Re: [IAEP] [SLOBS] [Sur] motion for a new mission statement

[Lionel Laské]

+1.

  Lionel.

2017-04-22 20:30 GMT+02:00 Pacita Pena :

> This mission seems to be perfectam I wrong?
> pacita
>
> 2017-04-21 17:29 GMT-04:00 Walter Bender :
>
>> Through a community effort led by Caryl Bigenho, I am making a motion.
>>
>> Motion: Revise the Sugar Labs mission statement to "Sugar Labs is a
>> volunteer-run project whose mission is to reach global learners and
>> educators with a collection of tools that enable them to explore, discover,
>> create, and reflect in their local language. Sugar Labs distributes these
>> tools freely and encourages its users to appropriate them, taking ownership
>> and responsibility for their learning."
>>
>> Looking for a second.
>>
>> regards.
>>
>> -walter
>>
>> --
>> Walter Bender
>> Sugar Labs
>> http://www.sugarlabs.org
>> 
>>
>> ___
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>> http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/olpc-sur
>>
>>
>
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Re: [IAEP] constructionism and Linux, was Re: Sugar Labs Mission & The 6 lesson Schoolteacher

[James Simmons]

I agree that having Sugar in any form at all on Android is valuable. It
would be a lot more valuable if Android wasn't so locked down, but it
definitely is a platform that children use. My wife and I have a party
every New Year's Day and every year every child brings a tablet and we all
march downstairs to copy the WiFi password off the router.

I do think that there is a lot of value to be had by teaching kids to
program. Maybe the kid never becomes a "developer", but we teach children a
lot of things (ballet, Karate, creative writing, public speaking, sports,
piano) with no real expectation that they'll make a living doing these
things one day, and computer programming is more generally useful than most
of them. I sometimes wonder how my own education would have been improved
if I had learned some Python and had access to Libre Office and the
Internet when I was in middle school.

Much of the best software for Linux has a Windows version. GIMP, Eric,
Libre Office, Eclipse, JBoss, Python, and lots more. I use these versions
at work every day. It seems to me that much of Sugar is just Python with
GTK. How much native software is in Sugar, and how much could we do without
or replace with something else?

Running free software on an unfree OS is not optimum, but it does loosen
the grip the OS has on the consumer. I work for Walgreens, a company that
is as conservative as they come, but which is now embracing more and more
free software. It didn't happen overnight, but it is happening. Schools are
if anything more conservative than companies, and will continue to be as
long as children have parents, but progress can happen if it doesn't have
to happen all at once.

James Simmons


On Tue, Apr 25, 2017 at 10:25 AM, D. Joe  wrote:

>
> On Mon, Apr 24, 2017 at 01:03:09PM -0500, James Simmons wrote:
>
> > I'd rather the children used Linux myself (that's all I use at home) but
> > realistically I don't see it happening, unless the kids do it themselves.
>
> This is what is so exciting about Sugarizer: One of the platforms it
> targets, Android, is in many signifcant respects the most widely used Linux
> distribution on the planet.  There's no need to sneak it into schools, or
> to
> cajole it into the hands of children.  What's more, at least a couple of
> the
> original goals for the OLPC XO--ubiquity through low cost and aggressive
> power management--have been brought to fruition and continue to be pursued
> by the Android market. We don't have to fight a strong current the entire
> way, we may be able to row along with it, just enough to steer towards our
> own goals,
>
> That said, Android is heavily fractured and very consumer oriented, and
> works pretty directly against the concept of general-purpose computing
> embodied by form factors like traditionally-conceived desktops and laptops.
> The complexity of the development and production environment, and the
> limitations from its heavy focus on centralized, network-based services is
> fraught, at least as I see how they interact with goals like empowering
> individual learners and supporting their autonomy.  Nor is it as free (as
> in
> freedom) as I'd like.  Thus, I don't endorse the wholesale abandonment of
> Sugar on other platforms.
>
> Even so, it seems to offer a more tractable and more palatable path than do
> some other, more proprietary consumer-orientated platforms that, at the
> very
> least, elso encourage a centralizing, passivating dependence amongst their
> customers.  These other OSes may offer benefits from being still in
> widespread use, in part no doubt due to a certain level of regulatory
> capture, but Android is where the growth is at.
>
> My understanding is that Sugar, like the constructionist approach behind
> it,
> is meant to support open-ended learning.  I see a dichotomy pushed in a few
> of the discussions here, setting everyone else against developers.  This
> flies in the face of the possibilities that at least some Sugar learners
> will indeed *become* developers, that some *should* become developers, and
> that the rise of future Sugar developers from the broader pool of Sugar
> learners demonstrates constructionism at its best.  Not every learner
> should
> have to become a developer, no, but those that do should be able to use
> Sugar on their way.
>
> If that is to happen, we should keep that path as clear as we can and in my
> mind that includes Sugar running on general-purpose computing platforms
> that
> can host some, if not all, development activities.  Maybe someday
> web+mobile
> platforms will be self-hosting, and it will be routine to build systems
> from
> the kernel on up in web browsers.
>
> Until that happens, though, I'd like to think that a Sugar learner will not
> be limited in their ability to move smoothly from introductory activities
> all the way through to running Develop or Terminal (or, on the XOs, OFW) or
> activities yet to be developed or incorporated into the broader 

[IAEP] constructionism and Linux, was Re: Sugar Labs Mission & The 6 lesson Schoolteacher

[D. Joe]

On Mon, Apr 24, 2017 at 01:03:09PM -0500, James Simmons wrote:

> I'd rather the children used Linux myself (that's all I use at home) but
> realistically I don't see it happening, unless the kids do it themselves.

This is what is so exciting about Sugarizer: One of the platforms it
targets, Android, is in many signifcant respects the most widely used Linux
distribution on the planet.  There's no need to sneak it into schools, or to
cajole it into the hands of children.  What's more, at least a couple of the
original goals for the OLPC XO--ubiquity through low cost and aggressive
power management--have been brought to fruition and continue to be pursued
by the Android market. We don't have to fight a strong current the entire
way, we may be able to row along with it, just enough to steer towards our
own goals,

That said, Android is heavily fractured and very consumer oriented, and
works pretty directly against the concept of general-purpose computing
embodied by form factors like traditionally-conceived desktops and laptops. 
The complexity of the development and production environment, and the
limitations from its heavy focus on centralized, network-based services is
fraught, at least as I see how they interact with goals like empowering
individual learners and supporting their autonomy.  Nor is it as free (as in
freedom) as I'd like.  Thus, I don't endorse the wholesale abandonment of
Sugar on other platforms.

Even so, it seems to offer a more tractable and more palatable path than do
some other, more proprietary consumer-orientated platforms that, at the very
least, elso encourage a centralizing, passivating dependence amongst their
customers.  These other OSes may offer benefits from being still in
widespread use, in part no doubt due to a certain level of regulatory
capture, but Android is where the growth is at.

My understanding is that Sugar, like the constructionist approach behind it,
is meant to support open-ended learning.  I see a dichotomy pushed in a few
of the discussions here, setting everyone else against developers.  This
flies in the face of the possibilities that at least some Sugar learners
will indeed *become* developers, that some *should* become developers, and
that the rise of future Sugar developers from the broader pool of Sugar
learners demonstrates constructionism at its best.  Not every learner should
have to become a developer, no, but those that do should be able to use
Sugar on their way.

If that is to happen, we should keep that path as clear as we can and in my
mind that includes Sugar running on general-purpose computing platforms that
can host some, if not all, development activities.  Maybe someday web+mobile
platforms will be self-hosting, and it will be routine to build systems from
the kernel on up in web browsers.

Until that happens, though, I'd like to think that a Sugar learner will not
be limited in their ability to move smoothly from introductory activities
all the way through to running Develop or Terminal (or, on the XOs, OFW) or
activities yet to be developed or incorporated into the broader Sugar
platform, from whence they have access to the entire computing stack,
without limit.

-- 
D. Joe
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[IAEP] quality of USB keychains for SoaS, was Re: Sugar Labs Mission & The 6 lesson Schoolteacher

[D. Joe]

On Mon, Apr 24, 2017 at 01:03:09PM -0500, James Simmons wrote:

> I tried Sugar on a Stick a few years ago and found that it didn't work all 
> that
> well. Maybe it has improved since then? I think the problems were related more
> to the quality of the USB storage than anything else.

I've found definitely that quality of the USB drive is a factor.

For only a brief time, for reasons I won't go in to just now, I and the
undergraduates in my class had access to computer labs in which the BIOS was
not yet locked down to prevent booting from USB.  I found this out but
hadn't requested new USB drives to give them, so I asked each student to
bring one one of their own in so I could load SoaS on it.  I then ran the
(now deprecated) livecd-iso-to-disk installer to make a (somewhat)
persistent live USB SoaS instance on each (a process whose tedium I was able
to alleviate by stealing into the lab at off hours and running it in
parallel across several systems).
 
The speed at which the installation ran on these drives varied dramatically
not just between USB 2 and USB 3 capable drives, but also from manufacturer
to manufacturer.  I was able to see this pretty directly because performing
this installation process was when I had the most direct access to the
drives in operation.

I then handed the students back their drives and had them boot lab machines
into SoaS from them.  Our aim, then, was not to benchmark USB performance
and so I lost track of how much of a differential there was in the overal
SoaS experience.  My goal then was to give them the opportunity to use SoaS
for getting greater experience with Sugar, for development and testing
activities on newer hardware, and in general complementing the XOs they'd
been lent.  If they had their own hardware and were willing to boot it from
USB drives, that was an option.  

Beyond that, I felt it would be instructive for students who'd never seen a
dual-boot system in action see what the process entailed.  It's one thing to
hear about it or read about it or (these days) see a video demonstration,
but quite another to direct the process oneself, hands on.  Even though the
process of using livecd-iso-to-disk was fiddly and tedious, it was well
worth it to know this was the first time several of the students had seen
such a thing done, and could see the difference in how Sugar performed on
the XOs versus the beefy high-memory, i7-based machines in the labs.

That said, flash media generally, including USB drives, have supplanted
nearly every other form of removable media, but unlike magnetic floppy disks
and optical media, they are not passive devices.  They share with modern
hard drives the inclusion of, from a historical perspective at least,
significant on-board computing power and all the attendant complexity that
carries with it, see, eg:

  https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3554

"The embedded microcontroller is typically a heavily modified 8051 or ARM
CPU. In modern implementations, the microcontroller will approach 100 MHz
performance levels, and also have several hardware accelerators on-die. "

As with so many of our computing devices now, consumerism dictates that we
be encouraged to ignore what goes on behind the curtain and to regard them
as passive, cheap, simple, straightforward, reliable, and as easy to use. 
Were our job selling technology, we could leave it at that.  Given our
goals, though, we should keep this complexity in mind, and stand ready to
help Sugar learners better grasp some of these nuances as their
understanding of the technology they use develops.

In the meantime, keeping in mind these complexities can also help us
appreciate why developing and maintaining simple recipes for their use isn't
as straightforward as a consumerist mindset might lead some to think.

-- 
D. Joe

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Re: [IAEP] [SLOBS] Technical Service Request - Project: Sugar Network

[Laura Vargas]

2017-04-24 22:24 GMT-05:00 Dave Crossland :

>
> Hi Laura
>
>
Hola Dave


> I sympathize with your concern for active users.
>

I recommend you read the translation
 of "Como hacer
un proptotipo?" made by Valerie Taylor last week. Valerie found the
document (with the proper license) posted on the Sugar Network related to
the Context [1] by the Demo user.

Having this Context in Sugar Network allow us (the Community = users +
supporters) to keep multiple asynchronous dialogs about the ideas proposed
on the document by the original autors Antonio Lafuente y Patricia
Horrillo, about prototyping

.

"The Adventure of Learning is a space of encounter and exchange around
learning to discover what practices, atmospheres, spaces and agents make
communities work; Their whys and their commotions, or in other words, their
yearnings and protocols."

Sugar Network has proved to be a useful prototype for the network of sugar
users. Open Data from it's stats-viewer
 is available for analysis.

I personally, would like it to feel more "like a game" for the second
version. Something like SUNSET
.

;D

Regards and blessings


[1] http://network.sugarlabs.org/article/453451141ee711e7b149525400e4dcb5

-- 
* I SomosAZUCAR.Org*

“Solo la tecnología libre nos hará libres.”
~ Laura Victoria

Happy Learning!
#LaMAgiaDelTiempo
#LearningByDoing
#Projects4good
#IMakeATSugarLabs
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