Re: [IAEP] IAEP Digest, Vol 14, Issue 58
A few years ago I prepared a compendium of Spanish language classics from the net for an AP Spanish literature class having many kids who couldn't afford to pay for all the books. As I recall, there was a university site in Argentina that had a LOT of these. Not affiliated with Gutenberg. I found it by Googling for the titles in the AP Spanish Lit syllabus and getting hits at the same site for a lot of works on the list. Unfortunately I don't remember the site. But maybe my heuristic will work for you. On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 8:26 AM, James Simmons jim.simm...@walgreens.comwrote: Tomeu, This link is not to the main Gutenberg site, but to a Czech Republic site. The books seem to be all in Czech. Project Gutenberg does not list this site as an affiliate. I don't know what's going on here. James Simmons Tomeu Vizoso wrote: Hmm, actually I looked for this book and couldn't find it from inside ETexts: http://www.gutenberg.cz/kniha.php?etext_nr=357 Any idea why? Thanks, Tomeu ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] IAEP Digest, Vol 14, Issue 58
James, I think it is wonderful to make it easy for people with good network access to fetch books from the net. But I don't think that precludes the need for packages with selected materials. Kids in poor areas don't necessarily have net access all the time. 2009/5/18 James Simmons jim.simm...@walgreens.com Carol and Caroline, I'm working on something that should communicate just how useful Sugar is for reading ebooks, but you'll need to be patient. I'm about 90% complete on this, which in IT parlance means I have enough to do a rigged demo but the bulk of the work remains to be done. What I am doing is a new feature for Read Etexts which lets the user browse the offline catalog for Project Gutenberg, select a book from it, download it, and read it. This accomplishes several really useful things: 1). You can download and save multiple books to the Journal in one session by using the keep button. So for instance if you want to read A Thousand Nights and a Night as translated by Sir Richard Burton you could get all of the volumes in one go. 2). The Journal title will be a meaningful name taken from the catalog. Thus your download of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carrol will have a Journal entry with that title, instead of 11.zip, which is the filename in the Gutenberg archive. 3). Since Read Etexts is actually creating the Journal entry the entry will use the Read Etexts icon and can be opened from the Journal with one click. No more opening your book with Etoys by mistake. 4). The biggest thing, though, is you can enter in words in the title or the author's name and see a list of books that have all of those words in them. This really communicates that there are over twenty eight thousand books available in the Gutenberg catalog. For instance, a child entering the word Shakespeare will find books about Shakespeare and all of Shakespeare's plays in several languages. (He will not find Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles or Plutarch's Lives in the list, but if he reads all the other books and plays he'll eventually realize he needs to read those too). To see a screenshot from the rigged demo go to this URL and click on the thumbnail: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Read_Etexts#Planned_Features It's going to take awhile to get the feature fully functional and user friendly, but I have enough working that I know I can get the rest finished in a few weeks. I think this will communicate the variety of ebooks available very well and should be a worthy addition to SoaS. As for some of the other ideas that were expressed, the Sword Bible reader and the Koran reader and the Newbery book bundle might give the impression that to read a book on Sugar you need to package it up somehow. You need to communicate that there are thousands of books ready to go, as is, and these don't do that. (I have nothing against the content of these books, of course). Unfortunately, Project Gutenberg may be the only ebook site with an offline catalog. It would be nice to give the core Read Activity a catalog search like this, but there are no comparable catalogs of PDFs. Maybe Sayamindu's fbreader could use something like this for EPUB files from Gutenberg. James Simmons Date: Tue, 12 May 2009 11:42:33 -0700 From: Carol Farlow Lerche c...@msbit.com Subject: Re: [IAEP] The eBook ah ha moment for Sugar on a Stick To: Caroline Meeks carol...@solutiongrove.com Cc: iaep iaep@lists.sugarlabs.org Message-ID: c856d2f0905121142u5a625ba2he65f1544f37b7...@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 This issue was discussed at length about a week ago, and James Simmons and Alexei (I think) were discussing the provision of a library activity. Until that happens, I think James' reader activity and Sayamendu's fbreader activity should be packaged for SOAS to allow epub, comic format and text formats to be read conveniently in SOAS. http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/search?q=newberycat=all is a package on aslo of all the free Newbery honor books by women authors as a .xol package. The texts themselves are epub format. I wish someone would reinstate the ability to access .xol files in SOAS. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Sugar Labs Flophouse
Just FYI the Gulf Coast in summer is extremely hot and humid. On Sat, May 9, 2009 at 6:00 PM, Maria Droujkova droujk...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, May 9, 2009 at 5:17 PM, David Farning dfarn...@sugarlabs.org wrote: On Sat, May 9, 2009 at 2:36 PM, Edward Cherlin echer...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, May 9, 2009 at 8:43 AM, David Farning dfarn...@sugarlabs.org wrote: Hey all, Is anyone interested in setting up a Sugar Labs Flophouse next summer? I have been impresses with the quality of applicants interested in gsoc and independent internships. If you set it up to run year round I would move in in a heartbeat and offer seminars. Can we consider doing this in a target country? Ghana would work well for me. I haven't thought this through very far yet. So the following might make less sense than I usually make. Within the next couple of years, I would like to start a Sugar institute to foster the Sugar community. I am thinking of something with work and living space for about 20 people to come together to work together for brief periods (a couple of weeks to a couple of months). There is much know-how on organizing places like that in coworking communities. This mailing list, for example, is nice: http://groups.google.com/group/coworking?hl=en There are economic models, frequently asked questions, examples of many existing spaces and so on. A transitional possibility to your Institute can be contacting existing coworking spaces for events like Sugar Month @ YourCoworkingSpace across the world. -- Cheers, MariaD Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site http://groups.google.com/group/naturalmath our email group http://www.phenixsolutions.com empowering our innovations ___ 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] versus, not
Kathy, Project Follow Through was comparing a specific direct instruction curriculum with various other unspecified curricula to teach early primary grade skills. It was also conducted over 30 years ago. I don't think it has much to tell us about the way to teach mathematical thinking and problem solving (as distinct from basic calculation algorithms) in higher grades. Having said that, I am sure that there is a place for the sort of instruction described in the rubric you pointed to when specific methods and categories are taught. The rubric seemed quite sound as a way to unambiguously teach bite-size pieces of information in a good sequence. I just think that you aren't talking about the same thing as others who are discussing the benefits of using constructionism. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Fwd: Language Learning Courseware
SourceForge.net: synphony » home http://synphony.wiki.sourceforge.net/ On Mon, May 4, 2009 at 11:22 PM, Tomeu Vizoso to...@sugarlabs.org wrote: On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 03:01, Seth Woodworth s...@isforinsects.com wrote: -- Forwarded message -- From: Neal Scogin neal.sco...@sbcglobal.net Date: Mon, May 4, 2009 at 3:36 PM Subject: [support-gang] Language Learning Courseware To: Laptop Support support-g...@laptop.org I am developing courseware (a complete methodology) that utilizes Sugar (primarily the collaboration - mesh networking features) to learn languages. I have recently found someone to help me with Arabic and so now I am working on Arabic-English and Spanish-English. I am interested in using the International Phonetic Alphabet for some of the work. I would like to have some software that can evaluate spoken language to check for pronunciation. When I purchased some Spanish learning software years ago that was one of the features. Obviously, I am looking for open source software. In addition, any advice on software tools for the courseware will be appreciated. Hi Neal, this sounds like an awesome project. I have found the following regarding pronunciation evaluation: https://www.stanford.edu/group/opensource/cgi-bin/wiki/index.php?title=(un)Conference_2008_Notes:_SPHINX_IIhttps://www.stanford.edu/group/opensource/cgi-bin/wiki/index.php?title=%28un%29Conference_2008_Notes:_SPHINX_II http://www.google.cz/search?q=related:www.meraka.org.za/pubs/JACBadenhorst.pdf http://www.meraka.org.za/pubs/JACBadenhorst.pdf Hope that helps and feel free to ask any other questions here in IAEP or in sugar-devel: http://lists.sugarlabs.org/ Regards, Tomeu ___ 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] Library Activity
Sorry for posting the screenshot without text (I was reposting a compacted version of the original screenshot, which our list manager wisely refused to forward). My original post was: I have attached a screenshot of calibre. This is a very useful way to look at books, though I'm sure many improvements could be suggested. (Clicking column headings sorts the grid.) ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Library Activity
To the extent that Title, Author, etc. are simply labels for two tags that many ebook items have, and that one could establish others, it is a good generalization of calibre's useful but fixed view. A lot of programs (including the dreaded Windows) allow selection of which columns to display, optimizing screen real estate for personal preferences. And some types of displays work much better for small sets of items as opposed to large ones. The fisheye view in my last post is not at all useful for a large collection, but it works well for a search result with a few to about a hundred items. On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 12:33 PM, James Simmons jim.simm...@walgreens.comwrote: All, The last few emails on the Library Activity suggest that people are looking at Library as a way of organizing their various Journal content just as much if not more than as a way to share said content. As far as organizing content goes, I like what Calibre does better than the tree view you seem to be proposing. What I would like is a tabular format where you can sort ascending or descending on any column, and filter on any column. Both Calibre and iTunes have a view like this and for me it works. I would have columns for Title, Author, Subject, and Type, where Author and Subject are optional. A tree structure is good for hiding stuff you don't want to look at. If you want to browse through everything (expand the entire tree) it wastes vertical space. James Simmons Samuel Klein wrote: The screenshots help the discussion a great deal. Thinking in terms of how you sort and change views is useful, since there are a few very different use cases that could all rely on what Aleksey is describing [local calibre, active filesharing, global persistent file hosting and bundle creation/publishing among them] SJ On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 1:23 PM, Aleksey Lim alsr...@member.fsf.org wrote: On Tue, May 05, 2009 at 09:41:01AM -0700, Carol Farlow Lerche wrote: Sorry for posting the screenshot without text (I was reposting a compacted version of the original screenshot, which our list manager wisely refused to forward). My original post was: I have attached a screenshot of calibre. This is a very useful way to look at books, though I'm sure many improvements could be suggested. (Clicking column headings sorts the grid.) Thanks for screens, Library could have fileformat-backends to parse all these books related properties from files to make calibre-like view more useful. -- Aleksey ___ 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] Library Activity
Here is fisheye. On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 12:46 PM, Carol Farlow Lerche c...@msbit.com wrote: To the extent that Title, Author, etc. are simply labels for two tags that many ebook items have, and that one could establish others, it is a good generalization of calibre's useful but fixed view. A lot of programs (including the dreaded Windows) allow selection of which columns to display, optimizing screen real estate for personal preferences. And some types of displays work much better for small sets of items as opposed to large ones. The fisheye view in my last post is not at all useful for a large collection, but it works well for a search result with a few to about a hundred items. On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 12:33 PM, James Simmons jim.simm...@walgreens.comwrote: All, The last few emails on the Library Activity suggest that people are looking at Library as a way of organizing their various Journal content just as much if not more than as a way to share said content. As far as organizing content goes, I like what Calibre does better than the tree view you seem to be proposing. What I would like is a tabular format where you can sort ascending or descending on any column, and filter on any column. Both Calibre and iTunes have a view like this and for me it works. I would have columns for Title, Author, Subject, and Type, where Author and Subject are optional. A tree structure is good for hiding stuff you don't want to look at. If you want to browse through everything (expand the entire tree) it wastes vertical space. James Simmons Samuel Klein wrote: The screenshots help the discussion a great deal. Thinking in terms of how you sort and change views is useful, since there are a few very different use cases that could all rely on what Aleksey is describing [local calibre, active filesharing, global persistent file hosting and bundle creation/publishing among them] SJ On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 1:23 PM, Aleksey Lim alsr...@member.fsf.org wrote: On Tue, May 05, 2009 at 09:41:01AM -0700, Carol Farlow Lerche wrote: Sorry for posting the screenshot without text (I was reposting a compacted version of the original screenshot, which our list manager wisely refused to forward). My original post was: I have attached a screenshot of calibre. This is a very useful way to look at books, though I'm sure many improvements could be suggested. (Clicking column headings sorts the grid.) Thanks for screens, Library could have fileformat-backends to parse all these books related properties from files to make calibre-like view more useful. -- Aleksey ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep attachment: fisheye.gif___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Library Activity
Jim, children are great collectors. I just think it is wise to try interfaces with varying numbers of items before concluding that one or another mode is too complicated. If you'd like to try an interface that has tunable complexity, you might like to get a copy of the readerware trial. I can supply a database with around a thousand books as a sample (my daughter's old elementary school was incredibly generous with a book drive!). On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 2:12 PM, James Simmons jim.simm...@walgreens.comwrote: Aleksey, It isn't clear to me what a cloud of tags is. Is there a familiar application that does something like this? I understand that users can tag things to suit themselves, but still I'd want to impose some kind of structure on the views. When I started visiting libraries they had card catalogs for Author, Title, and Subject. It was a good system, and every library used it. You could create a lot of other indexes but they wouldn't get much use. In the Calibre screenshot we had File Size, Publisher, Date, Series, and I could easily do without any of them. Considering that most users of Sugar are going to be children enforcing a minimum structure couldn't hurt. James Simmons Aleksey Lim wrote: Well, in my mind the best solution is let user choose the right way :) So Library will have several tags views * cloud of tags * tree of tags * plane list of objects i.e. w/o any tags ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Library Activity
Calibre makes a sqlite3 database which is the basis for its display. It seems to have a reasonable schema. (An easy way to examine it is with the Sqlite Manger, an excellent Firefox add-on if you haven't already discovered it). On Mon, May 4, 2009 at 11:54 AM, James Simmons jim.simm...@walgreens.comwrote: Aleksey, I, too would be interested in what this will look like. From your description it sounds like a way of grouping things (including texts) in such a way that you can share them with others without actually having them open, as long as the Library activity itself is open. I would guess that if I had a collection of books on my XO that I could make the whole collection available for download even if I wasn't reading any of them. Since you brought this up in response (more or less) to Caroline asking if there would ever be something like Calibre on the XO I was wondering if you planned to have features like Calibre has included in it? What I was thinking of is a grid that lists book information. You would have columns for Author, Title, Subject (or keywords), and you could sort or search the grid by any of these columns. This would give you a way to organize a large collection of texts, something the Journal is ill suited to do. The other Calibre-like thing you could do is to keep track of what format the text was in and open the correct Viewing activity when someone clicks a View button and the book's row is selected. This is another thing that the Journal doesn't do very well. Calibre uses Qt but I see that pygtk has a TreeView component that could be used to make the sortable grid. Caroline mentioned having a collection of over 100 etexts in her copy of Calibre. If you had that many texts on your XO the Journal would just list them in sequence by most recently added or read. You could search on the title string but that's it. It would be a mess to deal with. The reason I ask is that I'm thinking I might try to write such an Activity myself, since it would try to address problems I've had with using the Journal since I got my XO. If the Library activity would do much the same thing I wouldn't do it. James Simmons Tomeu Vizoso wrote: On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 15:51, Aleksey Lim alsr...@member.fsf.org alsr...@member.fsf.org wrote: On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 10:39:52PM -0400, Caroline Meeks wrote: Yes! In theory there are thousands of free books. We need people to be able to experience that there are books available for Sugar when they try Sugar. I like the idea of hooking the readers to a library. I don't know how much work that is or who is available to do it now. Does anyone know where we are in terms of books on the activities portal? I've just initiated Library activity. The major ideas were: Seems like this activity has a lot of functionality. Do you have already a mockup of how the UI would look like? Something as basic as this would be enough: http://expressionflow.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/paper-mock-up.png Thanks, Tomeu ___ 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] Library Activity
You would need to reinvent ACID updates if you shared the catalog. On Mon, May 4, 2009 at 12:34 PM, James Simmons jim.simm...@walgreens.comwrote: Carol, I would not use sqllite 3. The metadata for several hundred books could easily fit in memory. It would basically be a good sized spreadsheet. Python has a pickling feature which can save a bunch of objects in memory in a single file that can be easily reloaded into memory. I could store the pickle file as a Journal entry. I would not try to recreate ALL of Calibre, just the parts I would find the most useful. That way the Activity could be entirely self contained. James Simmons Carol Farlow Lerche wrote: Calibre makes a sqlite3 database which is the basis for its display. It seems to have a reasonable schema. (An easy way to examine it is with the Sqlite Manger, an excellent Firefox add-on if you haven't already discovered it). ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Project Gutenberg, etc.
James, Thanks for taking the time to at least examine this. I took a day off yesterday to run errands and I installed Calibre on a Fedora 10 box and tried it out. It has an enormous number of dependencies so it took a couple of hours to get it installed and working. Yes, it was troublesome to install on Ubuntu as well, but seemingly this was because of the Python version. wouldn't want to risk losing it. On the other hand, with Gutenberg I have reasonable faith that anything I could download today will still be there tomorrow. Since my ebooks largely come from somewhere other than PG, I am not so sanguine. I also buy a few. To me ebooks ONLY make sense for public domain works and content not easily available in another way. Like the Burton translation of 1001 Nights. If I want to read Neal Stephenson I'll buy the dead tree version and somehow make room on my shelves to keep it. De gustibus non est disputandum. However, for the XO using kids in the deployments, I doubt they have access to many paper books of their own or from a library. Why I would not keep ebooks on the XO is that it has only 1 gig that is really useful, and almost half of that is taken up by the OS. Considering all the things a student will use his XO for there really isn't room for a big library on there. Plus I sometimes have to do a clean reinstall of Sugar that clears out the Journal, so there's not much point in putting stuff there that might not get used. First, textual items are not large. My 123 books take 43 MB. Second, kids won't be reinstalling sugar or wiping their journal or we have a problem bigger than losing their ebooks. Finally, what are the electronic other things that are more precious to a child than books? Now as I said before, I do have a library of comic books in .cbz format. I keep some on an SD card and the rest on a Fedora 10 box where I can download them to the XO Journal using the web server on that box. So if I wanted to build something that does what Calibre does it would make sense to make it a server based application. I just don't agree that personal collections of reading material should rely on the school server. As for the XO itself, right now the Journal always lists entries in order of most recently used. If you added the ability to sort by the title string instead, plus gave it a filter that showed entries NOT created by any Activity I think you'd have 80% of the value of Calibre right there. Add an optional meta tag for Author and allow sorting by it and you'd bring the total to 90%. I don't disagree that this COULD be done. But so far, hardly anything that is asserted as a great change to functionality of the journal HAS been done. This is what I call making the perfect the enemy of the good. I also didn't care for the book reader supplied with Calibre. This is why we need to get Sayamindu's fbreader activity brought into aslo. Right now it is only available on the XO. The Calibre book reader looks to be a separable component. To use it for Gutenberg plain text files you need to convert then to Sony ebook format, and I wasn't all that pleased with the results. I wrote Read Etexts so I could read the books without converting them. epub format is available experimentally directly from Project Gutenberg. Works great for me! I have Sherlock Holmes, Father Brown mysteries, Autocrat of the Breakfast Table and the Baroness Orczy Pimpernel series that way. Carol Lerche ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Project Gutenberg, etc.
I wonder if you use an ebook reader? An ebook reader, similarly to a music player, needs a good way to organize and find content ON THE MACHINE to read. You aren't usually using it to read from the net -- quite the contrary. Now for a long time I used the browser to search for my books (which were all html -- I'm a sf fan, and have a lot of Baen Books content, both free and purchased). This worked for me because I knew how to transfer the content to my XO and manually unpack it in a place that was consistent and create simple index files. But it was very ad hoc and wouldn't work for the average user. Then I discovered calibre, thanks to a posting on one of these sugar related lists. I switched away from sugar to using Ubuntu for reading. Calibre has multiple parts. One part is an application that imports and catalogs your reading matter. I don't say books, because it is more eclectic than that, encompassing rss feeds, pdf files, etc. The catalog interface has the expected meta-information one would expect: title, author, publisher, subject tags, series, date of acquision. It displays this information in a tabular format and will sort the rows by any of the column headings. This is a great way to access a large collection of reading material. If sugar's journal had an alternate display for materials flagged in a certain way, it could supplant this function, but rather than wait for perfection in the journal, I think it would be better to make this part of calibre, which is written in Python, run under sugar. Calibre also has an ebook reader, so when you select an item in the catalog you can open the book to read. I think this component isn't quite as good as fbreader, which has the ability to rotate the text 90 degrees. Calibre understands multiple formats and can convert among them. One thing it lacks is the ability to import from a URL. (These conversion tools are also available as command line tools). One of the formats it supports is epub, which is an open format for packaging a book -- meaning text, illustrations and metadata into a single file. This is a great way to package reading material, and is what you are finding on more and more free content sites. On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 9:41 AM, James Simmons jim.simm...@walgreens.comwrote: Martin, I hear what you are saying. It sounds like what you want is like iTunes is, but for books. The thing is, it would have to do much more than iTunes does. iTunes has its own catalog of music for purchase. If I search for something on iTunes it doesn't have to go all over the Internet looking for stuff. It doesn't have to check out Usenet newsgroups, torrent sites, etc. It just has to look in its own database. iTunes is for finding music easily and paying for it, not for searching the Internet for free music. Now consider how you might go about looking for free books. You'd want to check out Project Gutenberg. You'd want to look at Project Gutenberg of Australia, which has a ton of stuff by dead authors that is legal there but still under copyright in the U.S. You'd want to check out the Baen Free Library of science fiction, which is under copyright but free to download anyway. You'd want to look at free textbooks from various places. You'd want to check the Internet Archive, and probably many other places too. You don't want iTunes. You want Google for books. This makes me believe that what we really want is some kind of server based portal that finds books. That would be quite a project. Probably more than we'd want to attempt. You could get *most* of the benefit of such a portal by simply putting links to Internet Archive, Gutenberg, and other places on the static start page we ship with the Browse activity. To avoid cluttering up that page we might just have a link on the top reading Free Books. Click on that and another static page comes up which has a ton of links to free book sites, and possibly forms to search on those sites. Maybe some info on the different book formats and what Activities are needed to read them. The other thing that would be nice to have is a sort of Bind Books Activity. The idea is a teacher could look for texts for her class, then use the Bind Books Activity to package them up as Unified Bundles. She would distribute these bundles to her class, perhaps by putting them on a local web server. I think the Unified Bundles idea is really important, because if we had that reading a book would be as simple as clicking on its entry in the Journal, and getting it in the Journal would be as easy as installing an Activity. You wouldn't have to know or care that the book is a plain text file, or a PDF, or a Djvu file, or a Zip file containing images, or a Zip file containing a plain text file, or a collection of HTML and images that can be browsed offline. The person binding the book would know that; the student would not. Older students could bind
Re: [IAEP] Project Gutenberg, etc.
I guess we all view the needs of our target audience through the prism of our own experience at their age. I was an avid reader, and a re-reader of favorite books. (Still am, as are many of my women friends -- perhaps this is gender related). So the idea of dumping a book I enjoyed would be anathema to me, especially if my access to the net was not reliable and pervasive. Do try calibre, as it really doesn't seem like overkill to me, except for the format conversion features perhaps. On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 2:10 PM, James Simmons jim.simm...@walgreens.comwrote: Carol, I don't have an ebook reader, other than my XO. I do have an ipod. Now where the purpose of the ipod is to store your entire music collection in your pocket, and maybe an ebook reader could do the same thing for all your books, up until now I hadn't thought of the XO like that. Since the books are free and always available (unlike books on a Kindle, which you have to pay for and can't trade in at a used book store or loan to anyone) there isn't much incentive to keep the book on the machine once you're done reading it. You can always download it again. When I first wrote Read Etexts I downloaded the complete Burton translation of _1001 Nights_, plus the complete English translation of _The Mahabharata_. I fully intended to keep them on the machine at all times, but I didn't. I only had a few hundred meg storage, so something had to go. After I finished reading Edison's Conquest of Mars by Garrett P. Serviss I blew that away too. On the other hand I do have a large collection of comic books for reading with View Slides on my SD card, which has two gig to play with. Comics take much more room than plain text files, so the SD card is the only place I can keep them. The SD card cannot do everything the Journal can do, including saving meta data like last page number read, so I end up copying the comic from the SD card to the Journal to read it, then deleting it from the Journal afterwards. In any case I've never used my XO like you describe, because I never had enough content on it to need to do that. The normal Journal view has been adequate for me. I'm going to check out Calibre when I can. If I were (hypothetically) to make something like Calibre for the XO it would probably be an Activity that showed you an alternate view of the Journal, except it would only show entries that have a MIME type that might be a book, and it would store meta info for the books, as well as the content type of the book (which the MIME type by itself would not be enough to do). Maybe this Activity would also include the code for Read Etexts, View Slides, etc. as well so you would manage and read your collection with the same Activity. The metadata could be pickled Python objects stored in the Journal. Now that I look at Aleksey's description of the Library activity it sounds pretty similar to this. The thing is the target audience for the XO and Sugar in general may find something like Calibre to be overkill. James Simmons Carol Farlow Lerche wrote: I wonder if you use an ebook reader? An ebook reader, similarly to a music player, needs a good way to organize and find content ON THE MACHINE to read. You aren't usually using it to read from the net -- quite the contrary. Now for a long time I used the browser to search for my books (which were all html -- I'm a sf fan, and have a lot of Baen Books content, both free and purchased). This worked for me because I knew how to transfer the content to my XO and manually unpack it in a place that was consistent and create simple index files. But it was very ad hoc and wouldn't work for the average user. Then I discovered calibre, thanks to a posting on one of these sugar related lists. I switched away from sugar to using Ubuntu for reading. Calibre has multiple parts. One part is an application that imports and catalogs your reading matter. I don't say books, because it is more eclectic than that, encompassing rss feeds, pdf files, etc. The catalog interface has the expected meta-information one would expect: title, author, publisher, subject tags, series, date of acquision. It displays this information in a tabular format and will sort the rows by any of the column headings. This is a great way to access a large collection of reading material. If sugar's journal had an alternate display for materials flagged in a certain way, it could supplant this function, but rather than wait for perfection in the journal, I think it would be better to make this part of calibre, which is written in Python, run under sugar. Calibre also has an ebook reader, so when you select an item in the catalog you can open the book to read. I think this component isn't quite as good as fbreader, which has the ability to rotate the text 90 degrees. Calibre understands multiple formats and can convert among them. One thing
Re: [IAEP] 70 minute interview with Bryan Berry on XO deployment in Nepal
Sayamindu has ported fbreader to the XO, but it is Sugar .82 and is not yet in SOAS or a.sl.o. It reads epub format among others, which is to be found on many of the free sites. I made the following XO style library bundle of the Newbery medal winning children's books by women authors from the UPenn site, and it is still experimental in aslo because it needs recommendations, but recommendations require that you have the reader. http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4077 Yes, it is in English. I know there is a lot of classic Spanish language content out there that could be packaged as well, because I gathered it as a resource for my daughter's AP Spanish Literature class a few years back. I have a detailed lesson plan and student materials bundle for a wonderful literacy activity using write and browse that I want to load (teacher tested -- contributed by my daughter the teacher -- and I could make more) , but we need a category for lesson plans so someone would know to look for it. We're so close to being able to start loading content, but seem to get sidetracked into discussions of better content formats and other perfect is the enemy of the good topics every time. On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 9:09 AM, Benjamin M. Schwartz bmsch...@fas.harvard.edu wrote: Martin Dengler wrote: A killer app might be an App Store for books, with the ability to access multiple stores. Project Gutenberg could be a store, for example. Even just Project Gutenberg support in Read would be cool (Apologies if this is already available and I don't know about it - please correct me). Perhaps you would like http://manybooks.net --Ben ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- I don't consider him a particularly reliable source of information. -- Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, at a House Foreign Affairs Committee meeting, on former Vice President Dick Cheney. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] More about SoaS on a MacBook
Eben, welcome to the world of K-8 education IT. There will be G4 machines in schools for years to come. Schools seldom junk hardware because they have little or no budget to replace it. On Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 9:40 AM, Eben Eliason eben.elia...@gmail.comwrote: On Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 3:46 AM, Tomeu Vizoso to...@sugarlabs.org wrote: [adding fedora-olpc to cc] On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 23:27, Carol Farlow Lerche c...@msbit.com wrote: Caryl, the G4 has a powerpc processor, which executes an entirely different binary instruction set from the Intel-based Mac and Intel PC architecture machines. Since SOAS in all its incarnations contains binary executables prepared for an Intel processor, this won't execute on your G4 Mac. (I'm leaving aside corner cases of having some kind of hardware emulator on the G4.) Maybe someone would be interested in doing a ppc version of soas? I see issues with activities containing binary modules, but maybe we should tackle this problem sooner than later, as any of these days someone could be interested in running Sugar on ARM or MIPS netbooks. And there's still lots of PPC macs in the education sector in the US. That's true. Does anyone know the typical life span of classroom computers? Apple started producing Intel machines 4 years ago, and hasn't produced any PPC machines in the past 3. If we expect the market to last, we should definitely address it, but we should also be careful not to expend too much energy on a platform that won't exist in a couple more years, especially if it comes at the cost of more robust support on Intel macs, or other platforms altogether. Eben Regards, Tomeu On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 2:19 PM, Caryl Bigenho cbige...@hotmail.com wrote: Hi Again, I downloaded http://www.sugarlabs.org/static/soas/soas-beta-1.zip. It took about 1 hr 45 min on a DSL connection. I haven't opened it yet...will get to that later today or this evening. But, I have a couple of questions. Is it possible to burn this file to a disk and boot from it? If so, would I unzip it first? If not, where should I put it? How do I access it? Is there any chance this version would run on a G4 MacPowerbook? I have one on hand I could try it with (it does run OSX). I would still like to be able to run from the SoaS USB with the helper CD. Someone else was having problems wiht that too. Is anyone working on a solution? Thanks, Caryl ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- I don't consider him a particularly reliable source of information. -- Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, at a House Foreign Affairs Committee meeting, on former Vice President Dick Cheney. ___ 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 -- I don't consider him a particularly reliable source of information. -- Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, at a House Foreign Affairs Committee meeting, on former Vice President Dick Cheney. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] More about SoaS on a MacBook
Caryl, the G4 has a powerpc processor, which executes an entirely different binary instruction set from the Intel-based Mac and Intel PC architecture machines. Since SOAS in all its incarnations contains binary executables prepared for an Intel processor, this won't execute on your G4 Mac. (I'm leaving aside corner cases of having some kind of hardware emulator on the G4.) On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 2:19 PM, Caryl Bigenho cbige...@hotmail.com wrote: Hi Again, I downloaded http://www.sugarlabs.org/static/soas/soas-beta-1.zip. It took about 1 hr 45 min on a DSL connection. I haven't opened it yet...will get to that later today or this evening. But, I have a couple of questions. Is it possible to burn this file to a disk and boot from it? If so, would I unzip it first? If not, where should I put it? How do I access it? Is there any chance this version would run on a G4 MacPowerbook? I have one on hand I could try it with (it does run OSX). I would still like to be able to run from the SoaS USB with the helper CD. Someone else was having problems wiht that too. Is anyone working on a solution? Thanks, Caryl ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- I don't consider him a particularly reliable source of information. -- Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, at a House Foreign Affairs Committee meeting, on former Vice President Dick Cheney. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Feedback on SoaS
Regarding content, the advantage of the local homepage in the XO-1 browser as shipped from OLPC is that content is there in an understandable way even if the network doesn't work/isn't available. As compared with finding content in the journal, it is easier to tell what and why the content might be interesting. It really seems wrong to me to put all eggs in the journal basket for new users. I know that the journal is much loved by the sugar afficianados, but it actually is pretty opaque to a new user. Regarding infoslicer, I think so much of sugar activities is math and science oriented, it is great to see a way that a teacher might create simplified content for kids to read. I hope, btw, that Infoslicer is enhanced to, for example, take as input an epub book, allowing someone to easily work on and produce a simplified version.There is a dearth of open content suitable for emergent readers. On Sat, Apr 18, 2009 at 6:57 AM, Frederick Grose fgr...@gmail.com wrote: See http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick/Roadmap/Home_View http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick/Roadmap/Home_View --Fred On Sat, Apr 18, 2009 at 9:20 AM, Sebastian Dziallas sebast...@when.comwrote: Let me add some thoughts here, too... ... If its not too hard to change I think we should set up a wiki page where we can discuss what should be in the favorites rings and potentially update the image fairly regularly. This is what I've tried to get off the ground several times, for example here (without getting a reply): http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2009-February/012303.html It admittedly concerned the list of included activities, and not only the ones in the ring, but it clearly went in the same direction. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. -- Upton Sinclair ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Sugar Activities Library can handle content
Remaining question is whether the info here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Content_bundles is still correct about media types. I want a bundle containing epub files, which is outside the types listed, but which Sayamindu's fbreader supports. Is it ok to have a content bundle with this media type? On Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 9:46 AM, David Farning dfarn...@sugarlabs.orgwrote: Hey all, Just had a successful content bundle test to http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/browse/type:all/cat:105 with NatureImages.xol. So, bring em on! david ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. -- Upton Sinclair ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Sugar Activities Library can handle content
To be more specific: http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/EPUB mime type is: application/epub+zip On Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 10:18 AM, Carol Farlow Lerche c...@msbit.com wrote: Remaining question is whether the info here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Content_bundles is still correct about media types. I want a bundle containing epub files, which is outside the types listed, but which Sayamindu's fbreader supports. Is it ok to have a content bundle with this media type? On Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 9:46 AM, David Farning dfarn...@sugarlabs.orgwrote: Hey all, Just had a successful content bundle test to http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/browse/type:all/cat:105 with NatureImages.xol. So, bring em on! david ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. -- Upton Sinclair -- It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. -- Upton Sinclair ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] [SoaS] Call for Testers (New Snapshot!)
One choice -- Newberry medal winning children's books by women authors: http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/_collections/newbery/newbery.html I have converted these to epub format including the illustrations found at the website, very compact and accessible via fbreader. How should they be packaged to make them available? On Sun, Apr 5, 2009 at 3:18 PM, Sebastian Dziallas sebast...@when.comwrote: Caroline Meeks wrote: On Sat, Apr 4, 2009 at 5:58 PM, Sebastian Dziallas sebast...@when.com mailto:sebast...@when.com wrote: Hi Caroline, thanks for giving this a try! I added some comments below... By the way, would it be okay for you to get a final image by April 7th or do you need one earlier? The ability to burn more then one USB at a time is still not working. If it works April 7th is fine. If it doesn't life is not going to be fun for me. Heh. Okay, I guess we'll see this tomorrow... ;) What of my wish list do you think I will get? Thanks, Caroline *Here is my wish list.* Add to favorites Ring: Slider Puzzle, Jigsaw Puzzle, Story Builder, Typing Turtle, Cartoon Builder, I hope that everything works well, as I tried to add them manually. That will turn out in the next snapshot, which should be ready tomorrow. Take out of the favorites Ring Log, Terminal. Read Add a book or two for Read then add Read back to the favorites ring Hm, we'd need some books to grab (preferable from a.sl.o)... Add Scratch and let me test it. It doesn't seem to be on the Activities Portal yet. Well, this is kind of strange. I can see it's wiki page on laptop.org (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activities/Scratch), but it seems like if it doesn't even have a GIT repo anymore (!) - that seems to be unavailable. As far as I know, it has also not been migrated to SugarLabs, either, so I'm a bit lost. Is there still any development on this? Fix: Colors, Flipsticks and IRC and add the to the favorites Ring IRC is working here. Colors is reporting that it cannot find 'proper binary blobs' (fails with 'from colorsc import *'), and so is Bounce (fails with 'from pongc import *'). Maybe we're still missing some dependencies, I'm not yet sure... probably the activity maintainers know. I'm open to dissenting opinions here, this is just my current impressions of what would make a good demo stick. ___ Sugar-devel mailing list sugar-de...@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel -- It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. -- Upton Sinclair ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Testing SoaS at Waltham MA YMCA
Welcome to the world of school computers. My suggestions: Take a blank formatted SOAS drive with you. Take a (Fedora/Ubuntu) live cd with you. When testing, if the first soas boot fails, you should: Boot windows. See if the windows boot has network access. See if the cursor/mouse is working. See if you can read the soas stick having data (e.g. see the files. Read some specific file). See if you can write the soas stick with no data. If you can't do these things the machine is a boat anchor. If you can, see if you can boot the livecd. gmail the dmesg output to yourself and the list ... more diagnosis will be possible. Any other suggestions from the more knowledgeable? On Sat, Apr 4, 2009 at 3:27 PM, Caroline Meeks carol...@solutiongrove.comwrote: YMCA Computer Lab 4/4/09 The Waltham YMCA is a community center with a room with 10 computers pretty much all different. We have been invited to present Sugar at Healthy Kids Day on April 18th. I went today to test SoaS Overall Results Only one computer (#8) was able to run SoaS2 Three computers ran SoaS1 = #2, #3, #4, No computers could connect to the internet or see any other Sugar machine. Here are my notes. It worries me that we are giving out SoaS2 at FOSSVT yet it seems to have a much higher failure rate. It would be good if we could figure out some of these bugs. Detailed Notes: Starting to the left of the door ordering computers clockwise. Computer 1 – Does not stay on regardless of USB – Broken Computer. Computer 2 – F8 for setup then you can boot from USB. SoaS2 Assuming Drive Cache write Through – No boot SoaS1 – Boots Computer 3 Boots with CD helper on Soas2 but you can't see a curser for the mouse. I can tell its there because I can get the frame to appear and disappear. SoaS1 Boots and you can see the curser arrow No internet access no one in neighborhood Del allowed me to change bios to boot from USB. Booting SoaS1 Computer 4 SoaS2 Assuming Drive Cache write Through – No boot SoaS1 – Boots, no internet access, no one in neighborhood. Computer 5 Delete to enter setup. SoaS1 create symlink error. Computer 6 Power button appears to be broken – Broken Computer Computer 7 Started to boot from USB SosS2 :: Denied BIOS AML access to invaldi pot 0x4d0+0x2 SoaS1 Gets to blue line then EXT – Fs error device dm-0 ext3_journal_start_sb deteceted aborted journal – inode 6609, block544159 and 54305 Remounting filesystem read-only but does not boot Computer 8 Boots SoaS 2 from USB, no internet Used Del then changed the order of the hard drives Sound works Computer 9 Used Del then changed the order of the hard drives SoaS2 :: Denied BIOS AML access to invaldi port 0x4d0+0x1 (PICO) [sdb] Assuming drive cahce: write through SoaS1 – you must specify a file system type Computer 10 SoaS2 with Boot helper - Canot find root file system Same error with SoaS1 -- Caroline Meeks Solution Grove carol...@solutiongrove.com 617-500-3488 - Office 505-213-3268 - Fax ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. -- Upton Sinclair ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Testing SoaS at Waltham MA YMCA
Regarding the SoaS2 Assuming Drive Cache write Through -- no boot -- It was pretty common in older commodity Wintel systems for the drives to not write through the cache. This was for performance. I think the assumption was that if the system died in the middle, you were only writing a sequential file, and could just rerun whatever program you were in without really losing much. Of course this played hell with database reliability in a power failure. This could often be changed in a BIOS setting. Does someone know if SOAS/Fedora is testing/verifying this setting in some way? On Sat, Apr 4, 2009 at 3:27 PM, Caroline Meeks carol...@solutiongrove.comwrote: YMCA Computer Lab 4/4/09 The Waltham YMCA is a community center with a room with 10 computers pretty much all different. We have been invited to present Sugar at Healthy Kids Day on April 18th. I went today to test SoaS Overall Results Only one computer (#8) was able to run SoaS2 Three computers ran SoaS1 = #2, #3, #4, No computers could connect to the internet or see any other Sugar machine. Here are my notes. It worries me that we are giving out SoaS2 at FOSSVT yet it seems to have a much higher failure rate. It would be good if we could figure out some of these bugs. Detailed Notes: Starting to the left of the door ordering computers clockwise. Computer 1 – Does not stay on regardless of USB – Broken Computer. Computer 2 – F8 for setup then you can boot from USB. SoaS2 Assuming Drive Cache write Through – No boot SoaS1 – Boots Computer 3 Boots with CD helper on Soas2 but you can't see a curser for the mouse. I can tell its there because I can get the frame to appear and disappear. SoaS1 Boots and you can see the curser arrow No internet access no one in neighborhood Del allowed me to change bios to boot from USB. Booting SoaS1 Computer 4 SoaS2 Assuming Drive Cache write Through – No boot SoaS1 – Boots, no internet access, no one in neighborhood. Computer 5 Delete to enter setup. SoaS1 create symlink error. Computer 6 Power button appears to be broken – Broken Computer Computer 7 Started to boot from USB SosS2 :: Denied BIOS AML access to invaldi pot 0x4d0+0x2 SoaS1 Gets to blue line then EXT – Fs error device dm-0 ext3_journal_start_sb deteceted aborted journal – inode 6609, block544159 and 54305 Remounting filesystem read-only but does not boot Computer 8 Boots SoaS 2 from USB, no internet Used Del then changed the order of the hard drives Sound works Computer 9 Used Del then changed the order of the hard drives SoaS2 :: Denied BIOS AML access to invaldi port 0x4d0+0x1 (PICO) [sdb] Assuming drive cahce: write through SoaS1 – you must specify a file system type Computer 10 SoaS2 with Boot helper - Canot find root file system Same error with SoaS1 -- Caroline Meeks Solution Grove carol...@solutiongrove.com 617-500-3488 - Office 505-213-3268 - Fax ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. -- Upton Sinclair ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Marketing] Do not open a new window for menu link on sugarlabs.org
Sean, Wouldn't it be ok to merge Bugs / Git / API / Buildbot into Develop, and expand them when you get to the Develop page? Also, the language on the wiki home page makes it sound like communication is done via the wiki. The Sugar Labs wiki is where the community comes together to develop and support the Sugar Learning Platform. This isn't really the case. IRC and mailing lists are far more useful places to come together. The wiki reflects community-generated documentation, it seems to me.I have never (with one exception) had any response to something I placed on the talk page on sugarlabs or olpc wiki, and it would be frustrating for an unwary user to think there . Also, are the forums used? It would seem that if we really do our work via the lists, we should make the list archives prominent on the site and forget forums. On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 2:59 PM, Sean DALY sdaly...@gmail.com wrote: thanks Christian a related issue is our logo size and positioning which I would like to see left-justified (your suggestion of that for the press release was excellent) and... the Git size (bigger) rather than smaller, but i know you feel differently about that :-) On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 10:51 PM, Christian Marc Schmidt schm...@pentagram.com wrote: Hi Sean Thanks for initiating this. I generally agree with the goals to unify the site through a single navbar, but am also concerned about visual complexity. The more we can consolidate navigation items, the better. I'll start exploring visual treatments with the goal to find something that would work across all sites. That said, it may still be sensible to keep the intro separate from the other sites, to direct people in a more focused way towards only a few sections that we determine (as is currently the case). Christian On 3/26/09 5:41 PM, Sean DALY sdaly...@gmail.com wrote: Here are some ideas for a harmonized navbar across our domains, for discussion and input please. By way of an anology, I would like that a visitor navigating between our welcoming reception area, our meeting room, our factory floor, our mailroom etc. always know where s/he is and how to get to another section and in particular the homepage: www.sugarlabs.org. I know that Christian wants to keep the navbar short in the intro section so it is unobtrusive... that Josh wants a friendly home for Activities not unlike Mozilla's addons... that our wiki mavens want their usual workspace without fuss and bother, that teachers need a super easy to use section, and so on. That said, I think we all want teachers, parents, funders, journalists, bug reporters, developers, and... , kids :-) to be able to visit and explore the richness of our site without getting lost. Because for them, there is the Sugar Labs site and not 9 separate sites. It is a measure of the labyrinthine nature of our site/sites that I discovered some sections today I hadn't suspected even existed, and these sections had no link to the main page or to each other. Linking our sections will raise the visibility of our site and its richness will show any visitor (as if there were a doubt) that our community is vibrant. So, here goes... let's start with the union of all the linked sections I can find for sugarlabs.org: Home Wiki Blog (or Planet) Lists Bugs Git Schools Activities Download People Donate API Buildbot Trees Indices Index Lounge (or Forums or Discussions) FAQ Press (or Contact) Register Help About Sitemap Login Search plus a missing one: Support/Feedback 26 candidates for a navbar! ...More complicated than I suspected. Some of these, in particular Search, are never identified as local to the section, sure to be confusing to the nontechnical visitor who just want to search the Sugar Labs site. Not everyone knows the Google site:sugarlabs.org syntax :-) Others are on the same subject, but point to different places; for example, the Activities section of the intro is not yet well integrated with activities.sugarlabs.org and even points offsite, to the corresponding OLPC pages. I think we can agree that 25, or 20, or even 15 choices are too many. The traditional solution to this problem is two tiers: mouseover on the navbar reveals subchoices. The idea being to standardize a navbar like this at the top of every section, giving random access to any other section. For example, how about 9 main sections: *** Home Download Activities Schools Contributors Wiki / Bugs / Git / API / Buildbot / Translate / People / Planet Resources Documentation / FAQ / Mailing Lists / Community News / Index / Sitemap Search Wiki search / Bugs search / Schools search Contact Press / Forums / IRC / Support / Feedback Donate *** What do you think?
[IAEP] Portfolios in education
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/3668/electronic-portfolios-a-path-to-the-future-of-learning ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] aslo categories
The offered categories are not a taxonomy but rather a set of tags. Presumably activities would be tagged with multiple of these if appropriate. Have you ever looked at the amo site to see how the Firefox add-ons appear there? You can see add-ons under multiple of the descriptions they provide. Yes, you can also search the site. Is art music? Is music art? Educators and school curricula usually use the term art to refer to the visual arts. The tags are a finding tool, not a definitive designation of every aspect that an activity may present. Where does synth lab fit it? Art, music, programming, science? It seems like you can attach four tags if you think these are all appropriate. Personally, I think programming is stretching the term to meaninglessness. Is a memorize a game when you are making math facts cards? Or is it geometry when you make a name that country game? Just because you can't perfectly describe every activity doesn't detract from the usefulness of general tags that conform to educators' and parents' notions of broad areas that a learning activity could contribute to. Or is it English-language learning when you making pronunciation cards?Typing Tutor can be used for spelling, not just learning to type. Literacy covers all those areas. Perhaps we can search on descriptions? And if reviewers could add a word or two description of what they used the activity for, and Gary generates an interactive SOM for the search... Nothing prevents someone from using local or google searching. -walter -- 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 -- It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. -- Upton Sinclair ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] New sugarlabs website
Furthermore, if you can't browse you must guess or use search, which leads you into a maze of twisty little passages all alike (but not what you want). On Sat, Mar 14, 2009 at 7:38 AM, Eben Eliason eben.elia...@gmail.comwrote: On Sat, Mar 14, 2009 at 1:15 AM, Bernie Innocenti ber...@codewiz.org wrote: David Farning wrote: When things settle down, I would like to get google analytic running for the static portion of the site to see how the click through and bounce rate compare with the wiki. Please use our analytics account based on Google Apps for all sugarlabs.org websites: UA-6267583-1 . I guess Christian should do it, or it will be overwritten the next time he updates the website. In the future we should consider using better collaborations tools, such an SCM, to let multiple people work on the static web site. I think as a rule we should make sure that any given page with a number of related sub-pages has an index of sorts which exposes the next-level-down to make browsing as natural as searching. In other words, every sub-page should have (at least) an incoming link from its parent page, so the tree of all pages is connected in a browsable way. (We get a link from the sub-page back to the parent page—all ancestors, actually—for free.) Does anyone know how to do this in mediawiki? Dunno. I think the #1 issue with the wiki is not navigability, but clutter. We're not helping the user by increasing it with adding 10 more links to the 100+ we already have in every page. My point here is really one of discoverability, so in a sense we're arguing similar high level points. It's not easy to find what you want among 100+ links on a given page, but it's impossible to find what you want if there is no link to it at all, and search doesn't work reliably. Perhaps my previous statement about making a general rule is too strong, but I still think there are lots of places that need to be more browsable. Honestly, I think almost any situation which merits hierarchy on the wiki for logical grouping *probably* merits links from parent to child pages anyway. Consider the DesignTeam/Designs page: It discusses design goals at a high level, and it summarizes each of the posted designs, with links directly to the individual design sub pages so that people can get more detail about each. Why would we not want the DevelopmentTeam/Release page to have links to release notes for recent releases (at the very least, the most recent!)? In other words, what good is a hierarchy if it's not a browsable one? Things may as well be flat if there's no way to move through the tree. I raise the issue because I myself have fought this many times, frequently attempting to browse through the hierarchy to find things, only to find no links to pages I know full well exist. In order for a wiki to be usable, it must be both well organized and well linked (well linked doesn't imply excessively linked; just intelligently). - Eben I especially dislike the blue translation bar containing lots of weird scripts. People know to use Google Translate without every web site in the world hinting them at it. Search is currently pretty nonfunctional because mediawiki can not search within words. So we need to get rid of the CamelCase as soon as possiable:( I will ask SJ what he did on wiki.laptop.org to improve upon it. -- // Bernie Innocenti - http://www.codewiz.org/ \X/ 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 -- It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. -- Upton Sinclair ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] New sugarlabs website
Congratulations on the new website. It looks great. The designer did a wonderful job of listening to feedback, which isn't easy. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] A nicer looking wiki
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder -- OpenSuSE also uses MediaWiki, but their theme and layout looks really good: http://en.opensuse.org/ Busy; tiny unreadable fonts; minimal, dull graphics. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Design for a.sl.o and sugarlabs branding/theme unity
Slight grammatical problem with one panel on http://www.christianmarcschmidt.com/projects/sugarlabs/betasite/index.php?template=pagepage=learners Kamala reads a webpage about sharks and LEARN that shark populations are declining. -- should be LEARNS. On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 6:54 AM, David Farning dfarn...@sugarlabs.orgwrote: On Sat, Feb 28, 2009 at 6:35 AM, Christian Schmidt schm...@pentagram.com wrote: Thanks Sean. We are in the final stages of proofing content on the betasite, and think we will go live this weekend. Stay tuned! Christian, I officially withdraw any reservations I had about the new site:) I showed it around my nephew's elementary school yesterday; The teachers, teachers aids, and parents thought it was great! The most interesting aspect was the change from the dark to light background. They thought the dark, over welming, background represented what one 'expects' from computers and the light background was what you would 'want' from computers. david Christian From: Sean DALY [mailto:sdaly...@gmail.com] To: ,Josh williams [mailto:joshcwilli...@gmail.com] Cc: David Farning [mailto:dfarn...@sugarlabs.org], iaep@lists.sugarlabs.org, sugar-de...@lists.sugarlabs.org, Christian Marc Schmidt [mailto:schm...@pentagram.com] Sent: Fri, 27 Feb 2009 04:05:48 -0500 Subject: Re: [IAEP] Design for a.sl.o and sugarlabs branding/theme unity Greetings Josh! In fact lots of work has been done on this by Christian, see for example: http://sugarlabs.org/go/MarketingTeam/Logo http://sugarlabs.org/go/MarketingTeam/Website and, in beta: http://www.christianmarcschmidt.com/projects/sugarlabs/betasite/index.php May I suggest you join the Marketing list? http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/marketing We have IRC meetings on Tuesdays at 1600 UTC: http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/marketing/2009-February/000341.html We are gearing up for the imminent Sugar 0.84 release. Thanks Sean Marketing Coordinator On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 8:08 AM, ,Josh williams joshcwilli...@gmail.com wrote: Hey David, I have had a quick look at the markup and the CSS, but I haven't actually had a look at the PHP. I laughed when I saw the Mozilla guys had an IE style sheet, but then I figured they were probably just reusing code. I was actually wondering if I could have a local copy of the remora code or access to a development or testing environment at some point? I also agree that we need a common branding for all of the sites, Gnome is a great example I think Mozilla and Ubuntu are good examples to. I think a splash page for www.sugarlabs.org built on WordPress or Drupal would be a really good idea also. It could explain the what the project is, have a download link to the latest version, link to the wiki, press release, news etc. Cheers, Josh David Farning wrote: On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 9:38 AM, Wade Brainerd wad...@gmail.com wrote: Hey Josh, thanks for the offer of help! I definitely like your simple and kid-friendly theme for addons. I wonder off the top of my head though, if it makes sense to make addons.sl.o look *more* like the other sl.o sites? Have you gotten a chance to look at the aslo code? Things are kind of confusing right now with the different styles of wiki, trac, addons, schools, gitorious, api, buildbot, etc. planet is the lone exception, it seems to follow wiki.sugarlabs.org nicely :) It would be great if the Design Team could comment on this decision. Here are a couple other web infrastructure ideas: + Improve theming consistency among various SL.o sites. + Single sign on cookie among all SL.o sites - perhaps OpenID based. + Standard nav header atop all SL.o sites rather than the various nav headers in different places, with different links. The various gnome sites such as build.gnome.org and www.gnome.org are very nice examples of common theming tying sites together. Some thing similar for SL would be great. david + Better splash page for Gitorious, looking more like GitWeb - a page with a small search box at the top and the rest being a list of projects, sorted by recent activity, showing owner and last commit details Best regards, Wade On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 11:10 AM, ,Josh williams joshcwilli...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, I'm working on the design of sugar labs add-ons with Mick Weiss. I've created a mock up at http://sugarlabs.org/go/AddonsPortal/Design but I've haven't been able to contact anyone on the design team as of yet. I would also like to volunteer some of my time for other projects. I'm primarily a front-end designer with XHTML/CSS JavaScript skills, but I also know some PHP/MySQL and have a background in Linux. I also enjoy creating icons, so if there are any activities developers that need icons please
Re: [IAEP] http://www-testing.sugarlabs.org/
I second Michael's suggestion about a web design that echoes the Sugar design. Think how useful this would be if carried to school servers. And as a basis for web-served Sugar-like activities. I have to agree with the conclusion that the test design is off-putting. It is certainly not intelligible to children. One of the foundations of the Sugar interface is to make things iconic and simple and universal. The flood of words, most of them jargon, just doesn't work. On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 11:46 AM, Michael Stone michael.r.st...@gmail.comwrote: On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 11:56:52AM -0500, Benjamin M. Schwartz wrote: David Farning wrote: Sorry there was a typo in my last email the site is actually http://www-testing.sugarlabs.org/ I forcefully object to everything about this website. It is ugly, off-putting, unnavigable, unreadable, buggy, empty of any helpful information, and in many other ways among the worst websites I could possibly imagine for this purpose. It is a very cool javascript tech demo, which is not at all useful here. Meanwhile, the front page of the wiki is beautiful. It presents the visitor immediately with a statement explaining what Sugar is, and a bunch of clearly named links to learn more about Sugar and Sugar Labs. Scrolling down presents a wealth of introductory information about Sugar, presented in a logical fashion. It does all of this in a non-headache-inducing color scheme, using complete sentences. Clearly a lot of work has been put into this, and it shows. Christian, I wish I felt differently, but I agree with pretty much everything Ben said. In fact, I found myself so put off by the new design that I left the site after reading no more than two entries. I was particularly frustrated by the meaningless colors, the dark - light background transition, the useless sound bytes, and the invisible one-word menu that overlaps other text when I scroll. In more detail, this is not the Sugar design that I enjoy -- in Sugar: * Colors denote individual identity and contribution; they aren't uniform over a page and they aren't randomly regenerated on each visit. * Contrast is used carefully: I would never see a black menu with yellow text over a pure white background, nor a yellow menu with white text on a white background. (Both of which I observed.) * Text colors are never reversed for emphasis. * Views are scoped and zoomable, and information is usually arranged in visually pleasing layouts with gray-out filters or search; not organized hierarchically. (The exception is toolbars, which Eben redesigned in a fashion much more consistent with Sugar's design imperatives: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Designs/Toolbars ) (At any rate, contrast the hierarchy-free Neighborhood View and the Home View with semi-hierarchical Journal or the (deeply hierarchical) source code layout.) * For better and for worse, icons are used everywhere in place of short text. Short text is presented only on hover. Now, as an alternate suggestion: why not use the desire for a nicer website as an opportunity to test out our actual underlying UI design principles? For example, I'd love to see a Sugar front-page that used the Frame and its zoomable Views for navigation, perhaps organizing hierarchical content with Eben's Toolbar design. Regards, Michael P.S. - Just think of the educational opportunity that's slipping away by not dogfooding the existing design work. :) ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. -- Upton Sinclair ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Observations and feature requests based on watching a preK class use a computer lab
TuxPaint is very good and a good competitor to KidPix. PLEASE make it work well on the XO and on SOAS. Anecdote: When I spent a week in a Kindergarten with my XOs, only one of the machines had TuxPaint. (All the rest had been upgraded to the build turning Rainbow on, and at the time I didn't know how to disable this.) The kids vied to use the machine with TuxPaint. They were completely uninterested in paint. On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 12:57 PM, Caroline Meeks carol...@solutiongrove.com wrote: Today I visited a computer lab at a school in Boston where 3-5 year olds (the PreK class) were using the computers in the computer lab. The teacher tried to get them to use Kidspirations to look at and stamp bugs but they rebelled. All they wanted to do was use KidPix. We need a paint program that is as cool as KidPix or we will suffer the same fate. They will turn off Sugar and go back to Windows to use KidPix! In Kidpix the students learned that they need to use the mouse and not the keyboard. By the time I left all students had managed to learn to use the mouse to make something on the screen. I saw some kids make the connection that they had done something with the mouse and it had appeared on the screen. Some were painting with colors, others were stamping with images. Some kids had learned how to erase the screen and start over. Clearly learning was going on. I thought to myself, what would take this lesson to the next level for these students. I think, based on the interactions the teachers were having as they spent individual time with the students, that it would be valuable to these students to begin to tell stories about their pictures. It would be cool if the kids could record a voice note when they saved a picture in the journal. This could help the teachers move them towards telling stories about thier pictures. I think that would in turn motivate them to want to control what they did with the picture more. Our goal with the journal is to get kids to reflect on thier work. For many of the students in the age range we serve typing that reflection is going to be a challenge and we might well get more thoughtful reflection if they could speak it. -- Caroline Meeks Solution Grove carol...@solutiongrove.com 617-500-3488 - Office 505-213-3268 - Fax ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. -- Upton Sinclair ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Design for a.sl.o and sugarlabs
I think a simple design such as Josh's is ideal to use for all kid facing pages. The school server could benefit from a similar theme. Personally, while I think someone talented (as Josh obviously is) could make a related theme for adults and kids, it is much more important to have a less text-intensive, more kid-friendly face for the target audience, which is kids. One comment on the design itself...perhaps have a thumbnail screenshot of the activity visible for enlargement if available? We could encourage authors to supply one when the activity is submitted. Things are kind of confusing right now with the different styles of wiki, trac, addons, schools, gitorious, api, buildbot, etc. planet is the lone exception, it seems to follow wiki.sugarlabs.org nicely :) It would be great if the Design Team could comment on this decision. Here are a couple other web infrastructure ideas: + Improve theming consistency among various SL.o sites. + Single sign on cookie among all SL.o sites - perhaps OpenID based. + Standard nav header atop all SL.o sites rather than the various nav headers in different places, with different links. The various gnome sites such as build.gnome.org and www.gnome.org are very nice examples of common theming tying sites together. Some thing similar for SL would be great. david + Better splash page for Gitorious, looking more like GitWeb - a page with a small search box at the top and the rest being a list of projects, sorted by recent activity, showing owner and last commit details Best regards, Wade On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 11:10 AM, ,Josh williams joshcwilli...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, I'm working on the design of sugar labs add-ons with Mick Weiss. I've created a mock up at http://sugarlabs.org/go/AddonsPortal/Design but I've haven't been able to contact anyone on the design team as of yet. I would also like to volunteer some of my time for other projects. I'm primarily a front-end designer with XHTML/CSS JavaScript skills, but I also know some PHP/MySQL and have a background in Linux. I also enjoy creating icons, so if there are any activities developers that need icons please contact me. My portfolio is over at http://tucsonlabs.com. If you're a member of the design team or have some use for my skills, please let me know. Thanks Josh ___ 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 ___ Sugar-devel mailing list sugar-de...@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel -- It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. -- Upton Sinclair ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Interesting game described in latest ACM technews
Is anyone affiliated with this organization? http://www.fraunhofer.de/EN/press/pi/2009/02/ResearchNews022009Topic3.jsp ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] addons.sugarlabs.org is starting to work
Why not provide a dependency declaration in the activity file which can be checked when the activity is installed? It could inform the user that a particular package or library was needed. I understand that different distros may package the dependencies differently, but it wouldn't be so bad if the user had to identify this at registration (if not an XO running a recognizeable distribution) or when using the activity.s.o site. Then the checker could recognize which dependency declaration to use (or could announce this activity has dependencies but your distribution hasn't been described -- or words to that effect. On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 4:36 PM, Luke Faraone l...@faraone.cc wrote: On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 7:28 PM, Aleksey Lim alsr...@member.fsf.orgwrote: What will happen if someone download TamTam/StoryBuilder/etc, and unfortunately hasn't csound/pygame/etc installed? One possible decision: we could create meta package w/ frequently used dependencies, like csound/olpcsound, pygames etc Whats our strategy in that case for short/long period? The *ideal* method would be to use a standard packaging method long term, ie .deb (which I'm partial to) or RPM. (both of these can be converted from and to each other with alien) Currently the main objection to using system packaging is that they require administrative privlages to install; unfortunately, so would any other solution other than requiring that *all* sugar installs had *all* the packages in the sugar system (like we were able to do with the XO). That method does not scale, and it forces people to handle shared libs. If we decided to look into using debs or RPMs, we could easilly use apt-get or yum in prefix mode, which lets non-root users install packages. Or, we could continue to use XO bundles, which have no dependancy handling what so ever. Even if we standardized on metapackages, we'd still need to either A) request that the system administrator install them, or B) make a XO bundle format for shared libs. -- Luke Faraone http://luke.faraone.cc ___ Sugar-devel mailing list sugar-de...@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel -- It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. -- Upton Sinclair ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] activites known not to either work at all or not on certin platforms
Frustration -- yup. However, let's try to come up with a way forward that solves the problem in the sort-of near term, and the frustration in the very near term. I too have been trying to run sugar on ubuntu and having frustration. So, what I think would minimize the frustration is a known place to look for the current state of what works, what doesn't work and why, and a way to work around the problem till it has a permanent fix. It's obvious from the sugar-ubuntu list that quite a few people are finding and fixing bugs, but the fixes are in various stages of hitting the repositories. E.g. and correct if this is inaccurate, it looks to me like the first problem you hit with write and jigsawpuzzle is that abiword hasn't been repackaged to provide a libabiword, and the people who can actually do that (the abiword project) haven't bought into or gotten around to this yet. So can someone provide a different package, even an rpm that could be installed with alien? and could the location of where to get this be noted in the state of the sugar ubuntu nation? Same with other known problems that have been figured out but not percolated into a distributed fix. Rinse and repeat for SOAS and any other distros floating around. This would at least make clear what is known to be wrong, and steps underway to fix. As for the second point, namely providing activities requested by teachers, I agree it is important, and I think Wade has an almost-ready typing tutor (google these lists for a prior thread on this). On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 6:14 PM, David Van Assche dvanass...@gmail.comwrote: ok? I guess this will be contreversial but it must be said and acted upon (much more importantly) Im gonna try and make this easy: SoaS - the latest fedora core based I tried to impress my 9 year old gescwister... (related one) Speak - it will not even launch why is it then on a disitributed stick? ubuntu - no read no write no jiggzawpuzzle etoys scratch epathi measure anything tam tam based until very recently even browse pdf reader of any kind measure distance slider video chat abc flower (thing doesnt even exist) ok, that is about 50% of the failed testtube babies... what is the solution: we test the damn tings before release we do what greg dekoenigsberg quite elegantly suggested. a 3 tier solution: 1. make an educator mailinglist we get every educator we know on the list. We start off the discussion with what is really needed... the simple stuff... the stuff u guru coders can whip up in days: Examples: 1. typing tutor... all it should do is allow kids to follow whatever the teacher is directing. speed of typing is recorded? accuracy; graph based report; printable to parents... stars given to best pupils... guys these are real world scenarios... not invented by devs.. asked for by teachers qnd not surprisingly thinking why it does not yet exist. 2 same for maths... times tables/division/addition/substraction groupings of kids, reports, printibale to both parents ant teachers... 2. (gdk) guys this is what teachers want... I reallly hate to say this; but the stuff right now on sugar apart from speak, which when working every teacher loves, is an absolute waste of educators time... yes the activities can be properly used... but basics first! mailing list to get the, involved; we mention the activities that we (welll actually they) have come up with, we discuss very briefly; 3: (gdk)then make a moodle/wiki page where educators and devs get together to create the tools that we actually need (the ones that will really chqnge the world) I hope no one takes this is as a critcism of the effort put into creating activities till now; but people... lets frocus... lets sugar mean something for teachers David (nubae) Van Assche ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. -- Upton Sinclair ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] How to Make Activity Designers Happy , Parts I and II
Bryan, as usual, brings up great suggestions that require stepping outside of our preconceptions. Regarding Wade's comment, I have just provisioned an XO with Teapot's Intrepid Ibex as popularized at olpcnews (beautiful package, btw). It comes with tubewatcher, a script using clive to download a youtube whose link is on the clipboard and then played with mplayer where the parameters have been adjusted to play succussfully on the XO hardware. Might this be a start toward an approach for a similar sugarized activity on the XO? (I realize this is only the video part. Perhaps an analogous approach to use existing FLOSS tools to optimize the client side for swf, together with a coherent document specifying the constraints the developer ought to observe.) http://stilen.com/notes/mplayer_on_slow_cpu.txt On Fri, Jan 2, 2009 at 9:30 AM, Wade Brainerd wad...@gmail.com wrote: I think Bryan's idea is wonderfully practical. What's more, it sounds easy to achieve. You just need a 'swf-activity' launcher, and a script to sugarize .SWF files into .xo bundles which launch as fullscreen activities. Building it around Browse is probably a bad idea (re: the .xol suggestion). What's the point of loading up Firefox just to play a SWF file? There is still a place for PyGTK. If you want the real Sugar, e.g. collaboration, Journal interaction, the visual theme, etc. stick with PyGTK. If you want a simple Pashto grammar activity and have Flash programmers at your disposal, use Flash. -Wade ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- Don't think for a minute that power concedes. We have to work like our future depends on it. -- Barack Obama ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Edu-sig] ACM Urges Obama to Include CS as Core Component ofScience, Math Education
My husband was 14 when he did the first install of APL OS for an IBM customer. He had learned APL from his friend, the son of an IBM Research scientist when he was 12, and on the strength of this, got a summer job with the APL group. The idea of hitting a pre-teen with Erlang and J, whereas most adults I know are still stuck on Access and Excel, is just a wee bit ludicrous, even for the child prodigy cult people (lots of Smalltalkers in that camp). Let's get a little more real, shall we? -- Don't think for a minute that power concedes. We have to work like our future depends on it. -- Barack Obama ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [sugar] list of complaints from sugarcamp community building talk
Please DON'T introduce more sugarisms like BEET, especially for novices. How are they supposed to know what to put as a tag, even if the tag makes sense? ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Fwd: Sugar architecture diagram (was Re: OLPC France CodeCamp in Paris)
Here is your diagram svg-ified via a nifty firefox addon (pencil). On Sat, Nov 15, 2008 at 3:26 AM, Tomeu Vizoso [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Sorry, didn't checked if the sugar lists where on CC. Tomeu -- Forwarded message -- From: Tomeu Vizoso [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Sat, Nov 15, 2008 at 11:18 AM Subject: Sugar architecture diagram (was Re: OLPC France CodeCamp in Paris) To: LASKE, Lionel (C2S) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED], Bastien [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] 2008/11/1 LASKE, Lionel (C2S) [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Hi all, OLPC France is proud to announce its OLPC CodeCamp in Paris on November 15th. Five workshops are planned: · Sugar: development and experimentation on Sugar/python, Hi, perhaps may help this diagram I quickly sketched (see in a fixed-width font): --- | | || | | | Non-python | Sugar shell | Python| | | Sugar | (Desktop window, |Sugar| | | Activities | panel,| Activities | | Regular| (Etoys,| journal) | | | X | Simcity, || | | Apps |Mono |--| | | activities, |Sugar toolkit (python-only) | | |etc.)| | | || | |DataStore | Presence | | | service | service| --- |Matchbox window manager| | (considering switching to Metacity for improved compatibility) | --- | | |GNOME-ish Linux desktop| |X11, HAL, D-Bus, NetworkManager, GConf, Telepathy, etc | | | --- Regards, Tomeu · School Server: setting up and test of school server on multiple platform (standard PC, Booba server, CherryPal, …), · Mono: development of new activities using Mono, · Pedagogic usage: Feedbacks from Haïti, Ethiopia and Palestine deployment. Brainstorming with French teachers to find usage and class activity for the XO. · French localization: French translators will work all the days to translate in French, sugar, activities and FLOSS manual. If you're interested to meet the French OLPC community and to have a nice trip to Paris: you're welcome ! More information on: http://olpc-france.org/wiki/index.php?title=OLPC_France_CodeCamp_15_november Best regards from France. Lionel Laské ___ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] 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 -- Don't think for a minute that power concedes. We have to work like our future depends on it. -- Barack Obama attachment: sugar.svg___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
