[IAEP] Fwd: Sugar Digest 2009-11-02
I must not be getting enough sleep. I forgot to CC iaep and dev. -walter -- Forwarded message -- From: Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com Date: Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 6:53 PM Subject: Sugar Digest 2009-11-02 To: community-n...@lists.sugarlabs.org === Sugar Digest === 1. Steve Levitt and Stephen Dubner are back in the news. Their new book, ''SuperFreakonomics'' is getting panned by the critics—the ''Boston Globe'' referred to it as ''Sloppynomics'' (See [http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/11/01/the_freakonomics_duo_tackles_climate_changeand_discovers_the_limits_of_cleverness). I haven't read it yet, so I won't pass judgment. However, I found the first book in the series, ''Freakonmics'', provocative but misguided. The chapter on nature vs. nurture was especially misleading. In it, the authors compared the academic performance—as measured by standardized tests—of children adopted into families with children born into the same families. Nature prevailed over nurture. Alas, there are any number of flaws and holes in their data analysis, but what was most damning was a throw-away comment at the end of the chapter: in life after school, there was no difference in performance between the two subject pools. So all they really demonstrated is that there is no correlation between standardized test scores and life skills. Given the penchant that we have for valuing that which we can measure instead of measuring that which we value, this would have been a provocative result, but not one picked up on by Levitt and Drucker. What brought this to mind was that on the opposite page from the book review was an article advocating for the use of standardized test data (See http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/11/01/a_way_to_improve_schools_one_instructor_at_a_time) to measure the difference a teacher makes. Numerous studies use a statistical analysis of standardized test results to measure the 'value added' that each teacher contributes each year. I am not opposed to trying to measure both student and teacher performance. If nothing else, it provides a forum for reflection, an important part of the learning process. The ''Globe'' reports that the Obama administration is considering using value-added studies as a component of metric for evaluating teachers and ting teacher pay to what is happening in each classroom as a central part of school reform. Developing, rewarding, and retaining effective teachers is a great goal. Let's just take care to measure the whole child and the whole teacher when we presume to measure effectiveness. 2. We had a Sugar Labs oversight board meeting last Friday in which we reached consensus on a more formal set of rules regarding quorum and voting by the board: we require a minimum quorum of four members present in order to initiate a vote and a majority of all members (four) for a passing vote. We will accept votes by email. We also established a mechanism for oversight-board members and community members to raise discussion topics. Community members should email any SLOBs member with a topic suggestion before the start of a board meeting. The meeting chair will triage discussion-topic requests. To increase the likelihood that your discussion topic rises to the top of the queue, please include: # a link to existing discussion thread(s) on public mailing list; # a ''brief'' summary of each option or alternative being proposed; and # a rationale for why this issue needs to escalate to the oversight board. The meeting log and minutes are available in the wiki (See http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Oversight_Board/Meeting_Log-2009-10-30 and http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Oversight_Board/Meeting_Minutes-2009-10-30). The next meeting is scheduled for Friday, 6 November 2009 at 15:00 UTC (10:00 EST). === In the community === 3. Christoph Derndorfer will be speaking about Sugar and OLPC at the 26th Chaos Communication Congress (26C3) in Berlin on 27–20 December (See http://events.ccc.de/congress/2009/wiki/index.php/Welcome). He would like to organize a meetup of European Sugar Labs / OLPC contributors and people who might be interested in working with us in the future. 4. We will be holding a Sugar Camp beginning next weekend in Bolzano at the TIS innovation center. We hope to make a lot of progress on 0.88 as well as build upon our various ties to the GNOME community, which also meeting in Bolzano. === Tech Talk === 5. Thanks to the efforts of Josh Williams, Aleksey Lim, and David Farning, the new http://activities.sugarlabs.org site went on-line over the weekend. The new look is clean and also in compliance with Mozilla copy === Sugar Labs === 6. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:2009-October-24-30-som.jpg). -walter -- Walter Bender Sugar Labs http://www.sugarlabs.org -- Walter Bender Sugar Labs http://www.sugarlabs.org
Re: [IAEP] SLs Chile and GNOME Chile
Thanks David, the technical background is not our best side, but we need to get in track. If you know ideas around Gnome and Sugar development it would be great to know. Regards, werner 2009/11/3 David Van Assche dvanass...@gmail.com Hi Werner, I don't know if you know this, but both Sugar an Gnome share identical code for collaboration and communication in the form of Telepathy dbus api (http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/wiki/) The only difference is that at the time their presence service was not so advanced, so Sugar has its own. Telepathy has since really mattured though, and mission control 5, that includes an advanced presence service that hopeffuly some folks are porting to latest sugar,, David Van Assche On Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 9:45 PM, Werner Westermann werne...@gmail.com wrote: Hello Tomeu, regards from Santiago, Chile. GNOME community, as far as I know, it had a lot of ups and down in their effort to build collaborative work. I really don't know if there's some counterpart to talk to. This is no sin for any free-software community, but it gets hard to coordinate any kind of cooperation. Where do you see that there's potential around Chile? Are yo talking to chileans involved with GNOME? I must say that stimulating GNOMErs to work around Sugar could be a good idea, but I feel that should come from GNOME's vision and scope. Two chileans are in GNOME's board (Germán Poo http://www.calcifer.org/ and Fernando San Martín http://blogs.gnome.org/fsmw/), and maybe they could help. Is there any work going around SL and GNOME today? Best wishes, werner 2009/11/2 Tomeu Vizoso to...@sugarlabs.org Hi, have you considered reaching GNOME Chile for cooperation? Sugar's code is more than 90% from GNOME and the two upstreams regularly cooperate. There's lots of potential for resource pooling in the technical level, and also in the advocacy for free software in education. Regards, Tomeu -- «Sugar Labs is anyone who participates in improving and using Sugar. What Sugar Labs does is determined by the participants.» - David Farning ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- Mike Ditka - If God had wanted man to play soccer, he wouldn't have given us arms. - http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/mike_ditka.html ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Fwd: Sugar Digest 2009-11-02
I think there are more recommended activities than fit at any one time. They are chosen randomly from the list. As to how the list is compiled, I do not know, but I believe that Etoys is already a recommended activity. I'll double-check. -walter On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 10:25 AM, Rita Freudenberg r...@squeakland.org wrote: Walter Bender wrote: 5. Thanks to the efforts of Josh Williams, Aleksey Lim, and David Farning, the new http://activities.sugarlabs.org site went on-line over the weekend. The new look is clean and also in compliance with Mozilla copy I would like to know how the activities on the starting page are chosen. What does it require from an activity to be recommended? My question is not just out of curiosity, I would like to see Etoys there. So I would like to know if we could do anything to be considered a recommended activity? Thanks, Rita -- Rita Freudenberg Squeakland Foundation http://www.squeakland.org -- Walter Bender Sugar Labs http://www.sugarlabs.org ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] SLs Chile and GNOME Chile
I know that gnome-es is very active and at least one fellow Colombian developer with experience on gnome, we can begin to work with them at sugar-desarrollo. Rafael Ortiz On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 9:00 AM, Werner Westermann werne...@gmail.com wrote: Thanks David, the technical background is not our best side, but we need to get in track. If you know ideas around Gnome and Sugar development it would be great to know. Regards, werner 2009/11/3 David Van Assche dvanass...@gmail.com Hi Werner, I don't know if you know this, but both Sugar an Gnome share identical code for collaboration and communication in the form of Telepathy dbus api (http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/wiki/) The only difference is that at the time their presence service was not so advanced, so Sugar has its own. Telepathy has since really mattured though, and mission control 5, that includes an advanced presence service that hopeffuly some folks are porting to latest sugar,, David Van Assche On Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 9:45 PM, Werner Westermann werne...@gmail.com wrote: Hello Tomeu, regards from Santiago, Chile. GNOME community, as far as I know, it had a lot of ups and down in their effort to build collaborative work. I really don't know if there's some counterpart to talk to. This is no sin for any free-software community, but it gets hard to coordinate any kind of cooperation. Where do you see that there's potential around Chile? Are yo talking to chileans involved with GNOME? I must say that stimulating GNOMErs to work around Sugar could be a good idea, but I feel that should come from GNOME's vision and scope. Two chileans are in GNOME's board (Germán Poo http://www.calcifer.org/ and Fernando San Martín http://blogs.gnome.org/fsmw/), and maybe they could help. Is there any work going around SL and GNOME today? Best wishes, werner 2009/11/2 Tomeu Vizoso to...@sugarlabs.org Hi, have you considered reaching GNOME Chile for cooperation? Sugar's code is more than 90% from GNOME and the two upstreams regularly cooperate. There's lots of potential for resource pooling in the technical level, and also in the advocacy for free software in education. Regards, Tomeu -- «Sugar Labs is anyone who participates in improving and using Sugar. What Sugar Labs does is determined by the participants.» - David Farning ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- Mike Ditka - If God had wanted man to play soccer, he wouldn't have given us arms. - http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/mike_ditka.html ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Bookreader] Text to Speech readers for XO
The Internet Archive has started to distribute books as DAISY (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DAISY_Digital_Talking_Book), something we should definitely take a look at. We might also consider leveraging the GNOME accessibility framework to provide book-reading features for Epubs and PDFs in Read - it may be tricky, but the end results would be worth it. Thanks, Sayamindu On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 5:34 AM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.com wrote: Bumping up this recent thread on the bookreader list about text-to-speech. Mike and Gregor, in case you haven't seen what's currently possible: I believe James S's Read Etexts uses speech-dispatcher to read selected text. Aleksey and others may have done further work with espeak... I've included some old threads from the Sugar list this past spring below. SJ On Thu, Oct 29, Mike McCabe mcc...@archive.org wrote: I also think this is a great idea. I've worked with several text-to-speech readers recently, as part of my effort to make the Internet Archive books available to print disabled people. They're very useful, and I think that this mode of reading could be of use to a very broad range of users. I suspect we'll see more of it soon. I'm also curious to hear about specific experiences with linux-compatible free TTS, as we may be producing audio books with this to work with the new Library of Congress audio players. Best regards - Mike == [1] old note from James Simmons == ( in repsponse to this speech-synthesis summer of code proposal: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/speech-synthesis ) Chirag, Since you have been working with Aleksey Lim you probably know about text to speech with highlighting in Read Etexts. I wrote the original TTS code that used speech-dispatcher with some assistance from Hemant Goyal and the folks on the speech-dispatcher project. Aleksey refactored my code so it could work with either speech-dispatcher or his own gstreamer espeak plugin. Not only does his plugin need no configuration to work, it also does a LOT better in producing timely callbacks as it reads each word. As you point out in your proposal, highlighting the word as it is spoken is a big part of the benefit of what you're proposing. If all you wanted to do was capture some highlighted text in the clipboard and have it spoken in a voice you can configure in a control panel, that would be easy, even trivial. It's the highlighting that's difficult. When I added speech to Read Etexts I deliberately tried for the simplest approach that would get the job done. It reads only the current page. It always starts either at the first word on the page, or if speech has been paused, it resumes with the last word spoken. You can't choose the word to start on. The Activity itself receives the callbacks as each word is spoken and takes care of doing the highlight and scrolling the textarea so the highlighted word stays on the screen. If I had to write a facility that did what Read Etexts does outside of the Activity I wouldn't know how to do it. It seems to me that highlighting is best done by the Activity itself. I can't deny that it would be useful to have all this work done as you have described without the Activity knowing anything about it, but it doesn't seem feasible. You'd have to have something that could work with gtk textareas, the evince component Read uses, Abiword, and everything else that came along. Another thing you'd have to deal with is PDFs composed of scanned in book pages. There are a lot of these around (the Internet Archive is full of them) and somehow the kid trying to select words on a scanned in page would have to be clued in that these words are not selectable. I suppose you could make an Activity that grabbed whatever text was in the clipboard, displayed it in a textarea, and highlighted the words in that textarea as it spoke them. I'm pretty sure that wasn't what you had in mind. Splitting sentences into separate words will be a challenge. I just use spaces as delimiters and filter out characters like asterisks, vertical bars, etc. That works OK for English but not for other languages. If I wanted Read Etexts to do highlighting on the Bhagavad-Gita in the original Sanskrit it wouldn't work. Even in English I get tripped up by double hyphens (--). It would be nice if Gutenberg etexts put spaces around double hyphens but they don't. It looks like you've picked a challenging project, and I would love to be proven wrong about everything I've mentioned here. Good luck with this, James Simmons == 2: SynPhony and reading assistance == On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 12:48 PM, Carol Farlow Lerche c...@msbit.com wrote: I'd like to call your attention again to SynPhony. We are close to a base release (probably this week) of a 44,000 word English word database that has a very rich array of information helpful to the teaching of English, especially reading. A 10,000 word
Re: [IAEP] What do I want Big Time To Be?
Caryl Bigenho wrote: Hi All, Hi, I've put some comments inline... When I asked if SoaS was ready for Big Time, Martin replied, What do you mean? I'd recommend it but I don't know enough about what you want. So here is what I mean and want... I would like to be able to go into a room (or exhbit hall) filled with overworked, underpaid educators and while showing them Sugar on the XO, tell them they can run some of the same (and some even better) Activities on the equipment they already have at their schools... and that they can do it for free (free is good). Running Sugar on a Stick on the XO with the *latest* Sugar version from the NAND is something that's on the list for the Blueberry launch. Martin Dengler has been doing a great job at getting this realized! I would like them to get really excited about being able to get something for their students that is not only sound educationally, but that they can afford because the download is free. Their only cost is their chosen storage media. I would like to be able to show them how it works on a MacBook (my machine) and on a PC (if someone would just tell me how to get one for very little $$$). I would like it to be stable software that runs on their choice of Live CD or USB stick. The point about Macs in general is that it's hard to say what's going to work and what isn't. At least insofar as most of the Linux distribution haven't focused on it. Which is why I wouldn't guarantee that everything works. This is also a distribution question, since it's the underlying distribution that needs to provide the support. Anyway, without knowing what is causing issues, what hardware is used, and so on, it's a bit hard to say what's wrong (there are just so many different models out there!). Providing hardware information works for example pretty well following there instructions: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick/Hardware On the stability: Development snapshots intended for testing won't necessarily be stable, as a matter of fact. Final releases should be, and that's what we're working on. Really. I would like to be able to give them links for downloading it and for getting other Activities. I would like to be able to give them links for very easy to follow instructions for downloading and using the software. And, I would like to be able to give them links to a place they can get help if they get stuck. activities.sugarlabs.org and answers.launchpad.net/soas should do the trick. I know some of these things exist already but, unless I have missed something, most of them don't. My next presentation to educators will be at the CUELA/LAUSD Tech Fair on November 14. It all depends on what you're looking at. Strawberry is now several months old. It works and is rather stable. But it doesn't contain all the features that are going to be in the next version, obviously. Until Blueberry is out, there are the snapshots, but those might not be entirely working. So again, Blueberry is what will introduce a lot of this officially. How much of this is real already? How much is in the dim and distant future? Send links! Caryl = --Sebastian ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Fwd: Sugar Digest 2009-11-02
On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 11:41 AM, David Farning dfarn...@sugarlabs.org wrote: On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 9:28 AM, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: I think there are more recommended activities than fit at any one time. They are chosen randomly from the list. As to how the list is compiled, I do not know, but I believe that Etoys is already a recommended activity. I'll double-check. Currently there is not a formal recommended policy. Basically, whenever I see a cool new activity I add it to the recommend list and remove an activity that has been around for awhile. I think Aleksey does the same. If anyone would like to create and maintain more formal recommended list it is very easy to create an activities.sl.o editor's account for them. david I had written about this a long time ago. My approach was to rank activities based on a list of attributes (weighted scoring). The activities with the highest attributes would be the ones installed. The same approach could be used for Recommended activities. The thread is at http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/grassroots/2008-September/000707.html . The GoogleDocs spreadsheet is at http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=p_Xhb6KcXLyEViA50CnCaDghl=en Sameer -walter On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 10:25 AM, Rita Freudenberg r...@squeakland.org wrote: Walter Bender wrote: 5. Thanks to the efforts of Josh Williams, Aleksey Lim, and David Farning, the new http://activities.sugarlabs.org site went on-line over the weekend. The new look is clean and also in compliance with Mozilla copy I would like to know how the activities on the starting page are chosen. What does it require from an activity to be recommended? My question is not just out of curiosity, I would like to see Etoys there. So I would like to know if we could do anything to be considered a recommended activity? Thanks, Rita -- Rita Freudenberg Squeakland Foundation http://www.squeakland.org -- Walter Bender Sugar Labs http://www.sugarlabs.org ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Fwd: Sugar Digest 2009-11-02
On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 2:31 PM, Sameer Verma sve...@sfsu.edu wrote: On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 11:41 AM, David Farning dfarn...@sugarlabs.org wrote: On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 9:28 AM, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: I think there are more recommended activities than fit at any one time. They are chosen randomly from the list. As to how the list is compiled, I do not know, but I believe that Etoys is already a recommended activity. I'll double-check. Currently there is not a formal recommended policy. Basically, whenever I see a cool new activity I add it to the recommend list and remove an activity that has been around for awhile. I think Aleksey does the same. If anyone would like to create and maintain more formal recommended list it is very easy to create an activities.sl.o editor's account for them. david I had written about this a long time ago. My approach was to rank activities based on a list of attributes (weighted scoring). The activities with the highest attributes would be the ones installed. The same approach could be used for Recommended activities. The thread is at http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/grassroots/2008-September/000707.html . The GoogleDocs spreadsheet is at http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=p_Xhb6KcXLyEViA50CnCaDghl=en If you are interested, the job of recommend list[1] maintainer is open. ASLO is getting 100,000 visits a month, doubling every three months, so the effect of your work would be rather widespread. david 1. http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/recommended Sameer -walter On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 10:25 AM, Rita Freudenberg r...@squeakland.org wrote: Walter Bender wrote: 5. Thanks to the efforts of Josh Williams, Aleksey Lim, and David Farning, the new http://activities.sugarlabs.org site went on-line over the weekend. The new look is clean and also in compliance with Mozilla copy I would like to know how the activities on the starting page are chosen. What does it require from an activity to be recommended? My question is not just out of curiosity, I would like to see Etoys there. So I would like to know if we could do anything to be considered a recommended activity? Thanks, Rita -- Rita Freudenberg Squeakland Foundation http://www.squeakland.org -- Walter Bender Sugar Labs http://www.sugarlabs.org ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] stat collecto activity
The new google wave stuff made me think of a maybe interesting activity that would be very easy to write but might be useful for teachers to gain feedback from their students, while treating them more as peers in the constructionist philosophy. The idea is, to have a a multiple choice like activity that would ask students about their experience of lessons. For example, lets say they have been learning algebra, the teacer could get them to launch an activity that asks questions like with multiple answers like: The most difficult part to learn was a) blah, b) bleh, c) bluh, The most fun part was a)) glah b) gleh c) gluh What do u think would something like that be useful? The problem I see is that the teacher would actuallly have o create the questions and answers, so it might seem like too redundant. I guess the best way would be for the teacher to get the students to create these quizzes (for lack of a better word) would be very simple to create such an activity. Would there be ebnough demand and usage of such ab activity? regards, David Van Assche ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Fwd: Sugar Digest 2009-11-02
On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 9:28 AM, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: I think there are more recommended activities than fit at any one time. They are chosen randomly from the list. As to how the list is compiled, I do not know, but I believe that Etoys is already a recommended activity. I'll double-check. Currently there is not a formal recommended policy. Basically, whenever I see a cool new activity I add it to the recommend list and remove an activity that has been around for awhile. I think Aleksey does the same. If anyone would like to create and maintain more formal recommended list it is very easy to create an activities.sl.o editor's account for them. david -walter On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 10:25 AM, Rita Freudenberg r...@squeakland.org wrote: Walter Bender wrote: 5. Thanks to the efforts of Josh Williams, Aleksey Lim, and David Farning, the new http://activities.sugarlabs.org site went on-line over the weekend. The new look is clean and also in compliance with Mozilla copy I would like to know how the activities on the starting page are chosen. What does it require from an activity to be recommended? My question is not just out of curiosity, I would like to see Etoys there. So I would like to know if we could do anything to be considered a recommended activity? Thanks, Rita -- Rita Freudenberg Squeakland Foundation http://www.squeakland.org -- Walter Bender Sugar Labs http://www.sugarlabs.org ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Infrastructure Status Report
While SoaS and Trademarks have gotten most of the attention lately, other parts of Sugar Labs are growing and moving forward. A lot is happening on the infrastructure side of the project. Some of it behind the scenes and some of it more public. --Capacity growth-- The biggest challenge faced by the team is handling capacity growth. -Machines- The first and most visible need is additional servers. Initially we outsourced several of our services. While cost effective, that policy created problems because each place we outsourced to had different support policies and system requirements. Now we are going through a consolidating phase. It is much easier to maintain a consistent infrastructure. Several of our services now need to be clustered across groups of co-located machines for load balancing and increasing reliability. We are also seeing growth rate which are doubling every quarter for Activities.sl.o. -Administrators- The second and less visible need is for administrators to help keep the systems alive. Sorry Bernie, we are going to have to pull you (kicking and screaming) from sysadmin to Infrastructure team leader. We are going to need to work on training and identify others so that they can take authority and responsibility of parts of the infrastructure. --Specific Tasks-- There are a number of specific tasks in progress which need help. -Launch Pad- Luke is working on migrating pieces of the Infrastructure to Launch Pad. There are a number of Pros and Cons to this. The big win will be using the LB bug tracker. Upstream trac (our current bug tracker) development has stalled make it very difficult to maintain dev.sl.o. Other improvements will be LP answers and LP blueprints. The user facing portion of LP is very good. Overall the LP team has been very good to work with. But I still have a number of reservations that I hope Luke and the LP team can take care of: 1. Integration with the rest of Sugar Labs services. Specificly git.sl.org and translate.sl.org. 2. Ability not to get lost in Ubuntu. There are several place where it is very easy to unwittingly exit the Sugar project and end up wandering around Ubuntu. 3. Ability to get easily get back to the rest of the *sl.org I encourage others to get involved in this project to insure that: 1. It is the right thing to do. 2. Work with the Sugar and LP communities to insure that this process is beneficial to both parties. 3. Work with the Sugar user and developer communities to insure that the migration goes smoothly. -Activities.sl.org- I am working on separating activities.sl.o from the rest of the Sugar Labs services. There are several reasons for separating out a.sl.o: 1. It will be easier to grant admin authority to a.sl.o with granting admin authority to all of the SL infrastructure. 2. A.sl.o is a resource hog. By splitting it out, we can think about scaling a.sl.o without worrying about how it will affect the rest of the infrastructure. 3. Security. The separation with provide a fence between a.sl.o and the rest of the infrastructure. If one part is compromised it will not affect the other parts. If any one want to help out, there are several interesting tasks... 1. Setting up a fresh instance of a.sl.o. 2. Load balancing and HA for the php front end. 3. Load balancing and HA for the my SQL database. -Beamrider- Bernie is in the process of splitting up the services on sunjammer between two machines, it and Beamrider. This is primarily lead by the needs to: 1. Scale sunjammer. In addition to SL stuff, Sunjammer is also hosting services for local labs and OLE. 2. Increase security and reliability. Sunjammer will remain the 'developer' machine, hosting developer accounts and testing/devel services, while beamrider will host higher priorith services. -Machines and Rack space- Finally, we need to start thinking about future machine and rack space needs. Of particular concern is finding a hosting provider that is willing and able to our growing number of machines in a single facility. david ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] 'apt-get install sugar-platform' available for Ubuntu9.10.
On Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 6:38 AM, Tomeu Vizoso to...@sugarlabs.org wrote: On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 01:02, David Farning dfarn...@sugarlabs.org wrote: After a couple of weeks of reading tutorials, help from Aleksey, and some Ubuntu developers there are Sugar packages available for Ubuntu 9.10. Just gave them a try and worked great, congrats all! Which are the next steps? Cool The next steps are a proper bug tracker and start patching. It has been a little frustrating because all of the bugs on this thread have been part of the lower packages. As part of my learning I have been starting with the easiest packages first, the activities. From there I hope to move to the more complicated core sugar packages and finally start on xulrunner an csound. The basic strategy is to move towards Debian's upstream packages. The goal is to allow Ubuntu and Debian to share patches and feedback without step on each others toes with regard to packaging methods. Debian has added several interesting features to automate the packaging process. But, these features make it harder for new packagers to get started. Btw, why did we needed to build our own xulrunner? The xpcom provided by the Ubuntu xulrunner does not seem to work correctly. david Regards, Tomeu For now, these packages are available on the Ubuntu-Sugarteam PPA (personal package archive) at https://launchpad.net/~sugarteam/+archive/0.86 . To use these packages, just add 'http://ppa.launchpad.net/sugarteam/0.86/ubuntu karmic main' to the end of /etc/apt/sources.list Ubuntu-Sugarteam -- Ubuntu-sugarteam mailing list ubuntu-sugart...@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-sugarteam -- «Sugar Labs is anyone who participates in improving and using Sugar. What Sugar Labs does is determined by the participants.» - David Farning ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Stat collection
Please check out http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Teacher%27s_Tools it's a project that i've been working on and have posted several emails to several mailing lists about. It is extremely similar and i have gotten positive feedback from a few people about its usability. feel free to comment on it yourself if you're interested The new google wave stuff made me think of a maybe interesting activity that would be very easy to write but might be useful for teachers to gain feedback from their students, while treating them more as peers in the constructionist philosophy. The idea is, to have a a multiple choice like activity that would ask students about their experience of lessons. For example, lets say they have been learning algebra, the teacer could get them to launch an activity that asks questions like with multiple answers like: The most difficult part to learn was a) blah, b) bleh, c) bluh, The most fun part was a)) glah b) gleh c) gluh What do u think would something like that be useful? The problem I see is that the teacher would actuallly have o create the questions and answers, so it might seem like too redundant. I guess the best way would be for the teacher to get the students to create these quizzes (for lack of a better word) would be very simple to create such an activity. Would there be ebnough demand and usage of such ab activity? regards, David Van Assche ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Stat collection
Yes it is quite similar indeed, but I think it'd better be served with python and telepathy as an activity from within sugar, rather thn a dlasbb /web app.I guess its mostly a personal thing, but I have an exteme dislike of Flash based apps... In LTSP labs, for exmple, unless u are running firefox+flash as local apps, fkash has a tendency to bring the network to its knees. I havent considered how/why do use d-tubes yet, but I'm sure there is a goiod way to use them. Karma might be another way to do this, as long as it wouldn't require flash (an unesccasary demand) Anyway, might be wiirth integrating int another quiz app I did, pyqclic as it already has the necessary underlying frameqork. I's bw happy to work with you on this however if u are keen to port your prototype to python and use telepathy bindings for collaboration. I guess need to figure out how ti best use collbab here, but what comes to mind is, passing the app around the class and having every student write a question for the quiz, then have the teacher review, and export the finished product as an XML document which would then be capable of running in Moodle, inside Sugar itself, or even a web app. btw, just read a little deeper and realise your end result would be python too, a good choice... so what's holding u back from doing it irght now? I also see that your aim is really a general multiple choice quiz for whatever subject, while what I was getting at was more of collecting statistical data on particular lessons. Even so, the same framework could be used for both approaches. Anyway, pyqclic is extremely similar except visual in that the teacher uploads an image points and clicks on the image and then fills in the label. The student then uses the tester to fill in the labels. I think we could use a similar apprioach and even add it as another module, so the teacher can choose which kind of quiz they'd like (visual, multiple choice suubject based, or statistical, whatever else we've missed, perhaps essay based quiz or something) Anyway, the real challenge is how to use collab with this properly. I've gotten stuck on that oart in pyqcclic for a whilke now... as my initial idea was to pass the app from collaborating student to student letting each fill in a label. An approach I can think of and like is this could be mixed with the multiple choice, so that its a bit more random, yet still subject based, so as to cover more ground with the abilitity to export the whole quiz as an XML doc and import into Moodle or something else and perhaps have the statistical gathering as a totally seperate module what do u think? kind Regard, David Van Assche On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 5:57 AM, ALEXANDER JONES (RIT Student) acj3...@rit.edu wrote: Please check out http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Teacher%27s_Tools it's a project that i've been working on and have posted several emails to several mailing lists about. It is extremely similar and i have gotten positive feedback from a few people about its usability. feel free to comment on it yourself if you're interested The new google wave stuff made me think of a maybe interesting activity that would be very easy to write but might be useful for teachers to gain feedback from their students, while treating them more as peers in the constructionist philosophy. The idea is, to have a a multiple choice like activity that would ask students about their experience of lessons. For example, lets say they have been learning algebra, the teacer could get them to launch an activity that asks questions like with multiple answers like: The most difficult part to learn was a) blah, b) bleh, c) bluh, The most fun part was a)) glah b) gleh c) gluh What do u think would something like that be useful? The problem I see is that the teacher would actuallly have o create the questions and answers, so it might seem like too redundant. I guess the best way would be for the teacher to get the students to create these quizzes (for lack of a better word) would be very simple to create such an activity. Would there be ebnough demand and usage of such ab activity? regards, David Van Assche ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- Charles de Gaulle - The better I get to know men, the more I find myself loving dogs. - http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/c/charles_de_gaulle.html ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep