Re: [IAEP] Planning for the future
This is certainly a vital topic for many of us. I have been hands-on with a number of deployments. In the case of Rwanda, a lot of money has been invested in an effort to provide a laptop to every elementary school child in the country. I feel that project needs any support we can give it to ensure that that investment has a positive return. In other deployments, individuals or small groups have donated funds to acquire a set of laptops for a specific school. I feel that investment needs to be protected. In Nepal, OLE Nepal has done remarkable things focused on making the OLPC laptops as valuable as possible to the schools where they are deployed. That effort also needs to get a maximum return. In the computer field, it is obvious that a specific computer model has a limited lifetime. Most models remain on the market for less than three years (a shrinking time-scale as manufacturers want you to buy the next big thing). in actual use, computers probably have a life more like 5-7 years. In educational use, they are used until they stop working since the school has no way to get more. With SOAS, SugarLabs recognized this and sought a way to make Sugar viable on other hardware. Again, in the computer field, software has a much longer lifetime than hardware. (Our firmware is written in Forth). Will there be anything recognizable as Sugar running on computer hardware in 2020? A critical part of the OLPC experience has been the insistence on open source and open educational resources. The intent is not only to enable a volunteer community to contribute but also so that the recipients of the laptops are not confronted with a bill for use of the software and educational content. What happens to this if the only viable software is WIndows, IOS, and Android? One thing that is certain is that by 2020 school children will have computing devices. What will those devices due to help them to a better education? Most probably, they will help them get better scores on high-stake exams. This has been the uniform criteria used to measure the success of OLPC deployments. Personally, my hope is that this community will produce a viable educational alternative for community schools (with limited access to the internet) to the purchase of software and educational content from the educational industry. An alternative in the sense that Linux distributions offer a viable alternative to Windows, IOS, and Android. There are some very favorable developments. One is the increasing focus in the XSCE community on content and educational resources. The contributions of Khan Academy (especially Lite), IIAB, Rachel, and OLE Nepal are invaluable. The continued contributions of educators such as Sora Edwards-Thro are also invaluable (I should name countless others, but if I try I will do an injustice). It is possible that new hardware such as the XO Infinity will breathe a few more years of life into the project (particularly if it supports Fedora/Sugar builds). Anyway, one can try to keep the vision. Yours, Tony On 02/24/2015 01:31 PM, iaep-requ...@lists.sugarlabs.org wrote: essage: 1 Date: Mon, 23 Feb 2015 18:36:34 -0500 From: Samuel Greenfeldsam...@greenfeld.org To: IAEP SugarLabsiaep@lists.sugarlabs.org Subject: [IAEP] Planning for the future Message-ID: CA+cAqjM7=hqou47mhmr9aqtnbzkrmjdb00nxbzennbo+1wk...@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Disclaimer: The following are my views, and not the views of my current or past employers. About a year ago, I privately expressed concern that Sugar needed to ensure it had long-term sponsorship and a long-term user base. Since then, both the historical US-based OLPC organization and Sugar Labs have not publicly said much about their long-term plans, with OLPC also being rather closemouthed about the present. Meanwhile contributors silently leave. It is hard to justify volunteering when you don't know who will benefit besides mysterious customers. Everyone seems happy to cite their past successes. No one corrects the press when they report stale information in their favor. There is no shame in being a smaller project. But we need to ask the hard questions. With Sugar, getting users and developers for a niche platform is a problem. With OLPC, everyone seems to love repeating the 2 or 2.5 million number for laptops historically shipped. Rarely is it asked how many XOs been shipped in the past year or are in active use where. Sugar OLPC need to come up with long-term strategies. While there is nothing public I have seen stopping One Education's XO Infinity from running Sugar, I haven't seen anything stopping it from running anything else. It is also unclear how much One Education is willing to engage with the historical Sugar OLPC communities (or how much they can tell us at this time). Historically there have been many philosophical questions like Does there need to be a physical machine? and Have
Re: [IAEP] Planning for the future (Samuel Greenfeld)
recognized). The app helps teachers write books https://projectrive.wordpress.com/2014/12/27/lascahobas-workshops-final-review/ for beginning readers by recommending easy words; now we're shifting our focus to supporting student writers. There are already several excellent writing activities for the Sugar, which we're including as we design lessons for a summer writing workshop for our XO projects in Haiti: -Labyrinth http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4078, a mindmapping activity that gets kids thinking http://www.unleashkids.org/2013/07/31/story-activity-continued-and-the-results/ about how to lay out their ideas on paper -Fototoon http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4253, comic-book style creations; a perpetual favorite https://projectrive.wordpress.com/2013/08/16/first-week-of-classes/ -Newspaper http://seeta.in/j/products/37.html, an example of how templates can enable kids http://blog.unleashkids.org/2013/08/01/journal-mission-of-hope/ to explore new formats -Prompt http://olpc-yokwe.tumblr.com/post/39897602954/prompt-activity, literally just presents students with a random image from a library for them to write about...proof that simple stuff can be powerful We want to supplement these great activities with some new stuff, based on teacher recommendations. A lot of the focus will be on creating templates and scenarios that kids can use as inspiration - for example, we can present the kids with a scene of people talking, where the speech bubbles aren't filled in, and ask them to fill in the speech bubbles. That's one of many ideas for an effective tool. We also hope to make use of the XSCE schoolserver installed on-site to enable the kids to collaborate and share the finished products with one another. Our most dire need is help with the programming, but we also welcome input on any and all aspects. Thank you everyone! Sora Edwards-Thro On Thu, Feb 12, 2015 at 1:49 AM, Aaron Borden adbor...@live.com wrote: Hello, OLPC San Francisco will be hosting our monthly meeting Saturday, February 14th, from 10AM - 1PM at the downtown SFSU campus, 835 Market Street, Room 597 (the fishbowl). Our meetings are held on the second Saturday of every month. Everyone is welcome to join us for our monthly meeting! We'll be discussing the latest in OLPC events and give updates on our local (and global) projects. There will be plenty of XO laptops with the latest builds to play around with, too. Please post with any additional agenda items. Facebook https://www.facebook.com/events/325843320953044/ Google+ https://plus.google.com/events/crf7g4e84aag78ssn761danaj8s -- Aaron Borden Human and Hacker ___ 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 -- Gonzalo Odiard SugarLabs - Software for children learning -- Gonzalo Odiard SugarLabs - Software for children learning -- Gonzalo Odiard SugarLabs - Software for children learning ___ 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 -- Gonzalo Odiard SugarLabs - Software for children learning -- Gonzalo Odiard SugarLabs - Software for children learning -- next part -- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/attachments/20150224/46e24159/attachment.html -- ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep End of IAEP Digest, Vol 83, Issue 17 ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Planning for the future (Samuel Greenfeld)
their ideas on paper -Fototoon http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4253, comic-book style creations; a perpetual favorite https://projectrive.wordpress.com/2013/08/16/first-week-of-classes/ -Newspaper http://seeta.in/j/products/37.html, an example of how templates can enable kids http://blog.unleashkids.org/2013/08/01/journal-mission-of-hope/ to explore new formats -Prompt http://olpc-yokwe.tumblr.com/post/39897602954/prompt-activity, literally just presents students with a random image from a library for them to write about...proof that simple stuff can be powerful We want to supplement these great activities with some new stuff, based on teacher recommendations. A lot of the focus will be on creating templates and scenarios that kids can use as inspiration - for example, we can present the kids with a scene of people talking, where the speech bubbles aren't filled in, and ask them to fill in the speech bubbles. That's one of many ideas for an effective tool. We also hope to make use of the XSCE schoolserver installed on-site to enable the kids to collaborate and share the finished products with one another. Our most dire need is help with the programming, but we also welcome input on any and all aspects. Thank you everyone! Sora Edwards-Thro On Thu, Feb 12, 2015 at 1:49 AM, Aaron Borden adbor...@live.com wrote: Hello, OLPC San Francisco will be hosting our monthly meeting Saturday, February 14th, from 10AM - 1PM at the downtown SFSU campus, 835 Market Street, Room 597 (the fishbowl). Our meetings are held on the second Saturday of every month. Everyone is welcome to join us for our monthly meeting! We'll be discussing the latest in OLPC events and give updates on our local (and global) projects. There will be plenty of XO laptops with the latest builds to play around with, too. Please post with any additional agenda items. Facebook https://www.facebook.com/events/325843320953044/ Google+ https://plus.google.com/events/crf7g4e84aag78ssn761danaj8s -- Aaron Borden Human and Hacker ___ 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 -- Gonzalo Odiard SugarLabs - Software for children learning -- Gonzalo Odiard SugarLabs - Software for children learning -- Gonzalo Odiard SugarLabs - Software for children learning ___ 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 -- Gonzalo Odiard SugarLabs - Software for children learning -- Gonzalo Odiard SugarLabs - Software for children learning -- next part -- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/attachments/20150224/46e24159/attachment.html -- ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep End of IAEP Digest, Vol 83, Issue 17 ___ Sugar-devel mailing list sugar-de...@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel -- 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
