Re: [IAEP] The Children's Library On OLPC project
Jim Simmons writes: A Journal entry consists of a file plus metadata. There is no real advantage in NOT storing the book in the Journal. You can convert whatever book format you're reading into a zipped archive of same on reading it for the first time then mark the Journal entry with Read's activity id. This would give the Journal entry Read's icon and make it resumable by Read. I do something like this with Read Etexts when it reads a plain text file. I'm not trying to save disk space in this case; I need to add a pickle file to the archive to store annotations, so I create a new Zip file and store the text and the pickle in it. This encapsulation makes it more difficult for people to share books with non-Sugar users. If a Sugar user provides a PDF to a Windows user, Adobe Acrobat should recognize it. Likewise for sharing with MacOS X and GNOME users. Putting a bit of non-critical metadata on a file is not a reason to be changing the file format. Normally an xattr would be used to store this data. (hopefully the Journal is xattr compatible) The XO does not have enough disk space to hold hundreds of books as PDFs. Plain text files would work, but kids like pictures and I don't blame them. As I see it, the child should choose what books go on his computer for himself, and delete books when he has lost interest in them. This all depends greatly on the PDF generation tool. Most are not focused on producing small files. Text should be stored as text. It should not have fancy kerning, because this causes bloat from constantly specifying coordinates. It should use a standard PDF font. The font should not be embedded. The PDF should be compressed. (not just the images) Images should be stored as JPEG with an appropriate compression level. Computer-generated line art should be in vector format. A recent PDF standard revision should be used. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] The Next Wave of Activity Sharing
[adding IAEP to cc] On Sat, Jul 25, 2009 at 10:09, Bastienbastiengue...@googlemail.com wrote: Joshua Eddy joshuage...@gmail.com writes: This is what Sugar Labs DC wants to bring to the table. For a more detailed description of this idea, please visit my blog: http://joshstechjournal.blogspot.com/ Nice idea! Thanks for sharing it. I presume ideally the config options would offer a website to publish to, along with the Jabber service. I love the idea of having a site for children to share their work, I think this is going to be really big hit for Sugar. Congratulations on taking this task. We have been already discussing this in #sugar during the last week with Jeff and Aleksey and several good ideas were shared, will be nice to put all our thoughts in common when we get to more detail. A somewhat minor concern I have with your proposal is that I'm not sure that just one global server will be enough for everybody. What about areas with local network but none or little internet access? If on the other hand deployments can set their own server as Bastien suggests, how would a child upload to the global one when connection conditions improve? One could imagine that the control panel would allow to set a list of servers and the Publish menu item becomes a submenu where you can select the server to upload to, but things get complicated fast with maybe not too much value. What I would propose instead, based on my experience, is to start by the very basics and build on that after getting some feedback from actual users. I see how a publish menu item in the activity palette or the journal makes it easier than having to go to a specific site in Browse, but if you restrict the modifications at first to Browse, then you can install your new activity version on any existing Sugar version. There's still a lot to discuss, feel free to ask any questions but better do so in the Sugar Labs mailing lists, as OLPC is not doing Sugar development any more: http://lists.sugarlabs.org Regards, Tomeu -- Bastien ___ Devel mailing list de...@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] etoys, moodle, gcompris, kde-edu and other sister projects
Tomeu Vizoso to...@sugarlabs.org writes: Wonder what we could do so that these other projects feel more welcomed to our community and more collaboration opportunities are taken. Any ideas? If we take Gcompris as an example of such project, I guess ideas of collaboration are more likely to come from Gcompris/Sugar users. I don't read OLPC Sur as I don't speak spanish. It looks like I miss a lot. I would be happy to share Gcompris/Sugar feedback with the larger Gcompris community in France, but I would need this feedback to be more accessible: in english, on a blog, etc. This way I Gcompris users would have more incentives to test Sugar. -- Bastien ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] The Children's Library On OLPC project
On Sat, Jul 25, 2009 at 04:37:07AM -0400, Albert Cahalan wrote: Jim Simmons writes: A Journal entry consists of a file plus metadata. There is no real advantage in NOT storing the book in the Journal. You can convert whatever book format you're reading into a zipped archive of same on reading it for the first time then mark the Journal entry with Read's activity id. This would give the Journal entry Read's icon and make it resumable by Read. I do something like this with Read Etexts when it reads a plain text file. I'm not trying to save disk space in this case; I need to add a pickle file to the archive to store annotations, so I create a new Zip file and store the text and the pickle in it. This encapsulation makes it more difficult for people to share books with non-Sugar users. If a Sugar user provides a PDF to a Windows user, Adobe Acrobat should recognize it. Likewise for sharing with MacOS X and GNOME users. Putting a bit of non-critical metadata on a file is not a reason to be changing the file format. Normally an xattr would be used to store this data. (hopefully the Journal is xattr compatible) But what about preview metadata field.. The current approach which was chosen in[1] is using object bundle if we want to preserve sugar metadata and use raw files otherwise[2]. So, to library.sugarlabs.org[3] Browse will upload object bundles. Moreover library.sl.o server could return .xo files if web client is Browse and plain Journal entries otherwise(for non-sugar users). [1] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/Object_Bundles [2] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/Object_Bundles#User_Experience [3] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/Server_Objects_Sharing -- Aleksey ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] etoys, moodle, gcompris, kde-edu and other sister projects
On Sat, Jul 25, 2009 at 10:53, Bastienbastiengue...@googlemail.com wrote: Tomeu Vizoso to...@sugarlabs.org writes: Wonder what we could do so that these other projects feel more welcomed to our community and more collaboration opportunities are taken. Any ideas? If we take Gcompris as an example of such project, I guess ideas of collaboration are more likely to come from Gcompris/Sugar users. I don't read OLPC Sur as I don't speak spanish. It looks like I miss a lot. I would be happy to share Gcompris/Sugar feedback with the larger Gcompris community in France, but I would need this feedback to be more accessible: in english, on a blog, etc. This way I Gcompris users would have more incentives to test Sugar. Yeah, I see connecting the different Sugar communities around the world and fostering collaboration as one of the most interesting problems that Sugar Labs faces. Local Labs are a piece on this puzzle, but I would like to see more spontaneous action there. This page is a start to give some structure to Sugar around the world: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Deployment_Team/Places Ideally, people would be able to push their local issues directly to any team at the global Sugar Labs, but also would be possible to pull feedback from the deployments through that list of contacts. Language is an issue, but it's also a matter of GCompris users in Uruguay knowing how the software is developed and what channels exist to talk with the people who do it. There's a huge amount of work ahead to educate everybody about what free software is and how it gets developed and deployed, from NGO managers to politicians, with teachers and parents in between. I hope one day we'll have some kind of Sugar newsletters that get translated in several languages and are sent directly to teachers and students, containing articles, interviews to people like Bruno, etc. This could help give some more cohesion to our so broad community Regards, Tomeu -- Bastien ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] The Next Wave of Activity Sharing
On Sat, Jul 25, 2009 at 11:31, Aleksey Limalsr...@member.fsf.org wrote: On Sat, Jul 25, 2009 at 10:45:32AM +0200, Tomeu Vizoso wrote: [adding IAEP to cc] On Sat, Jul 25, 2009 at 10:09, Bastienbastiengue...@googlemail.com wrote: Joshua Eddy joshuage...@gmail.com writes: This is what Sugar Labs DC wants to bring to the table. For a more detailed description of this idea, please visit my blog: http://joshstechjournal.blogspot.com/ Nice idea! Thanks for sharing it. I presume ideally the config options would offer a website to publish to, along with the Jabber service. I love the idea of having a site for children to share their work, I think this is going to be really big hit for Sugar. Congratulations on taking this task. We have been already discussing this in #sugar during the last week with Jeff and Aleksey and several good ideas were shared, will be nice to put all our thoughts in common when we get to more detail. Everyone is welcome to formalize thoughts on http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/Server_Objects_Sharing A somewhat minor concern I have with your proposal is that I'm not sure that just one global server will be enough for everybody. What about areas with local network but none or little internet access? If on the other hand deployments can set their own server as Bastien suggests, how would a child upload to the global one when connection conditions improve? But global server doesn't except local servers think about www.flickr.com - its global option but every community could have local servers. One could imagine that the control panel would allow to set a list of servers and the Publish menu item becomes a submenu where you can select the server to upload to, but things get complicated fast with maybe not too much value. What I would propose instead, based on my experience, is to start by the very basics and build on that after getting some feedback from actual users. I see how a publish menu item in the activity palette or the journal makes it easier than having to go to a specific site in Browse, but if you restrict the modifications at first to Browse, then you can install your new activity version on any existing Sugar version. btw, why just not using Browse, we already do this in case of ASLO is there real need to add additional complexity to sugar UI at least we could start using Browse, get feedback and add new features to 0.88(if its necessary). That's what I was trying to explain ;) Though I do see some value in jumping over the step of opening browse and navigating to a specific site, just think that from the deployment side of things this could be better done in a future step. Josh, I think your blog has very interesting stuff about your work in Sugar, would you like to have it syndicated in http://planet.sugarlabs.org ? http://joshstechjournal.blogspot.com/ Thanks, Tomeu -- Aleksey ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sur] sugerencia para actividad clock
At Mon, 20 Jul 2009 10:14:23 -0700, Yoshiki Ohshima wrote: At Sat, 18 Jul 2009 11:56:03 +0200, Tomeu Vizoso wrote: What about the clock in Etoys? Are you asking the maintainer of the clock done in Etoys? That one has more complicated eye candy but a teacher or a helper of the teacher should make one in 10 minutes or so. However, my point of making that clock was that each kid should make one to understand it. At the Squeakfest Brasil conference, Kathleen Smith conducted a tutorial session to make a clock in Etoys. Dozens of teachers from Brazil, Uruguay, Peru, etc. attended and making their own clocks. So hopefully the idea spreads in the continent... -- Yoshiki I don't subscribe the olpc-sur list. Please forward this to the list and connect the original person to these Squeakfest attendees. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sur] sugerencia para actividad clock
At Sat, 25 Jul 2009 14:55:53 -0300, Yoshiki Ohshima wrote: At Mon, 20 Jul 2009 10:14:23 -0700, Yoshiki Ohshima wrote: At Sat, 18 Jul 2009 11:56:03 +0200, Tomeu Vizoso wrote: What about the clock in Etoys? Are you asking the maintainer of the clock done in Etoys? That one has more complicated eye candy but a teacher or a helper of the teacher should make one in 10 minutes or so. However, my point of making that clock was that each kid should make one to understand it. At the Squeakfest Brasil conference, Kathleen Smith conducted a tutorial session to make a clock in Etoys. Dozens of teachers from Brazil, Uruguay, Peru, etc. attended and making their own clocks. So hopefully the idea spreads in the continent... One more thing... In my version, I sort of cheated and used the premade digital clock object that is available in the Object Catalog-Just for Fun to get the system clock. If you just need to know the current time, you can pull out the object from catalog. Also, in various ways, you can come up with more arithmetic tricks to teach. -- Yoshiki ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] GPA Notes 7/23/09
On Friday 24 Jul 2009 7:08:05 am Anurag Goel wrote: I feel most kids struggled with this because they had not learned too much about geometry, particularily concepts involving degrees and radii. However, kids experimented with a lot of different values to better predict increments. Some kids realized that if they input a really large number they would get the same result as importing a really small number (ex: 12 and 732). As expected, the kids did not understand why that was. The circular movement is not about geometry but differential calculus. Watch the movie clips on Talking Turtles in http://logothings.wikispaces.com, particular the first part of clip 2. 732 and 12 are numerical encodings of a concept that they have to experience first using their own body movements. Subbu ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
