta release. (paulproteus) * Hand-clean text for comic. (paulproteus) -- Where do I find the time for not reading so many books? -- Karl Kraus ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: libglade?
I'd strongly suggest incrementally extending Pippy (making a Poppy) to add functionality, instead of starting from scratch. That way, at every point you will have a working application which is better than what we have now, minimizing the chance that this will be Yet Another Ambitious Develop Effort That Never Yields Usable Code. In particular, translation support for Pippy is not outside Pippy's scope, and interesting (but accessible) UI designs/implementations for it would be Very Interesting. In particular, I've been working on a simple icon editor, which should address one of the largest current Pippy deficiencies (IMO). Forking a Poppy which replaced Pippy's sidebar of examples with a sidebar of project contents would greatly increase the number of activities which could be edited. --scott -- ( http://cscott.net/ ) ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [ANNOUNCE] Beta release of Creative Commons licensing activity
On Jan 14, 2008 7:10 PM, Asheesh Laroia [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm happy to announce a beta release of the Creative Commons licensing activity for the XO. Do you have suggestions on integrating this with Pippy and (say) Paint? For example, if you could copy the license choice to the clipboard after completing the activity, one could then drag drop the license to a hotspot in the sugar toolbar for the new document (possibly right next to the document title) to apply it. Other ideas? --scott -- ( http://cscott.net/ ) ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Classroom tools
Actually I think you're assuming (incorrectly) that the text matching feature is the only way questions are graded in my (hypothetical) activity :) In the description, the teacher has the ability to override whether or not the answer is correct or partially correct before it is reported to the student. The text matching is simply a convenience to reduce the tedium on the part of the teacher. I agree that it doesn't cover more exotic paradigms like self grading on the part of the student. Further, it doesn't allow the student to submit a drawing with their answer. But it was just a 3 paragraph idea... Best, Wade On Jan 14, 2008 3:24 PM, Edward Cherlin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 2008/1/14 Wade Brainerd [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Yeah, I was thinking along these lines with the Pop Quiz activity. The teacher (the activity initiator) gets a screen showing a box for a question, a box for the answer, and a box for every student that is sharing the activity. She types in a question, it is posed to the children, they type in their answers. When done, she types in her answer, which is delivered to the students, and their boxes are marked correct or incorrect on her screen. You are making important assumptions here. The first is that the teacher is only asking questions that have right answers. The second is that the right answer is actually correct. This is frequently not the case, particularly outside the realms of math and physics. But even in math, teachers and textbooks frequently give incorrect information. The notion that you can't add apples and oranges, for example. This is what algebra is *for*. It is true that when you add apples and oranges, you don't get a total that is all one or the other, but to claim that you just can't do it is simply insane. According to Richard Feynman, the books used in the Los Angeles Unified School District in his day were appalling, and I don't know of any reason to suppose that any others are any better, except the few written by serious mathematicians like Ken Iverson. I am interested in the case where the teacher asks an open-ended question for the children to explore in some manner. I am also interested in other cases, such as the original out of the box puzzle, which asks for the minimum number of connected straight lines that can be drawn to cover nine dots in a 3 x 3 square. Five is trivial; four is the classic outside the box solution; children have discovered solutions in three lines and one line. It is nothing short of a miracle that modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiousity of inquiry.--Albert Einstein The world we have made, as a result of the level of thinking we have done thus far, creates problems we cannot solve at the same level of thinking at which we created them.--Albert Einstein At this point she can manually adjust correct/incorrect/partially correct answers for individual students. Then she clicks the Next button, and the interface is reset for the next question. The students see a vertically scrolling list of question/answer pairs with a current correct and incorrect count at the bottom. When the teacher's question is posed, they will see the question followed by an input box to enter their answer. This would be a massive improvement over the standard write test, photocopy test, pass out test, receive test, grade test system as the questions could be adjusted in realtime based on how well the class is doing. This should be implementable using the current activity interface, right? It just means that the initiator of the activity receives a different interface than the participants, which is easy to do. Regards, Wade 2008/1/14 [EMAIL PROTECTED]: On Mon, 14 Jan 2008, Wade Brainerd wrote: My mother-in-law is an 8th grade teacher in Nobleboro, ME. Maine has had an Apple laptop program for the past few years in which all 8th graders receive personal iBooks that they can take home with them. She has a feature where she can silently watch a single student's screen at a time via a VNC connection (a simplified Apple Remote Desktop). She uses it when kids look distracted, and simply calls across the room to ask them if what they're doing is appropriate after checking out their screen. Plus, the child's knowledge that they *can* be watched at any time is generally enough to prevent them from doing anything really bad during class time. A secure remote screenshot utility should be considered essential for teachers to maintain control of their classrooms (IMO). A TV wall view showing a number of kids screens would be even better. I'm not sure if remote control is needed, as this would be a much greater security risk. I'm not an educator, but I think the idea of a room full of kids looking down at their screens
Re: Classroom tools
There was a nice project done in Chile using Ipacks: the teacher would pose a problem and the children would formulate an answer. Then they'd gather in groups of four and pool their answers. Each group of four would then reach consensus on an answer they thought was correct. All of the group answers would be shared with the entire class. Then a class discussion would ensue: why did Group A come up with that answer? The role of the computer and the teacher was to facilitate the discussion among the students and to focus discussion around problem areas that revealed themselves in discussion. A nice use of collaboration that has nothing to do with taking control or all eyes forward. -walter 2008/1/14 Wade Brainerd [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Actually I think you're assuming (incorrectly) that the text matching feature is the only way questions are graded in my (hypothetical) activity :) In the description, the teacher has the ability to override whether or not the answer is correct or partially correct before it is reported to the student. The text matching is simply a convenience to reduce the tedium on the part of the teacher. I agree that it doesn't cover more exotic paradigms like self grading on the part of the student. Further, it doesn't allow the student to submit a drawing with their answer. But it was just a 3 paragraph idea... Best, Wade On Jan 14, 2008 3:24 PM, Edward Cherlin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 2008/1/14 Wade Brainerd [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Yeah, I was thinking along these lines with the Pop Quiz activity. The teacher (the activity initiator) gets a screen showing a box for a question, a box for the answer, and a box for every student that is sharing the activity. She types in a question, it is posed to the children, they type in their answers. When done, she types in her answer, which is delivered to the students, and their boxes are marked correct or incorrect on her screen. You are making important assumptions here. The first is that the teacher is only asking questions that have right answers. The second is that the right answer is actually correct. This is frequently not the case, particularly outside the realms of math and physics. But even in math, teachers and textbooks frequently give incorrect information. The notion that you can't add apples and oranges, for example. This is what algebra is *for*. It is true that when you add apples and oranges, you don't get a total that is all one or the other, but to claim that you just can't do it is simply insane. According to Richard Feynman, the books used in the Los Angeles Unified School District in his day were appalling, and I don't know of any reason to suppose that any others are any better, except the few written by serious mathematicians like Ken Iverson. I am interested in the case where the teacher asks an open-ended question for the children to explore in some manner. I am also interested in other cases, such as the original out of the box puzzle, which asks for the minimum number of connected straight lines that can be drawn to cover nine dots in a 3 x 3 square. Five is trivial; four is the classic outside the box solution; children have discovered solutions in three lines and one line. It is nothing short of a miracle that modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiousity of inquiry.--Albert Einstein The world we have made, as a result of the level of thinking we have done thus far, creates problems we cannot solve at the same level of thinking at which we created them.--Albert Einstein At this point she can manually adjust correct/incorrect/partially correct answers for individual students. Then she clicks the Next button, and the interface is reset for the next question. The students see a vertically scrolling list of question/answer pairs with a current correct and incorrect count at the bottom. When the teacher's question is posed, they will see the question followed by an input box to enter their answer. This would be a massive improvement over the standard write test, photocopy test, pass out test, receive test, grade test system as the questions could be adjusted in realtime based on how well the class is doing. This should be implementable using the current activity interface, right? It just means that the initiator of the activity receives a different interface than the participants, which is easy to do. Regards, Wade 2008/1/14 [EMAIL PROTECTED]: On Mon, 14 Jan 2008, Wade Brainerd wrote: My mother-in-law is an 8th grade teacher in Nobleboro, ME. Maine has had an Apple laptop program for the past few years in which all 8th graders receive personal iBooks that they can take home with them. She has a feature where she can silently watch a single
New joyride build 1536
http://xs-dev.laptop.org/~cscott/olpc/streams/joyride/build1536/ +blas.i386 0:3.1.1-1.fc7 -totem.i386 0:2.18.2-11 +totem.i386 0:2.18.2-12 -totem-mozplugin.i386 0:2.18.2-11 +totem-mozplugin.i386 0:2.18.2-12 -totem-plparser.i386 0:2.18.2-11 +totem-plparser.i386 0:2.18.2-12 -- This email was automatically generated Aggregated logs at http://dev.laptop.org/~bert/joyride-pkgs.html ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: MP3 and the OLPC
On 1/14/08, Dan Williams [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: To be shipped on the OLPC platform, code and binaries must be a few things: 1) Open Source 2) Free of known patent encumbrance 3) Redistributable/transferrable You will notice that the XO laptop ships with support for three audio codecs known to be the best in their specific area even when compared with proprietary ones. Vorbis for lossy music, FLAC for lossless music, and Speex for human voice (very useful for podcasts). And best of all, they fulfill all of those requirements you mention. Keep spreading files in those formats for a world of Open Media. -Ivo ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [ANNOUNCE] Beta release of Creative Commons licensing activity
On Jan 14, 2008 4:10 PM, Asheesh Laroia [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm happy to announce a beta release of the Creative Commons licensing activity for the XO. This activity is a comic reader that includes simple English text to explain the images. This is based on a comic we published a few weeks back that was written with the XO audience in mind: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Sharing_Creative_Works A good idea, though rather pedestrian in execution. I would have found it more interesting if you had created a character who created something and wanted to publish it, but had no idea of the considerations, and who then had a conversation with somebody knowledgeable. Better still if some characters had done various things with unexpected consequences, and got together to discuss what to do. Then they could go on to talk to other creators and publishers about the possibilities and benefits, not only to the publisher and to others in the developed world, but to those in the developing nations. I am disappointed that there is no mention of CC-Developing Nations licenses. It also includes a license chooser; right now, the results of that license choice aren't used by anything, but we hope to work with XO developers who want to integrate CC license choosing into their activities - they can perhaps use the license chooser we bundle, and they can perhaps use as a default the license chosen by the child at the end of the CC Licensing activity. You can download the .xo at http://labs.creativecommons.org/~paulproteus/olpc/License-3.xo . It even has a proper NEWS file. I encourage you all to grab the .xo and give it a whirl! -- Asheesh. P.S. If you want to know how this compares to the release a few weeks ago, here's the NEWS file: 3 * Fix .xo packaging and MANIFEST to include everything necessary and not more. (paulproteus) * First beta release. (paulproteus) * Hand-clean text for comic. (paulproteus) -- Where do I find the time for not reading so many books? -- Karl Kraus ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Edward Cherlin End Poverty at a Profit by teaching children business http://www.EarthTreasury.org/ The best way to predict the future is to invent it.--Alan Kay ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [ANNOUNCE] Beta release of Creative Commons licensing activity
On Mon, 14 Jan 2008, Edward Cherlin wrote: On Jan 14, 2008 4:10 PM, Asheesh Laroia [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm happy to announce a beta release of the Creative Commons licensing activity for the XO. This activity is a comic reader that includes simple English text to explain the images. This is based on a comic we published a few weeks back that was written with the XO audience in mind: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Sharing_Creative_Works A good idea, though rather pedestrian in execution. [further comic comments] I've bounced your comments on the comic to Alex Roberts and Rebecca Rojer who did most of the graphic and storyboard work. Just a reminder - the comic contents are dedicated to the public domain, so re-use and re-envisioning is encouraged. I am disappointed that there is no mention of CC-Developing Nations licenses. In June 2007, we retired that license for reasons Larry laid out at http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/7520 . -- Asheesh. -- Malek's Law: Any simple idea will be worded in the most complicated way. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [ANNOUNCE] Beta release of Creative Commons licensing activity
Edward Cherlin wrote: I am disappointed that there is no mention of CC-Developing Nations licenses. The Developing Nations license is no longer recommended for use; it has been retired. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/devnations/2.0/ Phil B. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Fwd: Dailymotion for XO laptop
Ed, 1. There are two kinds of good patent attorneys. One kind works pro bono for free software and the other gets paid big bucks by patent holders. There is a 3rd kind - the kind that works for a law firm specifically funded to assist free software projects. For example, the Software Freedom Law Center. It's a question of two competing sides of a specific and very detailed technical and legal argument being thrashed out in the press and in the courts. no, it does not need to be thrashed out either in the press or in court. The aim is to avoid both. What you need to do is produce detailed claim charts, along with a set of non-infringement arguments. Once you have those then you can work out how to write your code so as to avoid the patent. This isn't always possible, but it often is. If you head to the Groklaw web site, you can see this sort of thing (from the free software side). This process does not take a few weeks but *decades*. Not true at all. I have handled the patent avoidance for Samba for a long time now, and it has generally taken me a few weeks per patent with a good patent attorney to come up with a solid non-infringement argument. Those are intensive weeks, but it is certainly not years. If it took 'decades' then what you would be doing is waiting for the patent to expire. Whether the effort involved is worth it depends how much of an impediement these codec patents are to the success of the OLPC project. In the case of Samba we can't just choose to use another protocol, so avoiding patents via non-infringement is our only choice. If we can't do it then we have to shutdown the project. That makes almost any level of effort worthwhile. For OLPC the need for these codecs is almost certainly not as critical, so perhaps the effort is not worthwhile. That is not really for me to judge. I just wanted to point out that the existance of a patent in connection with a codec is not necessarily a show stopper. Cheers, Tridge ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Classroom tools
2008/1/15, Jameson Chema Quinn [EMAIL PROTECTED]: The idea of activity sharing supports several important forms of classroom interaction, and can be stretched to accommodate many more. However the focus on constructionism means there's a lack of support for teacher-centric interactions, even ones which are useful in constructionist learning. Raising hands (Sorry for my duplicate mail, I unwittingly sent my post to your personal email address. ;-P) I think the topic you are posing here is very important and draw my deep interest. Partially I agree with the some lacks of powerful tools for teachers to support the children's learning outside of the XO. And I also think it is natural that the teachers who are making tremendous effort to educate care about some kind of system or mechanism to perform their ways of teaching in OLPC scheme. I also think the collaboration tools between teachers and children you proposed here can be one of the support tools (or assist mechanisms) for many teachers who would like to commit OLPC activities with the will. But I guess the starting point of the discussion seems turn aside from the main track which OLPC is aiming for. According to Construntionism theory OLPC relies on, any children have their own model of understanding the world (that is shema and those are all different each other. As the children interact with the real world, they learn by themselves using their shema, assimilating this model to the phenomena first, and accommodating it to adjust for better understanding next. This causes new shema, or knowledge, and these new shema will be also assimilated and accommodated repeatedly. Along with these series of interaction with the real world, children learn. On the other hand, the opposite idea is Instructionism in which teacher poses question and children answer. So, the beginning of your discussion makes me feel some kind of contradiction. If we respect OLPC Learning learning policy, what we are aiming for as support tools for the teachers ( or children supporters, generally ) is not the tools to implement the current teaching schemes into OLPC framework, but those develops and accelerate the collaborations among childrens including supporters. But let me say one more thing. Making use of constructionism theory doesn't means the unnecessity of the teachers, but the role of the teachers changes. In the Learning learning world, children questions to themselves or pose them among other children, some of them are alone and others may get together the groups in which all of them have same questions. What questions will be posed, in which each children have interest, and their timing are all unsynchronized, so that it is almost impossible to synchronize children to obey some kind of curriculum to progress class one by one. Forcing something regardless of their interest will rather lose their obsession. But generally speaking, as you anxious about, it seems there are lacks of supporting tools for supporters, though XO as the standalone personal learning tool is well done. So I think it is OK to prepare the tools you proposed as an one of varieties of supporting tools if OLPC has enough resources ( or enough and skillful volunteers). One thing we should care about is that the main track is to respect Learning learning policy if we make some effort under OLPC, and we need more powerful tools or systems for supporters to help children's learning whose classroom is under the tree. Spiky ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
