Re: [IAEP] Sugar Labs Individual Membership
Although it is difficult to specify a precise definition [snipped] This creates ambiguity. If it doesn't add to the process, I suggest we remove it altogether. Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Information Systems San Francisco State University San Francisco CA 94132 USA http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://opensource.sfsu.edu/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Fedora Live CD for Sugar
On Thu, Sep 25, 2008 at 11:56 AM, Greg Dekoenigsberg [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I have: * A livecd for Fedora 10 devel (rawhide) that allows a Sugar 0.82 boot option via GDM. We're missing activites, but as those make their way into rawhide for F10, we will close these gaps quickly. * A kickstart file that can be used by any Fedora user to generate such an image trivially. So. Where shall we host them? Somewhere in Fedora-land, or somewhere in Sugar-land? Why not both, and torrent it up on http://linuxtracker.org/ ? Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Information Systems San Francisco State University San Francisco CA 94132 USA http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://opensource.sfsu.edu/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Deployment meetings
On Wed, Oct 1, 2008 at 11:38 AM, Walter Bender [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Every other Wednesday at 14:00 UTC. I announced this one in the Sugar Digest (and Rafael announced in on OLPC-Sur) but apparently not too many people saw the notice (or were interested/able to join us). -walter On Wed, Oct 1, 2008 at 2:14 PM, Marco Pesenti Gritti [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Are those weekly? At which time? I realized I lost today one from the wiki, but I didn't seen an announcement (possibly my fault). Marco ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- 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 Can we do a Google calendar or something equivalent for Sugar and other meetings/events so that others can subscribe to the ical feeds? Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Information Systems San Francisco State University San Francisco CA 94132 USA http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://opensource.sfsu.edu/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Deployment meetings
I found it. make sure you search for sugar labs meetings and not sugarlabs meetings. Sameer On Wed, Oct 1, 2008 at 12:53 PM, Nate Ridderman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I wasn't able to find the meetings in Google calendar. I guess it's possible that it hasn't been indexed yet on the Google servers, but I would be surprised. I tried searching for the exact text you sent, as well as other combinations. Thanks, Nate On Wed, Oct 1, 2008 at 2:56 PM, Walter Bender [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Try searching for Sugar Labs meetings in Google calendar. I've just added a few meetings so far. Does anyone know how to make meetings repeat bi-weekly in Google calendar? -walter On Wed, Oct 1, 2008 at 2:44 PM, Walter Bender [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Wed, Oct 1, 2008 at 2:42 PM, Sameer Verma [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Wed, Oct 1, 2008 at 11:38 AM, Walter Bender [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Every other Wednesday at 14:00 UTC. I announced this one in the Sugar Digest (and Rafael announced in on OLPC-Sur) but apparently not too many people saw the notice (or were interested/able to join us). -walter On Wed, Oct 1, 2008 at 2:14 PM, Marco Pesenti Gritti [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Are those weekly? At which time? I realized I lost today one from the wiki, but I didn't seen an announcement (possibly my fault). Marco ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- 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 Can we do a Google calendar or something equivalent for Sugar and other meetings/events so that others can subscribe to the ical feeds? Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Information Systems San Francisco State University San Francisco CA 94132 USA http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://opensource.sfsu.edu/ good idea. let me look into it. -walter -- Walter Bender Sugar Labs http://www.sugarlabs.org -- Walter Bender Sugar Labs http://www.sugarlabs.org ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Olpc-open] G1G1 (was Re: [Community-news] OLPC News (2008-09-29))
On Thu, Oct 2, 2008 at 1:12 PM, Samuel Klein [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Yikes. Undersaturated billboard markets... I wonder how such things impact the desire to 'launch' new announcements. On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 8:21 PM, Walter Bender [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: FWIW, I saw a billboard in the Indianapolis airport this weekend advertising last year's G1G1 program!! Ed, you're right that there isn't much visibility yet on the net. We should do better (and earlier!) this year, and target more focused communities of interest. I'm sure that the PR group will deal with things like billboards and print/radio/tv media, but there are hundreds of thousands of people already deeply engaged in missions aligned with ours whom we can reach more directly. You might add to the lists here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Community_media Especially groups of interested people (like the readers of boingboing and slashdot, which generally pick up OLPC news, but also specific mailing lists that only hear fringes of information about the project, like environment and sustainable dev groups, retired grandparents, c). Last year we didn't draft much in the way of specific language for different audiences, but we should. Notes I send to my family about the program are very different from the more generic emails that go out. SJ Marketing largely happens through two channels: Mass media and Word-of-mouth. Billboards, TV etc are mass media while talking to your friends, or SJ's family is word-of-mouth. Lately, the network effect has added to the power of word-of-mouth, hence the concepts of viral marketing, etc. One of the most interesting word-of-mouth channels has been the people who come by your table at a cafe or bookstore or the airport when you use your XO, or pretend to use it :-) Obviously, these parties are interested. So, an elevator pitch + pointing them in the right direction should do the trick. I used to carry small slips of paper with URLs and other information (sort of like a business card) last year during G1G1. I'm thinking of doing actual business card size templates with G1G1v2 information and some URLs + a line where I can write down my e-mail address or phone as necessary (maybe a double-sided business card). These are cheap to print and impressive to hand out. Perhaps we can do officially blessed designs early on this year. Of course posters etc. at your neighborhood stores and malls are also helpful. We did these last year. http://opensource.sfsu.edu/node/426 I even renamed my hotspot SSID to laptopgiving.org for a couple of months in the hopes that my neighbors would pick up on the hint :-) SJ - any specific mailing list to join for marketing efforts? cheers, Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Information Systems San Francisco State University San Francisco CA 94132 USA http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://opensource.sfsu.edu/ Ed writes: This is the first time I have heard that G1G1 will start up again on Nov 17. As far as I can tell, nobody in the outside world has picked up on this yet. I s this a leak? Is it true? Has there been any outside announcement? Since it doesn't show up in Internet news searches, I am certain that there was no press release. Should I Slashdot this? ___ Olpc-open mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/olpc-open ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Olpc-open] G1G1 (was Re: [Community-news] OLPC News (2008-09-29))
On Sat, Oct 4, 2008 at 3:42 PM, Edward Cherlin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Update: Some of the computer press has picked up the story. But we could be all over the Mainstream Media, including having Nicholas, Walter, Alan and others on all the talk shows. If they are willing. Are any of you? This is the one time of year when ordering something you can't get is a positive. We should aim for something ridiculous, like a million units. (Although we shouldn't say that to the media in so many words.) And then we should provide daily tracking of order numbers and of production lead times, to encourage yet more people to order as early as possible. We should be playing up the connection with the 40th anniversary of the Dynabook idea, and of Doug Engelbart's Mother of All Demos. I have been in contact with him and his people, and I know that they are keen on that. We should be doing T-shirts, mugs, stickers, replica mice, and all the rest of the merchandising, and getting several books published. Why anybody at OLPC would want to waste the best marketing time in the year is utterly beyond me. If you don't think my opinion counts, ask Amazon. I agree with Ed Cherlin in that if G1G1v2 begins in 5 weeks, now is the time to get the campaign going. Five weeks isn't a lot of time. What I'd look for in the efforts this year is something a bit more orchestrated. Materials (posters, cards, stickers, shirts, etc) all coming across with a consistency in branding, image, look-n-feel, etc. If we do merchandise from somebody like Cafepress, we don't have to get into the business of printing, cutting etc. I cannot setup shop at Cafepress because the logos involved aren't my copyright, but if someone from OLPC initiates, I'd be glad to help. Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Information Systems San Francisco State University San Francisco CA 94132 USA http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://opensource.sfsu.edu/ On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 4:50 PM, Edward Cherlin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: This is the first time I have heard that G1G1 will start up again on Nov 17. As far as I can tell, nobody in the outside world has picked up on this yet. Is this a leak? Is it true? Has there been any outside announcement? Since it doesn't show up in Internet news searches, I am certain that there was no press release. Should I Slashdot this? This is a Hell of a way to run a global non-profit. We have one of the world's biggest brands, and we do nothing with it. We could be The Must-Have Gift for this Holiday season without any advertising expense, if we would just let the media have the story. Even with the manufacturing delays that we can predict. That's one of the draws for the Must-Have Gift of the year. Cabbage Patch died the moment you could get one off the shelf. There is a great deal more I could say about this and other management issues, but this is not the place for it. If you want to hear any of it, you know where to find me. But!! I have a better idea. Who wants to fork the PR program, and help write an Open Source press release? We'll have to reverse engineer most of the content, but I have confidence in our community's abilities. On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 2:45 PM, Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Community News A weekly update of One Laptop per Child September 29, 2008 Our appearance outside the Marriott attracted a lot of people to out tables; some of them were as far as from Finland; many of them knew about those laptops for children and were asking about the ways to acquire the laptops (we even got questions: are you selling the machines?). So, in addition to conducting our scheduled testing, we also served as unofficial OLPC marketing representatives, steering people to the Nov 17 opening of the G1G1 event through amazon.com. The time we were outside wasn't even the peak lunch time for people to fill that square; just imagine the level of attention, if we were there at the lunch time! -- Don't panic.--HHGTTG, Douglas Adams fivethirtyeight.com, 3bluedudes.com Obama still moving ahead in EC! http://www.obamapedia.org/ Join us! http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/User:Mokurai For the children -- Don't panic.--HHGTTG, Douglas Adams fivethirtyeight.com, 3bluedudes.com Obama still moving ahead in EC! http://www.obamapedia.org/ Join us! http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/User:Mokurai For the children ___ Olpc-open mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/olpc-open ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Fwd: [vox] Tux Paint code_swarm'd
This is interesting. Bill Kendrick ran code_swarm against CVS logs of TuxPaint. Wonder what code_swarm of Sugar will look like... Code Swarm: http://vis.cs.ucdavis.edu/~ogawa/codeswarm/ Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Information Systems San Francisco State University San Francisco CA 94132 USA http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://opensource.sfsu.edu/ -- Forwarded message -- From: Bill Kendrick [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 12:42 AM Subject: [vox] Tux Paint code_swarm'd To: LUGOD [EMAIL PROTECTED] I ran code_swarm agains the ~6yr worth of CVS logs for Tux Paint, and posted it to YouTube (so the quality's not so good, and it scaled up a bit from the 320x240 that I had code_swarm render it at): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dahUFdiago4 Enjoy! :) -- -bill! Tux Paint - free children's drawing software for Windows / Mac OS X / Linux! Download it today! http://www.tuxpaint.org/ ___ vox mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] teams vs. projects
On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 10:19 AM, Bernie Innocenti [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Sameer Verma wrote: dotProject (http://www.dotproject.net/) and Project.net (http://www.project.net/) are good candidates. They are both FOSS, although I haven't had much luck locating Project.net's FOSS license. Their Bus. Dev. guy tells me that the next release will be GPLv3. dotProject is marked as other/proprietary license on SourceForge. Actually dotProject is under GPLv2 (http://sourceforge.net/projects/dotproject/), while Project.net is marked Proprietary/other. Project.net is under commercial open source license, whatever that means. I did not get a clear answer out of their Business Dev VP. He kept talking in circles and finally said that the next release was going to be GPLv3. Redmine (http://www.redmine.org/) seemed like a promising clone of trac more oriented towards project management. Yes, I remember Bryan Berry (OLE Nepal) mentioning it a while back. I proposed evaluating it some time ago, but the developers are too used to trac to consider switching. Trac does have a Gantt module written in Python (http://willbarton.com/code/tracgantt/) and we looked at it a while back for SF State. We use Trac for managing our iLearn (branded Moodle install) system and wanted some PM charts such as Gantt. We found the granularity provided by this module to be too large to be useful. It tracks milestones instead of tickets. Maybe someone here could hack it to make it more suitable. cheers, Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Information Systems San Francisco State University San Francisco CA 94132 USA http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://opensource.sfsu.edu/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] teams vs. projects
On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 3:30 PM, Rafael Enrique Ortiz Guerrero [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: In my opinion we should use a customized trac for project management, i don't like to have too many resources to take into count, we already have the necessary ones (Trac, mediawiki..moodle) +1 Sameer The Gantt plugin it's a good solution there. Rafael Ortiz On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 3:54 PM, Sameer Verma [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 10:19 AM, Bernie Innocenti [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Sameer Verma wrote: dotProject (http://www.dotproject.net/) and Project.net (http://www.project.net/) are good candidates. They are both FOSS, although I haven't had much luck locating Project.net's FOSS license. Their Bus. Dev. guy tells me that the next release will be GPLv3. dotProject is marked as other/proprietary license on SourceForge. Actually dotProject is under GPLv2 (http://sourceforge.net/projects/dotproject/), while Project.net is marked Proprietary/other. Project.net is under commercial open source license, whatever that means. I did not get a clear answer out of their Business Dev VP. He kept talking in circles and finally said that the next release was going to be GPLv3. Redmine (http://www.redmine.org/) seemed like a promising clone of trac more oriented towards project management. Yes, I remember Bryan Berry (OLE Nepal) mentioning it a while back. I proposed evaluating it some time ago, but the developers are too used to trac to consider switching. Trac does have a Gantt module written in Python (http://willbarton.com/code/tracgantt/) and we looked at it a while back for SF State. We use Trac for managing our iLearn (branded Moodle install) system and wanted some PM charts such as Gantt. We found the granularity provided by this module to be too large to be useful. It tracks milestones instead of tickets. Maybe someone here could hack it to make it more suitable. cheers, Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Information Systems San Francisco State University San Francisco CA 94132 USA http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://opensource.sfsu.edu/ ___ 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] Balanced Scorecard experience?
On Mon, Dec 29, 2008 at 9:47 AM, Caroline Meeks carol...@solutiongrove.com wrote: Hi, I'm working on the project planning for the Sugar on a Stick pilot at the Gardner School. I'm considering using a Balanced Scorecard as one of the management tools and I'm doing the research on it. This is just a quick call out to see if anyone here happens to be experienced in Balanced Scorecard methodology or has an example from an educational project. Thanks! Caroline -- 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 We've used it in one of our classes and in campus projects. Let me know if I can be of any help. School's out though, so digging out samples will be a bit difficult. I'll look for examples. I'm curious about how you plan on using BSC in this scenario. cheers, Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Information Systems San Francisco State University San Francisco CA 94132 USA http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://opensource.sfsu.edu/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Fwd: Call for Participation Now Open
Is anyone sending in proposals for OSCON 2009? This year it will (sadly) be in San Jose. I saw many XOs at OSCON in 2007 (Rob Savoye had the most visible one...he was walking around with it), but only two in 2008 - I had one and the OSUOSL guys had one. I also heard a lot of misleading opinions from the attendees (Windows/MSFT drama). So, at the very least, we should have a significant presence in the exhibit areas. Some of you Sugarheads should really present in sessions as well! Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Information Systems San Francisco State University San Francisco CA 94132 USA http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://opensource.sfsu.edu/ -- Forwarded message -- From: O'Reilly Open Source Convention elists-conferen...@oreilly.com Date: Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 4:45 PM Subject: Call for Participation Now Open To: sve...@sfsu.edu If you cannot read the information below, click here. News Coverage Sponsorship opportunities Media partnership inquiries Be Part of OSCON 2009 O'Reilly's Open Source Convention, Open for Business as It Begins Its Second Decade O'Reilly Media invites developers, designers, sysadmins, community leaders, inventors, CTOs and CIOs, evangelists and activists, researchers, strategists, and entrepreneurs to lead conference sessions and tutorials at the eleventh O'Reilly Open Source Convention, July 20-24 in San Jose, California. The Call for Participation is now open. Submit your proposal by midnight PST February 3, 2009 With the global economy on shifting ground, the world is looking to the tech industry for solutions to a wide range of challenges. Ubiquitous computing, with smart phones at the leading edge, continues to expand. Open source is at the core of so many emerging technologies, driving the innovation engine. How can open source — its tools as well as its principles — contribute to making a difference in the business of computing? How can it help to create a sustainable lifestyle? In an uncertain economy, how can open source empower us? The first ten years of OSCON were about opening the minds of big business to the philosophy of open source. The next ten will be about opening the minds of the open source community to the practical possibilities of its future. As OSCON goes to eleven in 2009, we want to turn up the volume on efficiency, knowledge transfer, and working smarter within constraints to achieve more with what we already have—or even with less. What can you contribute? We want to hear about your winning techniques, favorite life-savers, and the system you've made that everyone will be using next year. We'll have tracks for sessions and tutorials on Linux, PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, Java, Databases, Desktop Applications, Web Applications, Mobile, Administration, Security, People, Business, and Emerging Topics. We're seeking proposals for 45-minute sessions, 45-minute panel discussions, and 3-hour in-depth, hands-on tutorials. Some of the topics we want to consider at OSCON 2009 include: Doing more with less—finding opportunities in a constrained economy Design and usability—tools, techniques, and success stories Open source in smart phones and mobile networked devices Cloud computing, openness in distributed services Parallelization, grid, and multicore technologies Open web, open standards, open data AI, machine learning, and other ways of making software smarter than the people using it Open source in democracy, politics, government, and education Best practices for building a business model around open source Virtualization and appliances—their creation and deployment This is just to get you started. We want to hear your ideas, your stories, your successes (and failures). Focus your proposal on hands-on instruction and real-world examples to provide conference participants with information they can put to use immediately and inspiration that will propel their work for months to come. If you're passionate about open source, the open technologies shaping our future, building communities, crafting beautiful code, designing for users, or just getting things done, we invite you to answer the call for innovation and submit a proposal now, see the submission guidelines Meeting July 20-24 in San Jose, OSCON is the crossroads of all things open source, a deeply technical conference that brings community ideals face-to-face with business practicality. Join 3,000 of the best, brightest, and most interesting people to explore what's new and to help define, maintain, and extend the identity of what it means to be open source. OSCON is the place to be inspired and challenged, renew bonds to community, make new connections, and discover the most relevant projects and products to help you do your best. Early registration opens in March. To receive advance notification and stay informed on the program as it develops, sign up for the conference newsletter If you have ideas for speakers and topics that will make the convention
Re: [IAEP] [Olpc-open] CORRECTION: 2ND Weekly Deployment Chat: Tues 3PM 11:59PM EST [TODAY]
FYI, I'm on gmail, and for some reason, the URL *shows* http://forum.laptop.org/chat but still *points* to http://support.laptop.org/chat Correct URL is http://forum.laptop.org/chat -- Sameer On Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 9:20 AM, Holt h...@laptop.org wrote: 1) See you in just less than 3hours, at 3PM EST (popular!) or 11:59PM EST (new!!!) The Corrected URL is: http://forum.laptop.org/chat Then type: /join #olpc-deployment 2) Peru deployment leader Hernan Pachas hopes to join us for the early show :) Holt wrote: Call is open to everyone with a Heart: teachers, volunteers, Flash learning content creators, Obamanic govt re-inventors, utopia-smoking Sugar hackers rich poor, greedy MBA's who actually deliver... We will discuss small deployments in América del Sur, centre-of-the-universe: (and why not a few others, depending on speakers!) * Bolivia/La Paz (Ploskonka Silva) * Paraguay (Drake) * Peru/Lima's http://www.ata.org.pe community repair center creative space (Mayorga) * Oceania (Waugh) * Nigeria (Bennett) * Nepal (Berry) * Austria (Derndorfer) * Birmingham (Woodworth) * Massachusetts' http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Cambridge_Friends_School_Pilot (Sigalos Foley) * Kiva Model (Daswani) * How to start your very own XO Laptop Lending Library, to seed initiative in your country (Holt) http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Contributors_program Help reshape above agenda to your liking, by editing: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Deployment_meetings See you 3PM EST (popular!) or 11:59PM EST (new!!!) TUESDAY: http://supportforum.laptop.org/chat Then type: /join #olpc-deployment Free Conf Call, if ya like People too :) +1 (866) 213-2185or+1 (609) 454-9914 Access Code: (ask on above live chat, call is free using SkypeOut) Senior Stone's Awesome Recap From Last Week: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Deployment_meetings/20090120 ___ Olpc-open mailing list olpc-o...@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/olpc-open ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] First competitor?
On Sat, Feb 28, 2009 at 12:04 PM, Albert Cahalan acaha...@gmail.com wrote: Christian Marc Schmidt writes: On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 8:58 AM, Caroline Meeks solutiongrove at gmail.comwrote: On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 8:56 AM, Christian Marc Schmidt christianmarc at gmail.com wrote: I think we'd need to know the specific points of contention. I can't imagine which design decisions might work less well on PCs. Sugar remains significantly easier to use than standard PC operating systems... Put Sugar in front of the average adult sitting alone, without any instruction, for 20 minutes. I doubt many of them would agree with you. Caroline, I agree this is a challenge. Of course I would argue that this is due to our familiarity with current desktop-based operating systems and the difficulty of breaking old habits. Sugar was designed from the ground up, and hence does require a bit of a learning curve for those of us who use other systems (but for new users should prove much easier to learn). So our marketing needs to continuously address that Sugar is not designed for adults, but for children! Never mind the adults. Think of the children! should prove much easier is a hope, not a fact. Children struggle HORRIBLY with Sugar, especially if they don't have a real mouse to use. They do like playing with it, sure, at least until the frustration sets in. I have never seen a child successfully use the journal. That's not surprising; it is a black hole for data as far as I can tell. I've seen several children in Khairat (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Khairat_school) use the Journal quite deftly. They pulled up videos from two months ago and showed it to me when I was there last year. This was build 656. I also saw them use the zoom keys quite naturally. What surprised me the most was that they had *no* prior exposure to computers whatsoever. The teacher (Mr. Surve) would yell out in Marathi Go to the neighborhood, join the mesh. The children not knowing what neighborhood or meshmeans, would press the zoom key and join the shared activity. I personally found their level of ease somewhat incredible, considering that they had the XOs for 10 months at that point. BTW, to see the typical din of this classroom, here's a clip http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gL3OXaM9s0c I have never seen a child successfully use the hover palettes. They also totally kill user efficiency and are incompatible with the long-awaited touchscreen. Again, I didn't see Khairat children struggle with palettes. They actually used it while I watched over their shoulders and drew scenes quite nicely. Here's one http://www.zooomr.com/photos/sameerverma/6300776/ I have never seen a child successfully use the frame. It's always there when you don't want it, and usually not there when you do. Regular computers have an interaction device that is essentially always there but leaving at least two sides of the screen free of trouble. (original MacOS menu, OS/2 Presentation Manager thing, Windows taskbar, fvwm GoodStuff, etc.) I guess the thing to learn is that getting rid of time-tested GUI design is unlikely to produce good results. Not so sure, because what you are saying is that time tested GUI designs are a finite set, and all the good designs are taken. Sameer Uh, now what? Keep plugging away :-) Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Information Systems San Francisco State University San Francisco CA 94132 USA http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://opensource.sfsu.edu/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Adults and Sugar
On Sat, Feb 28, 2009 at 12:17 PM, Albert Cahalan acaha...@gmail.com wrote: Caryl Bigenho writes: One man sat in front of the XO for several minutes with a puzzled look on his face. Finally he asked, Where is your file manager? I explained that he needed to forget everything he knew about computers and just pretend he was a child again. He got up in disgust and left. He asked a simple question and you blew him off. Adults use communication to avoid wasting time. Had you tried to explain, you might have gotten better feedback. Of course, then you need to avoid being dismissive of the feedback. Meanwhile, nearby, a little boy, about 8-years-old was happily exploring Sugar. I'm sure he was, but exploring is not the same thing as being productive. Why does it have to be about being productive, and not about exploring? I deal with plenty of college students who all try to be productive, but never really learned to explore. Guess what? We have become a sausage factory of sorts! Crank the handle and out comes ground meat, ready to be packaged and sold. Critical thinkers? No. Analytical? No. Monkey see, monkey do? All the time! Seeing children in Khairat use the journal with ease removed any doubts in my mind as to why Sugar doesn't have a file manager. These kids don't even know what a file looks like! Why bother with a metaphor that is as clear as mud for them? Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Information Systems San Francisco State University San Francisco CA 94132 USA http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://opensource.sfsu.edu/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Great Photo
On Sun, Mar 1, 2009 at 7:49 AM, Caroline Meeks carol...@solutiongrove.com wrote: http://www.zooomr.com/photos/sameerverma/6300789/ This one is great! We don't seem to have many photos showing what kids are actually doing with Sugar. Can we use this one in marketing? Sure. I just changed the license on it. I need to figure out how to bulk-change licenses in Zooomr... Sameer Anyone else have pictures that show kids + what is on their screen and shows off Sugar or an activity well? Thanks, Caroline -- 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
Re: [IAEP] Topics deliverables from Marketing IRC meeting 03-03-2009: Sugar 8.4 launch date set!
On Fri, Mar 6, 2009 at 6:59 AM, Luke Faraone l...@faraone.cc wrote: On Fri, Mar 6, 2009 at 8:54 AM, Bert Freudenberg b...@freudenbergs.de wrote: Nice idea, but it's not google-compatible. Rather unlikely that sugar chocolate will lead one to discover 0.82 ... It's too bad Sugar is such a generic word :( How about Sugar Labs Chocolate? :) Isn't Sugar on a Stick a lollipop? Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Information Systems San Francisco State University San Francisco CA 94132 USA http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://opensource.sfsu.edu/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [support-gang] you volunteers are nuts :)
On Sun, Feb 22, 2009 at 5:44 PM, Adam Holt h...@laptop.org wrote: I didn't even call a meeting, and 10+ ppl still showed up 4PM Sunday-- your Loyalty to the cause is insane^h^h^h^h^h^hWONDERFUL :)) Topics discussed -- also posted to http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Support_meetings : * Sameer's researching how we might start a VoIP-on-XO project--I strongly favor this prjct--keep recruiting! http://iaxclient.sourceforge.net/iaxcomm/ http://www.astlinux.org/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-Asterisk_eXchange http://iaxclient.wiki.sourceforge.net/ http://www.slideshare.net/sverma/voice-over-internet-protocol-voip-using-asterisk http://www.voip-info.org/wiki-IAX+versus+SIP Just added a (somewhat incomplete) page on the wiki about IAX. http://wiki.laptop.org/go/IAX Haven't tried an IAX client on Sugar/XO as yet. Please jump in! I do have a Asterisk server set up, so let me know if I can help. cheers, Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Information Systems San Francisco State University San Francisco CA 94132 USA http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://opensource.sfsu.edu/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] OLPC on public radio
On Sun, Mar 22, 2009 at 7:05 PM, Jameson Quinn jameson.qu...@gmail.com wrote: you can find a stream at www.publicradiofan.com http://www.wpr.org/book/visionaries/index.html Sameer On Sun, Mar 22, 2009 at 8:01 PM, Edward Cherlin echer...@gmail.com wrote: To the Best of Our Knowledge, with Jim Fleming, has a segment on OLPC in the show starting in five minutes. Also Larry Lessig will be on. -- Silent Thunder (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) is my name And Children are my nation. The Cosmos is my dwelling place, The Truth my destination. http://earthtreasury.net/ (Edward Mokurai Cherlin) ___ 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 ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] format for lessons/content
Hi, Forgive me if this has been discussed and resolved before - it perhaps skipped my radar. I ran into Jason Cole (http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529185/) today at OSBC (http://www.infoworld.com/event/osbc/) and mentioned the problem of creating content/lessons for Moodle. IIRC, Bryan Berry had raised this issue - what should teachers author lessons in? HTML, Flash, PDF, etc. Jason's suggestion for teachers building content on their own was to use Moodle-on-a-usb stick (http://docs.moodle.org/en/Student_projects/SQLite#Moodle.2FSQLite_on_a_stick). Plug the stick into a computer, fire up Moodle on a stick, create a course, backup the course to a zip file and restore it on Moodle on the school server. Has anyone tried this? I haven't yet using Moodle on a stick (although I have backed up and restored Moodle courses several times...in fact every semester) but will do so once I wrap up with OSBC. Thought I'd pass this along for comments. cheers, Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Information Systems San Francisco State University San Francisco CA 94132 USA http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://opensource.sfsu.edu/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Sugar on LTSP
Hello, I had a conversation with our tech folks on campus yesterday, and Sugar via LTSP (http://www.ltsp.org/) came up. The original discussion was about LTSP and thin and fat clients, but this group is in the College of Education, so the conversation drifted towards Sugar. We've talked about this before, but I'll poke the embers again. Is Sugar usable via LTSP? Espcially the collaborative part via ejabberd? We plan on having a Jaunty-based showcase running in three weeks or so. If Sugar is usable in that environment, we'll definitely push for it in this lab. The lab is used by faculty and students from early childhood ed. and other departments inb CoE. They'd love to bring in teachers and children from local schools to showcase it. I'm cc'ing David Van Assche in case he's not on this list (highly doubtful, though). I am currently using his fatclient script (http://www.nubae.com/ltsp-linux-terminal-server-project-netbooted-fat-client-for-ubuntu-hardy-and-intrepid) on Intrepid+GNOME. cheers, Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Information Systems San Francisco State University San Francisco CA 94132 USA http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://opensource.sfsu.edu/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Grassroots-l] OLPC in Kindergarten
On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 2:36 PM, Christoph Derndorfer e0425...@student.tuwien.ac.at wrote: Hola Alejandro, I'm currently not aware of any other OLPC or Sugar projects working with children at that age. Most pilots and deployments currently seem to be focused on primary-school children (age 6 to 10). We have a local Montessori that has two XOs and is considering using them with the 4 to 5 year olds. They haven't started yet, but it would be interesting to see what their experience is like once they begin in the summer. Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Information Systems San Francisco State University San Francisco CA 94132 USA http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://opensource.sfsu.edu/ What kind of educational activities did you have in mind? One really great activity is the TypingTurtle (http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4026), the Memory activity also seems to be really popular with the the first-graders in our small Austrian OLPC / Sugar pilot. By the way, I'm also copying the It's an education project mailing-list (http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep), people there might have some good pointers for you. Hope that helps, Christoph Alejandro Fernandez schrieb: Hi, I'd like to get in contact with those using XOs with kids under 5. I am helping a group of kindergarten teachers use a pair of OLPC I got for them. Last year we made a small experience teaching kids to use the XO to take pictures and video. Then, they took the XO home, taught their family how to use it, recorded greetings, and browsed the greetings and pictures left by other families. They enjoyed it. This year we are planning to use them as educational tool (that is, adding value not just technology). Pointers to books, blogs, pedagogical patterns, activities, and notes are welcomed. Regards, Alejandro -- Christoph Derndorfer co-editor, olpcnews url: www.olpcnews.com e-mail: christ...@olpcnews.com ___ Grassroots mailing list grassro...@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/grassroots ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Sugar on Nokia N810
One of my all time favorite devices gets one of my all time favorite environments! Read on. http://guysoft.wordpress.com/2009/05/01/nokia-n810-running-olpc-sugar/ cheers, Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Information Systems San Francisco State University San Francisco CA 94132 USA http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://opensource.sfsu.edu/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Marketing] Project process visualization
On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 4:55 PM, David Farning dfarn...@sugarlabs.org wrote: Hey Gaurav, The diagram is great! This is what I had originally envisioned for our getting started page on the [www|wiki].sugarlabs.org. The best part about the diagram is how it communicates how all of the different pieces fit together to make the ecosystem work. Yet, individuals can drill down to specific , manageable, areas which they can learn more about. It would be great if you could work with Fred, Christian, Eben, Gary and the rest of the wiki/web guy to create this into an interactive 'map' for the project. FWIW, this rest of us will likely kibitz loudly about your choices for naming and categorization:) David On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 10:42 AM, Frederick Grose fgr...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Gaurav, I like your visualization of the social communication process for the OLPC project. The icons are simple and fun to associate with a concept, the cycles nicely emphasize the iteration needed in all domains, and the overlap with intersections demonstrate the coordination that is needed. I can imagine versions where nodes would be expanded in subsets to show more detail of a process. For example, we could use such a map to explain and guide newcomers to the software development cycle and community tools. Could you share the icons and tools you used to allow others to work on prototypes and drafts for their processes? We could start using more of these and similar icons for tagging concepts in our wikis and Sweet software, and we could use the maps as a navigational aids. Thank you for your contributions! --Fred On Mon, May 4, 2009 at 2:10 PM, Gaurav Bhushan gaura...@nid.edu wrote: Hi everyone, While I was a student of information design at National Institute of Design, India, I worked on brainstorming and visualizing an ecosystem to support the OLPC project in India. I am attaching a poster representing the same. The idea was to trigger advocacy among key players in Education, Technology and Outreach. It is still very crude, and I can take out more time to work on it if you guys have some feedback and inputs. I feel a lot more can be done in terms of making it interactive. Regards, Gaurav Bhushan User Experience Design Google, India -- Gaurav Bhushan Information Design National Institute of Design, India ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ Marketing mailing list market...@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/marketing ___ Marketing mailing list market...@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/marketing Hi Gaurav, Its good to finally see your model on the lists here. I'm also quite pleased that you are done with school and are at Google (Hyd I presume?). Congratulations! I saw Gaurav's model last year when I was visiting Reliance/DBF in India - this is the group that did Khairat (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Khairat_school). Obviously, Gaurav has put a lot of effort into it. My suggestions were to (1) release it under a CC style license and (2) maybe explore an interface (AJAX or otherwise) that would allow Zoom in and Zoom out of different cycles and levels for big picture and drill down details with explanations and links at each level. cheers, Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Information Systems San Francisco State University San Francisco CA 94132 USA http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://opensource.sfsu.edu/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Some Comments on Digital Textbooks In California
On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 12:45 PM, James Simmonsjim.simm...@walgreens.com wrote: Caryl, I can certainly understand expecting the worst here. I do think the idea has potential, even if it takes awhile to achieve it. My niece went to the Illinois Math and Science Academy, a public boarding school for gifted kids. One of the things that impressed me about this school was that they don't use textbooks at all. The teachers create all the class materials. Her father's complaint about the school was that, The teachers don't teach! I don't think anyone missed having textbooks, though. Creating textbooks has a lot of politics involved in it. School boards cannot be offended by anything in History or Biology textbooks, and the dumbest, most easily offended school boards in the country end up choosing what textbooks get used by most of the country. A couple of years ago I took a vacation in Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, etc. I learned a lot of things about U.S. History that I wish I had learned as a kid. For instance, the first ships in the U.S. Navy were captured from the British by pirates. In colonial Williamsburg, church attendance was required by law, and you could be punished for arriving late. If you wanted to attend a church other than the official one you could only do that with permission from the government, and you still had to tithe to the official church. What is the likelihood of any of that information making it into a high school textbook? I read a story that a Biology teacher got in trouble for pointing out that men and women have the same number of ribs! Mike Huckabee claimed during the last election that most of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were clergymen, and *nobody* corrected him. Having digital textbooks might be a way to get around that, because different states could publish their own books at a low cost. States could use each other's books, etc. I'm not saying it would be easy but it would be possible. The school boards in Texas and elsewhere would not be able to hijack the whole process. Eventually this should lead to better textbooks. If the books were in the public domain (and they should be) then cheap printed copies of the textbooks should also be available. James Simmons Hi James, As I read your post, it reminds me of my own education in India, where I grew up and went from kindergarten all the way to college. Our history books were very selective as well. For instance, there is no mention of any of the details of WWII and its role in Indian independence. Entire sections of historic movements are missing. I've learned so much more about history from independent sources than from my history classes, that I sometimes feel cheated :-) So, an entire nation grows up to believe that Indian independence was obtained due to Gandhi's non-cooperation. While I do not for a minute underestimate Gandhi's role and contribution in the independence process, it took much more than Gandhi and his refusal to cooperate. Unfortunately, most Indian children don't know that, and will grow up not to care...unless, they have access to a wealth of independent sources, and some (not all) will be curious enough to read it. Some people argue that books can only cover so much. Well, paper books are limited. Electronic books are not. Syllabi are designed to address specific teaching goals in limited time. I use syllabi every semester, and I'm not against that approach. However, if books were delivered electronically, and children had free access to content, then learning would take on a different shape...at least for some. This talk about writing books to replace existing ones is interesting. It is very much in line with what happened in the FOSS world. Someone decided to write free replacements for expensive proprietary software, thereby reducing the cost barrier (although poorly written FOSS titles steepen the learning curve). I deal with publishers every semester, so I know that game all too well. We can create modules or chapters based on topics and be able to mix and match chapters and create what we need. Easier said then done, but it needs to be said first. Just like following APIs and standards for making code talk across systems, we will need standards for making chapters collate into a book, but those are tactical issues. We need to address strategic matters first. cheers, Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Information Systems San Francisco State University San Francisco CA 94132 USA http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://opensource.sfsu.edu/ Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2009 09:53:04 -0700 From: Caryl Bigenho cbige...@hotmail.com Subject: [IAEP] Some Comments on Digital Textbooks In California To: Community Support Volunteers -- who help respond t support-g...@lists.laptop.org, IAEP SugarLabs iaep@lists.sugarlabs.org Message-ID: blu108-w2187e0143da92f82975a95cc...@phx.gbl Content-Type: text/plain
Re: [IAEP] Fwd: An interesting project I stumbled across
On Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 4:18 PM, Frederick Grosefgr...@gmail.com wrote: Forwarding to the community... -- Forwarded message -- From: William Schaub Date: Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 6:31 PM Subject: An interesting project I stumbled across To: Frederick Grose fgr...@gmail.com This looks like something that is right up the alley of the OLPC groups and sugar labs etc. http://www.wizzydigital.org/index.html using UUCP and memory sticks and couriers they are able to connect schools to the internet in areas where there is ZERO connectivity. ... However this whizzy digital courrier could be VERY successfully used on a classroom server or a specially outfitted XO laptop with some extra storage via an added USB storage device. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep +1 Some similar approaches: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sneakernet and http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Motoman Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Information Systems San Francisco State University San Francisco CA 94132 USA http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://opensource.sfsu.edu/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Open Office on XO?
On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 9:37 PM, Caryl Bigenhocbige...@hotmail.com wrote: Hi... Has anyone out there in Sugarland been able to run Open Office on an XO? I have someone doing a project that sounds like he may need a spreadsheet program and a presentation program for. Caryl ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep There's SocialCalc (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/SocialCalc). You can also try Gnumeric, although its not Sugarized (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Spreadsheet). Some folks have tried OpenOffice for kids on the XO. http://olpc-france.org/blog/2009/04/ooo4kids-openoffice-for-kids-on-the-xo/ cheers, Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Information Systems San Francisco State University San Francisco CA 94132 USA http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://opensource.sfsu.edu/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] View Slides an alternative to PowerPoint?
On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 2:43 AM, David Van Asschedvanass...@gmail.com wrote: A real simple alternative to powerpoint/impress that looks and smells like it, but with maybe really limited functionality would be loved by teachers everywhere, At least, all the teachers I have met rely very heavily on powerpoint in one form or another, be it integrated into other software like moodle or an LMS, or used with an interactive whiteboard/touchpad soft, or just used by itself. But normally it is used in a very limited fashion, and without much of the fancy transitions/coloring/themeing/graphing and all that stuff... IF they want something like that, it would make sense to steer them to turtleart... but there needs to be something much much simpler... David +1 There is also the issue of existing materials that are already authored in Powerpoint and need to be imported into a format that's processable by an activity on the XO. Re-doing all such material in yet another format is painful. Maybe something that can take a ppt file and push png of each slide to the Journal for view slides or TA to pick up. Powerpoint itself will export each slide to a jpg or png, but I haven't had much luck with OOo for batch export (it does the export one slide at a time). The other option is to run PDFs full screen like evince. All these approaches take care of display, but still do not address authoring in Sugar. cheers, Sameer On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 11:33 PM, Walter Benderwalter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: And we also have Turtle Art as a presentation option (it can keep to a prearranged order :) -walter On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 4:04 PM, James Simmonsjim.simm...@walgreens.com wrote: I deleted the digest that contained someone asking about putting Open Office on an XO to get alternatives to Excel and PowerPoint, but I'd like to suggest that with the features I added to View Slides over the weekend you *could* use View Slides to create and view presentations. What you could do is create individual slides using the Record Activity or one of the Paint Activities. These would create separate image files in the Journal. Then you'd fire up View Slides to add these images to a slide show, arranging them in sequence by renaming the images in the show, and deleting images that aren't needed. Then View Slides could be used to view the presentation. You can even hide the mouse cursor and view the images full screen. It isn't Power Point, but on the other hand, it isn't Power Point. The pictures at http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4039 tell the story. Unfortunately they tell the story out of sequence. There doesn't seem to be any way to arrange the pictures in order. James Simmons ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- Walter Bender Sugar Labs http://www.sugarlabs.org ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Google Docs and Power Point
On 7/3/09, Jim Simmons nices...@gmail.com wrote: Sameer, The issue of what to do with existing Power Point slides can probably be handled by using Google Docs, which can import existing Power Point presentations from your hard drive. Once imported you could download them as PDF's for the Read Activity. I haven't tried importing a presentation from Power Point yet (people keep sending them to me but I don't keep them) but from what I've seen of Google Docs so far I'd be surprised if it wasn't a workable solution. Google Docs can also import presentations from Open Office. Googledocs is fine, but I am looking at environments where we don't have net access. Additionally, Read can display PDFs but I was looking for fullscreen presentation mode of evince. Sameer For teachers authoring presentations Google Docs should be fine. Students can and should use Turtle Art, Etoys, View Slides, etc. as they see fit. James Simmons On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 10:07 AM, iaep-requ...@lists.sugarlabs.org wrote: Send IAEP mailing list submissions to There is also the issue of existing materials that are already authored in Powerpoint and need to be imported into a format that's processable by an activity on the XO. Re-doing all such material in yet another format is painful. Maybe something that can take a ppt file and push png of each slide to the Journal for view slides or TA to pick up. Powerpoint itself will export each slide to a jpg or png, but I haven't had much luck with OOo for batch export (it does the export one slide at a time). The other option is to run PDFs full screen like evince. All these approaches take care of display, but still do not address authoring in Sugar. cheers, Sameer ___ 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] Google Docs and Power Point
On Sun, Jul 5, 2009 at 10:51 AM, Jim Simmonsnices...@gmail.com wrote: Sameer, The Read Activity can display PDFs fullscreen. You need to open the PDF the usual way and then press Alt-Enter. Currently Read displays documents as continuous pages, but I believe that evince can display one page at a time and perhaps the Read Activity could be made to do that at some point too. It would make looking at PowerPoint presentations in full screen more like using the Power Point viewer and might use less memory too. +1 The one page at a time display would be greatjust what I'm looking for. PS: cc'ing the list again. Sameer James Simmons On Sun, Jul 5, 2009 at 10:15 AM, Sameer Vermasve...@sfsu.edu wrote: On 7/3/09, Jim Simmons nices...@gmail.com wrote: Sameer, The issue of what to do with existing Power Point slides can probably be handled by using Google Docs, which can import existing Power Point presentations from your hard drive. Once imported you could download them as PDF's for the Read Activity. I haven't tried importing a presentation from Power Point yet (people keep sending them to me but I don't keep them) but from what I've seen of Google Docs so far I'd be surprised if it wasn't a workable solution. Google Docs can also import presentations from Open Office. Googledocs is fine, but I am looking at environments where we don't have net access. Additionally, Read can display PDFs but I was looking for fullscreen presentation mode of evince. Sameer For teachers authoring presentations Google Docs should be fine. Students can and should use Turtle Art, Etoys, View Slides, etc. as they see fit. James Simmons On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 10:07 AM, iaep-requ...@lists.sugarlabs.org wrote: Send IAEP mailing list submissions to There is also the issue of existing materials that are already authored in Powerpoint and need to be imported into a format that's processable by an activity on the XO. Re-doing all such material in yet another format is painful. Maybe something that can take a ppt file and push png of each slide to the Journal for view slides or TA to pick up. Powerpoint itself will export each slide to a jpg or png, but I haven't had much luck with OOo for batch export (it does the export one slide at a time). The other option is to run PDFs full screen like evince. All these approaches take care of display, but still do not address authoring in Sugar. cheers, Sameer ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) i...@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iae ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Localization] Fwd: sugar on a stick localized in farsi or pashto or both
On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 9:07 AM, jimj...@well.com wrote: wait wait: i hope i wrote that mtsa is a set of people who together have fluency in english, dari, and pashto as well as some computer familiarity. that any one person combines some useful subset and also has time to chip in work is an unknown. we can cast about to see. jim Hi Jim, Greetings from Jamaica! A point of clarification. Is MTSA interested in a) Farsi and Pashto b) Dari and Pashto c) Farsi, Dari and Pashto? cheers, Sameer ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Marketing] Next run of Sugar Labs Sticks
On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 4:54 PM, Caroline Meeks carol...@solutiongrove.comwrote: I'm going to place an order for more Sugar Labs branded USB sticks. The cost will be in the $7.50 to $9 per 2GB stick, depending on how many I order. Would anyone like to go in on the order so I can bring up the volume? I want them without caps this time so I'm going to go for this style (Saratoga) in red. Thanks, Caroline -- Caroline Meeks Solution Grove carol...@solutiongrove.com 617-500-3488 - Office 505-213-3268 - Fax ___ Marketing mailing list market...@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/marketing Hi Caroline, Looks like OLPC-SF will get at least a dozen sticks. I'll send you more precise numbers once I hear from others. Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Information Systems San Francisco State University San Francisco CA 94132 USA http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://opensource.sfsu.edu/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] sounds in Speak
Hello everybody, This afternoon, I had an interesting conversation with a Montessori teacher, about Speak. She asked me why Speak says a when a is pressed and not the *sound* of the letter a. Montessori teachers teach the shape and sound of letters first, and then the name of the alphabet. I did not have an answer for her, but I wondered if it would be possible to have an option in Speak to do so. I'd imagine that the sound of the letter would vary depending on language, right? cheers, Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Information Systems San Francisco State University San Francisco CA 94132 USA http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://opensource.sfsu.edu/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Deployment feedback braindump
On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 5:27 PM, Benjamin M. Schwartz bmsch...@fas.harvard.edu wrote: Daniel Drake wrote: What you are saying makes sense -- it is indeed a nice idea to keep SugarLabs as more of a loose structure, as a place for collaboration on anything that might further the general mission. It is a sensible idea to keep SugarLabs away from doing too much work on the OS building and deployment implementing side of things, because as you point out, even when you exclude those broad topics there is still a lack of resources on the bits that remain. That said, in a way, the gap that we're discussing is in some ways more important than any of the Sugar features currently being worked on, because the large majority of sugar users are currently a long way away from even having access to the features that were finished 6 months ago. Difficult. I disagree about local labs being key to filling the gap. While a nice idea, I think it is necessary for there to be a central and location-independent deployment-focused upstream, otherwise there will be a lack of coordination accompanied by lots of duplication of work. I agree... and I think the only way this will happen is for someone to start a company. You would be an ideal person to do such a thing. Consider the Gnome Foundation. The organization is composed principally of software engineers, working on a technical problems. They do not attempt to manage deployments or provide end-user support. They do not produce operating systems, apart from a few Live CDs for testing and validation purposes. They employed no one for many years, and now employ only one person, purely for administrative duties. Gnome is widely deployed, and supported, but this is done by organizations like Debian, Canonical, Slackware, and Red Hat. These deployers have both the incentive and the ability to respond quickly to user demands, by customizing their Gnome installation. They also communicate with Gnome upstream, getting their modifications into mainline and pushing for development that addresses their users' needs. In fact, most of the Gnome developers are actually employed by deployers, like Novell, and the Gnome Foundation is merely the place where all the deployers' engineers come to work together. Sugar Labs is explicitly modeled on the Gnome Foundation. I agree that there is a gap between Sugar Labs and deployment, but this is best addressed by a similar two-layer model. OLPC is part of that second layer, and so is Solution Grove, but we certainly need more. As for local labs... the term seems to have been used for many things. Some non-profit deployment organizations might request recognition as a local lab if they think it helps their marketing, and Sugar labs would likely be happy to confer the title upon them. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep This comparison of roles between Sugarlabs and GNOME Foundation is helpful. It allows me to think about how efforts have been successful (and have failed) when it comes to distros like Ubuntu and companies that support the process (Canonical in this case). The Ubuntu side of things doesn't get to see much of say, what conspires between Canonical and Dell. This is a much needed discussion. cheers, Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Information Systems San Francisco State University San Francisco CA 94132 USA http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://opensource.sfsu.edu/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] bundling Wikijunior
Has anyone bundled Wikijunior or a part of it? http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikijunior Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Information Systems San Francisco State University San Francisco CA 94132 USA http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://opensource.sfsu.edu/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Fwd: Designing for Children - Conference, Educational Meet, Exhibition at IDC IIT Bombay
FYI. -- Sameer -- Forwarded message -- From: sankarshan.mukhopadh...@gmail.com Date: Mon, Aug 17, 2009 at 12:18 AM Subject: Designing for Children - Conference, Educational Meet, Exhibition at IDC IIT Bombay To: olpc-in...@googlegroups.com http://www.designingforchildren.net/ 2nd - 6th of February 2010 at IDC, IIT Bombay http://www.designingforchildren.net/conference.html -- http://sankarshan.randomink.org/blog/ --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups OLPC India group. To post to this group, send email to olpc-in...@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to olpc-india+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/olpc-india?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~--- ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] FSF attitude to xo and sugar
On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 7:10 PM, Bill Kerrbillk...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 4:35 PM, Bastien bastiengue...@googlemail.com wrote: After a discussion with the FSF, they agreed the picture was not really appropriate and that the text should clearly distinguish OLPC from Sugar. They will make an update - stay tuned. the picture is gone but the words are still there: As a result, it is expected that the main effect of the OLPC project -- if it succeeds -- will be to turn millions of children into Microsoft dependents. That is a negative effect, to the point where the world would be better off if the OLPC project had never existed still over zealous, purist and FUD I think you are giving them too much credit :-) They simply didn't do their homework on this one. Sameer ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [support-gang] Fwd: w7sins FUD
On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 1:51 AM, Bert Freudenbergb...@freudenbergs.de wrote: Thanks to all who made the FSF change this. - Bert - +1 Sameer On 02.09.2009, at 08:14, Bill Kerr wrote: Yes the new paragraph is more reasonable: Microsoft is now targeting governments who are purchasing XOs, in an attempt to get them to replace the free software with Windows. It remains to be seen to what degree Microsoft will succeed. But with all of this pressure, Microsoft has harmed a project that has distributed more than 1 million laptops running free software, and has taken aim at the low-cost platform as a way to make poor children around the world dependent on its products. The OLPC threatens to become another example of the way Microsoft convinces governments around the world that an education involving computers must be synonymous with an education using Windows. In order to prevent this, it is vital that we work to raise global awareness of the harm Microsoft's involvement does to our children's education. On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 1:08 AM, Bobby Powers bobbypow...@gmail.com wrote: in any case, the text appears to be fixed now in a much more reasonable fashion. bobby On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 4:52 PM, Sebastian Silvasebast...@fuentelibre.org wrote: 2009/8/31 Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com I don't think anyone on this list was suggesting that Windows on OLPC was/is a good/appropriate solution for learning. But there is a free software alternative, Sugar, that is designed to be appropriated by the local community/culture. We were asking, why doesn't the FSF promote alternatives (Sugar or some other free learning platform) in parallel with their anti-cultural-imperialism message? -walter ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Schools kill creativity...
In my typical Friday afternoon TED Talk overindulgence, I came across this one. Its hilarious and informative. It also talks to some of the things we've argued about in this project. http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html cheers, Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Information Systems Director, Center for Business Solutions San Francisco State University http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://cbs.sfsu.edu/ http://is.sfsu.edu/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Montessori madness...
On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 1:55 AM, Martin Langhoff martin.langh...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 10:18 AM, Sameer Verma sve...@sfsu.edu wrote: I've been reading Montessori Madness for a few hours now, and I find Another good one is Montessori Today http://www.amazon.com/Montessori-Today-Comprehensive-Education-Adulthood/dp/080521061X The funny thing is that since I've been exposed to Bryan Berry's poignant theory of education, I can't help looking at Montessori and thinking that it is excellent, but not because Montessori's approach and materials are inherently better. It is excellent because - Montessori teachers are teachers who are clearly smart and passionate about education, and the school environment (principals, etc) share the smarts and the passion. - Parents sending kids to a Montessori school are smart and passionate about education. - The group of kids is small and manageable, so the smart and passionate teachers can work their magic. And that wins. They could teach with computers, or abacuses or post it notes or books written in Esperanto. It's all a catalyst that brings the 3 (purely human!) elements above together. Indirection. A social mind trick. Of course, I like most of Montessori's approach. But remove the human elements and... poof! it's effects will be gone. Montessori strategies in a crowded group with an unenthusiastic teacher have very slim chances. Indeed. My kid goes to a Montessori (which is why I was reading this book) but we've seen several M schools around here, where an indifferent teacher destroys the environment. It reverts to a Pink Floyd'ish assembly-line of faceless students processed into pink filler meat (Cue 4:21 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VUhoD3vM9Q). Interestingly, my current discussions with them are about the introduction of Sugar in that environment (after-school sessions, maybe) but they think the kids are too young. They would like for the kids to be 5 at least... Bryan, you need to postulate your theory more formally :-) Or, become a Maria incarnate...I'm sure a born-again Montessori will get you tremendous following ;-) cheers, Sameer ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Montessori madness...
On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 7:54 AM, Gerald Ardito gerald.ard...@gmail.com wrote: I wanted to add something to this conversation. I am a public middle school science teacher, and, as some of you know, the technology facilitator in my building working with our 5th grade students and teachers with a set of 150 XOs. I am sympathetic to the thread of this conversation about Montessori schools. Small classes and passionate teachers, somebody said. I think that this does a disservice to the passionate teachers in all kinds of settings (and I work with very passionate teachers). I spend much of my non-teaching time with teachers who are very interested in transforming education. They have real demands (state and federal assessments, for example) along with student needs, parent expectations and demands, etc. But this does not make them less patient. I believe that transformation takes place in situ. It does not wait for (or need) an ideal situation. My point is that I think that Sugar with and without the XOs has an enormous possibility of empowering children AND their teachers to do great things. Best, Gerald This I agree with. I think Sugar itself provides transport to children and teachers, while the XO acts as a Pinzgauer/Unimog in tough environs (I have an unhealthy desire for machines). It has to be supporting of the current method, while acting to facilitate the change. Most public school environments (including public higher ed) doesn't have the leeway to switch methods overnight. In my opinion, Montessori is an example of what can be done outside of the usual model of schools, but is subject to the constraints of size and manageability. A school (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Bhagmalpur) that I work with in India has 1100+ kids in 8 grades, managed by teachers who are a few shades away from shepherds, with little formal training. ...they naturally gravitate to bamboo canes (interestingly, so did my Catholic school teachers/nuns, but that's another post). I wouldn't dream of teaching them the Montessori method in its entirety, but just a few hours with two XOs revealed a spark in their eyes, which I take to be hope for something better than whipping non-conforming kids. Sameer ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Audubon MS Photos
On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 12:56 AM, Caryl Bigenho cbige...@hotmail.com wrote: Hi All, I have posted some photos from the Contributors Program project at the FAMLI (Foundation for Arts, Mentoring, Leadership and Innovation) after school program at Audubon Middle School in south central Los Angeles on my FaceBook account. If you have access, you might want to check them out! I am having problems with Flickr and general exporting for uploading to the wiki so it may be a few days before you will see them there. Caryl ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep Caryl, Facebook provides a link to photo albums accessible without a Facebook login. Look at the bottom of your album page and post it! Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Information Systems Director, Center for Business Solutions San Francisco State University http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://cbs.sfsu.edu/ http://is.sfsu.edu/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Photos From Audubon MS Project
On Fri, Oct 23, 2009 at 3:09 AM, Gerald Ardito gerald.ard...@gmail.com wrote: Caryl, Thanks for sharing these pictures. Can you share more details about this project, like: How many XOs are there? How many students? Which grades/age groups? How were the teachers/students trained? Maybe start a wiki page about this school and put details there. Sameer ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] voip.sugarlabs.org
On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 11:47 AM, Bernie Innocenti ber...@codewiz.org wrote: A few months ago, I've set up a VOIP box based on Trixbox (http://www.trixbox.org/) with the goal of providing conference rooms for the Sugar community, especially the less geeky teams. Since then, this VM has been sitting idle on bender (and later on treehouse), waiting for me to find some time to finish testing it and transition it into production. Would anyone want to take over and complete the work form here? I know Trixbox very well because I've used it in production for 3-4 years in Italy. It used to be a bit messy and kludgy, but very reliable and feature-complete. The ideal candidate for this job would would have strong background on Asterisk and PBX-side SIP in general, but enthusiasm for this technology can certainly compensate lack of experience. I can offer guidance on IRC and via VOIP (when it works). Anyone interested please send your resume to syst...@lists.sugarlabs.org complete with your IRC contact information. Pay: $0.00/h non-negotiable. Benefits: free VOIP and shell access on prestigious server, work with dynamic team in a professionally stimulating environment, help save the world, and all that. -- // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/ \X/ Sugar Labs - http://sugarlabs.org/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep Hi Bernie, What's the purpose of this VoIP box? Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Information Systems Director, Center for Business Solutions San Francisco State University http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://cbs.sfsu.edu/ http://is.sfsu.edu/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] 'apt-get install sugar-platform' available for Ubuntu9.10.
On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 2:50 PM, David Farning dfarn...@sugarlabs.org wrote: On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 6:29 AM, s.bouta...@free.fr wrote: Hi, After a couple of weeks of reading tutorials, help from Aleksey, and some Ubuntu developers there are Sugar packages available for Ubuntu 9.10. Thank you for your work. After some testing, I wrote a small blog-entry with some screenshots on OLPC France's blog, here: http://olpc-france.org/blog/2009/10/un-cartable-numerique-pur-sucre/ The Ubuntu variant used ist UNR 9.10. Thanks Samy, We have been struggling on the Ubuntu side of the project for awhile. A couple of people have already expressed interest in helping out! I am hoping that the Ubuntu-SugarTeam can holding some informal packaging Sugar for Ubuntu classes next week. As a project Ubuntu has a lot (too much) packaging information available. If we can sort out the important stuff, it shouldn't take too long to get some more packagers on board. david ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep Trying to install sugar-platform in Ubuntu 9.10 leads to a dependency problem. sudo apt-get install sugar-platform Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable distribution that some required packages have not yet been created or been moved out of Incoming. The following information may help to resolve the situation: The following packages have unmet dependencies: sugar-platform: Depends: sugar-fructose (= 0.86.2) but it is not going to be installed E: Broken packages Sameer ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] 'apt-get install sugar-platform' available for Ubuntu9.10.
On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 4:11 PM, Sameer Verma sve...@sfsu.edu wrote: On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 2:50 PM, David Farning dfarn...@sugarlabs.org wrote: On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 6:29 AM, s.bouta...@free.fr wrote: Hi, After a couple of weeks of reading tutorials, help from Aleksey, and some Ubuntu developers there are Sugar packages available for Ubuntu 9.10. Thank you for your work. After some testing, I wrote a small blog-entry with some screenshots on OLPC France's blog, here: http://olpc-france.org/blog/2009/10/un-cartable-numerique-pur-sucre/ The Ubuntu variant used ist UNR 9.10. Thanks Samy, We have been struggling on the Ubuntu side of the project for awhile. A couple of people have already expressed interest in helping out! I am hoping that the Ubuntu-SugarTeam can holding some informal packaging Sugar for Ubuntu classes next week. As a project Ubuntu has a lot (too much) packaging information available. If we can sort out the important stuff, it shouldn't take too long to get some more packagers on board. david ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep Trying to install sugar-platform in Ubuntu 9.10 leads to a dependency problem. sudo apt-get install sugar-platform Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable distribution that some required packages have not yet been created or been moved out of Incoming. The following information may help to resolve the situation: The following packages have unmet dependencies: sugar-platform: Depends: sugar-fructose (= 0.86.2) but it is not going to be installed E: Broken packages Sameer Running a simulated install of sugar leads to this: sudo apt-get -s install sugar Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following extra packages will be installed: libblas3gf libgfortran3 libhippocanvas-1-0 liblapack3gf python-decorator python-hippocanvas python-numpy python-wnck python-xklavier sugar-artwork sugar-base sugar-datastore sugar-presence-service sugar-toolkit xserver-xephyr Suggested packages: python-numpy-doc python-numpy-dbg python-nose The following NEW packages will be installed: libblas3gf libgfortran3 libhippocanvas-1-0 liblapack3gf python-decorator python-hippocanvas python-numpy python-wnck python-xklavier sugar sugar-artwork sugar-base sugar-datastore sugar-presence-service sugar-toolkit xserver-xephyr 0 upgraded, 16 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Inst libgfortran3 (4.4.1-4ubuntu8 Ubuntu:9.10/karmic) Inst libblas3gf (1.2-2 Ubuntu:9.10/karmic) Inst liblapack3gf (3.2.1-1 Ubuntu:9.10/karmic) Inst python-decorator (3.0.0-1 Ubuntu:9.10/karmic) Inst python-numpy (1:1.3.0-3 Ubuntu:9.10/karmic) Inst python-wnck (2.28.0-0ubuntu1 Ubuntu:9.10/karmic) Inst python-xklavier (1:0.2-1~ppa2 Ubuntu:9.10/karmic) Inst sugar-base (1:0.86.0-1~ppa3 Ubuntu:9.10/karmic) Inst sugar-artwork (1:0.86.0-1~ppa4 Ubuntu:9.10/karmic) Inst sugar-datastore (1:0.86.1-1~ppa3 Ubuntu:9.10/karmic) Inst libhippocanvas-1-0 (1:0.3.0-1~ppa2 Ubuntu:9.10/karmic) Inst python-hippocanvas (1:0.3.0-1~ppa2 Ubuntu:9.10/karmic) Inst sugar-presence-service (1:0.86.0-1~ppa3 Ubuntu:9.10/karmic) Inst sugar-toolkit (1:0.86.1-1~ppa3 Ubuntu:9.10/karmic) Inst xserver-xephyr (2:1.6.4-2ubuntu4 Ubuntu:9.10/karmic) Inst sugar (1:0.86.2-1~ppa3 Ubuntu:9.10/karmic) Conf libgfortran3 (4.4.1-4ubuntu8 Ubuntu:9.10/karmic) Conf libblas3gf (1.2-2 Ubuntu:9.10/karmic) Conf liblapack3gf (3.2.1-1 Ubuntu:9.10/karmic) Conf python-decorator (3.0.0-1 Ubuntu:9.10/karmic) Conf python-numpy (1:1.3.0-3 Ubuntu:9.10/karmic) Conf python-wnck (2.28.0-0ubuntu1 Ubuntu:9.10/karmic) Conf python-xklavier (1:0.2-1~ppa2 Ubuntu:9.10/karmic) Conf sugar-base (1:0.86.0-1~ppa3 Ubuntu:9.10/karmic) Conf sugar-artwork (1:0.86.0-1~ppa4 Ubuntu:9.10/karmic) Conf sugar-datastore (1:0.86.1-1~ppa3 Ubuntu:9.10/karmic) Conf libhippocanvas-1-0 (1:0.3.0-1~ppa2 Ubuntu:9.10/karmic) Conf python-hippocanvas (1:0.3.0-1~ppa2 Ubuntu:9.10/karmic) Conf sugar-presence-service (1:0.86.0-1~ppa3 Ubuntu:9.10/karmic) Conf sugar-toolkit (1:0.86.1-1~ppa3 Ubuntu:9.10/karmic) Conf xserver-xephyr (2:1.6.4-2ubuntu4 Ubuntu:9.10/karmic) Conf sugar (1:0.86.2-1~ppa3 Ubuntu:9.10/karmic) Sameer ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] (Please read) Re: Proposed Trac - Launchpad migration
On Sun, Nov 1, 2009 at 2:06 PM, Chris Ball c...@laptop.org wrote: Dear Sugar folks, This mail didn't get any replies, but it's important to know whether people agree with it before going ahead. So, please understand that: * bugs.sugarlabs.org is moving from Trac to Launchpad. * Existing bug data will be imported, but the bug numbers won't be the same. * It will be hosted by Canonical externally, rather than by SL as Trac currently is. If any of these are not to your liking, the time to speak up is now, before it all happens. :) Thanks for reading, - Chris. -- Chris Ball c...@laptop.org One Laptop Per Child ___ Sugar-devel mailing list sugar-de...@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel What's the reason for this migration? -- Sameer ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] 'apt-get install sugar-platform' available for Ubuntu9.10.
On Sun, Nov 1, 2009 at 4:14 PM, Gerald Ardito gerald.ard...@gmail.com wrote: I also had a strange problem, which I replicated (sadly :)). When I launched Sugar for the first time (and I had the same Browse problem) and then closed it, I could use the track pad and keyboards, but the mouse clickers wouldn't work. Removing Sugar did not fix the problem. Both times, I had to reinstall Ubuntu. I am working on a Dell Latitude 2100. Everything else I have tried with Ubuntu has worked fine. For what it's worth. Gerald Browse doesn't load for me as well. When I use TurtleArt, it works fine, but upon exiting, it throws me out to GDM. Looks like we still have some X issues. Where do we report bugs? -- Sameer On Sun, Nov 1, 2009 at 7:05 PM, Dave Bauer dave.ba...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Nov 1, 2009 at 8:02 PM, Ryan Kabir rka...@gmail.com wrote: For what it's worth - the install worked fine for me. Browse doesn't want to load, but I figure that's probably an issue on my part. I can confirm browse does not work for me either. I tried on 9.10 beta and a 9.10 final new install. I have not had a chance to collect the logs but I'll be doing that. Dave Awesome! Great work! Ryan. On Sat, Oct 31, 2009 at 2:35 PM, Edward Cherlin echer...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, Oct 31, 2009 at 14:34, Grant Bowman grant...@gmail.com wrote: You may have some other sources in your /etc/apt/source.list file that are conflicting. I've got David's packages installed and running without those errors. I saw errors like that were from the older packages. I removed the old ppa repositories beforehand. I don't think David's packages uninstall or conflict with the older packages yet to make the upgrade as seamless as it soon will be. You can try remove all the older sugar packages. To find the older packages try `dpkg -l | egrep sugar` and then apt-get remove the old ones before installing the new ones. I did that before installing. I still have the conflict. dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of sugar-platform: sugar-platform depends on olpcsound; however: Package olpcsound is not installed. dpkg: error processing sugar-platform (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured I tried the alternate command python /usr/bin/sugar-session which produces an almost usable Sugar session, with lots of missing icons. [1] 4997 moku...@mokurai-laptop:~$ ** (sugar-session:4997): WARNING **: Trying to register gtype 'WnckWindowState' as flags when in fact it is of type 'GEnum' ** (sugar-session:4997): WARNING **: Trying to register gtype 'WnckWindowActions' as flags when in fact it is of type 'GEnum' ** (sugar-session:4997): WARNING **: Trying to register gtype 'WnckWindowMoveResizeMask' as flags when in fact it is of type 'GEnum' Grant Bowman https://wiki.ubuntu.com/CaliforniaTeam On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 3:00 PM, Edward Cherlin echer...@gmail.com wrote: There seems to be something missing in the repository, or perhaps something else is wrong. python-sugar-toolkit-0.86: Depends: python-sugar-0.86 but it is not installable Recommends: sugar-0.86 but it is not installable Recommends: python-carquinyol-0.86 but it is not installable Recommends: sugar-presence-service-0.86 but it is not installable Recommends: python-jarabe-0.86 but it is not installable This is named -0.86, but the version listed is 0.85. Leaving that out, and installing the rest, Errors were encountered while processing: sugar-platform E: /var/cache/apt/archives/olpcsound_1%3a5.10.90-1~ppa2_amd64.deb: trying to overwrite '/usr/lib/libcsnd.so.5.2', which is also in package libcsnd5.2 1 This is a broken dependency sugar-platform--olpcsound--libcsnd5.2 Then when I try sugar-emulator, Xephyr starts, but not Sugar. sugar-emulator [dix] Could not init font path element /usr/share/fonts/X11/cyrillic, removing from list! [config/dbus] couldn't take over org.x.config: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.AccessDenied (Connection :1.79 is not allowed to own the service org.x.config.display101 due to security policies in the configuration file) unrecognised device identifier! (EE) config/hal: NewInputDeviceRequest failed (2) unrecognised device identifier! (EE) config/hal: NewInputDeviceRequest failed (2) unrecognised device identifier! (EE) config/hal: NewInputDeviceRequest failed (2) unrecognised device identifier! (EE) config/hal: NewInputDeviceRequest failed (2) unrecognised device identifier! (EE) config/hal: NewInputDeviceRequest failed (2) unrecognised device identifier! (EE) config/hal: NewInputDeviceRequest failed (2) unrecognised device identifier! (EE) config/hal: NewInputDeviceRequest failed (2) unrecognised device identifier! (EE) config/hal: NewInputDeviceRequest
Re: [IAEP] Fwd: Sugar Digest 2009-11-02
On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 11:41 AM, David Farning dfarn...@sugarlabs.org wrote: On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 9:28 AM, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: I think there are more recommended activities than fit at any one time. They are chosen randomly from the list. As to how the list is compiled, I do not know, but I believe that Etoys is already a recommended activity. I'll double-check. Currently there is not a formal recommended policy. Basically, whenever I see a cool new activity I add it to the recommend list and remove an activity that has been around for awhile. I think Aleksey does the same. If anyone would like to create and maintain more formal recommended list it is very easy to create an activities.sl.o editor's account for them. david I had written about this a long time ago. My approach was to rank activities based on a list of attributes (weighted scoring). The activities with the highest attributes would be the ones installed. The same approach could be used for Recommended activities. The thread is at http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/grassroots/2008-September/000707.html . The GoogleDocs spreadsheet is at http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=p_Xhb6KcXLyEViA50CnCaDghl=en Sameer -walter On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 10:25 AM, Rita Freudenberg r...@squeakland.org wrote: Walter Bender wrote: 5. Thanks to the efforts of Josh Williams, Aleksey Lim, and David Farning, the new http://activities.sugarlabs.org site went on-line over the weekend. The new look is clean and also in compliance with Mozilla copy I would like to know how the activities on the starting page are chosen. What does it require from an activity to be recommended? My question is not just out of curiosity, I would like to see Etoys there. So I would like to know if we could do anything to be considered a recommended activity? Thanks, Rita -- Rita Freudenberg Squeakland Foundation http://www.squeakland.org -- Walter Bender Sugar Labs http://www.sugarlabs.org ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] OLPC SF Summit
We are looking for someone in the SF bay area to run a session on Sugar and/or Sugar on a Stick at the upcoming OLPC-SF Community Summit (http://tinyurl.com/olpcsf-summit). Anyone interested? Any pointers? cheers, Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Information Systems Director, Center for Business Solutions San Francisco State University http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://cbs.sfsu.edu/ http://is.sfsu.edu/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] OLPC SF Summit
On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 10:46 AM, Edward Cherlin echer...@gmail.com wrote: I would be happy to. Excellent! Can we combine this with your session on python in schools, or should we do these separately? Most tech session are in the PM, so I'll book a slot in the afternoon. Sameer On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 10:33, Sameer Verma sve...@sfsu.edu wrote: We are looking for someone in the SF bay area to run a session on Sugar and/or Sugar on a Stick at the upcoming OLPC-SF Community Summit (http://tinyurl.com/olpcsf-summit). Anyone interested? Any pointers? cheers, Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Information Systems Director, Center for Business Solutions San Francisco State University http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://cbs.sfsu.edu/ http://is.sfsu.edu/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- Edward Mokurai (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) Cherlin Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation. The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination. http://www.earthtreasury.org/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] OLPC SF Summit
On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 10:59 AM, Sameer Verma sve...@sfsu.edu wrote: On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 10:46 AM, Edward Cherlin echer...@gmail.com wrote: I would be happy to. Excellent! Can we combine this with your session on python in schools, or should we do these separately? Most tech session are in the PM, so I'll book a slot in the afternoon. Sameer I'll see if I can double up with you and do a Sugar via LTSP demo. -- Sameer On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 10:33, Sameer Verma sve...@sfsu.edu wrote: We are looking for someone in the SF bay area to run a session on Sugar and/or Sugar on a Stick at the upcoming OLPC-SF Community Summit (http://tinyurl.com/olpcsf-summit). Anyone interested? Any pointers? cheers, Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Information Systems Director, Center for Business Solutions San Francisco State University http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://cbs.sfsu.edu/ http://is.sfsu.edu/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- Edward Mokurai (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) Cherlin Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation. The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination. http://www.earthtreasury.org/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] OLPC-SF Community Summit 2009: Schedule is up!
http://tinyurl.com/olpcsf-summit Nov 21, 2009 in San Francisco. Line-up of topics and presenters/facilitators is now up at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_SanFranciscoBayArea/OLPCSF_Community_Summit_2009#Presenters_and_Facilitators cheers, Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Information Systems Director, Center for Business Solutions San Francisco State University http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://cbs.sfsu.edu/ http://is.sfsu.edu/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] an interesting article on an article on learning styles...
Almost certainly, you were told that your instruction should match your students' styles. For example, kinesthetic learners—students who learn best through hands-on activities—are said to do better in classes that feature plenty of experiments, while verbal learners are said to do worse. Now four psychologists argue that you were told wrong. There is no strong scientific evidence to support the matching idea, they contend in a paper published this weekhttp://www.psychologicalscience.org/journals/index.cfm?journal=pspicontent=pspi/9_3in *Psychological Science in the Public Interest. *And there is absolutely no reason for professors to adopt it in the classroom. http://chronicle.com/article/Matching-Teaching-Style-to/49497/ cheers, Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Information Systems Director, Center for Business Solutions San Francisco State University http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://cbs.sfsu.edu/ http://is.sfsu.edu/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] sounds in Speak
On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 8:54 PM, K. K. Subramaniam subb...@gmail.comwrote: On Monday 14 December 2009 09:00:23 pm Aleksey Lim wrote: Hello everybody, This afternoon, I had an interesting conversation with a Montessori teacher, about Speak. She asked me why Speak says a when a is pressed and not the sound of the letter a. Montessori teachers teach the shape and sound of letters first, and then the name of the alphabet. I did not have an answer for her, but I wondered if it would be possible to have an option in Speak to do so. not sure it could be done in existed Speak(it just passes string to speak engine). But it could separate activity or mode in Speak which teaches alphabet. Isn't Speak an overkill for such basic lessons? Montessori teachers would find Scratch or EToys useful for such exercises. They can prepare a list of words and record their associated 'a' sounds. Script word objects to respond with the appropriate sound when letter 'a' is dropped on them (or the 'a' key is pressed with the mouse hovering over a word) . This puts more control on the quality of pronunciation in the hands of teachers. Subbu The concern was more along the lines of It will confuse our students because we teach them phonetically as opposed to anything else. cheers, Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Information Systems Director, Center for Business Solutions San Francisco State University http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://cbs.sfsu.edu/ http://is.sfsu.edu/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Announcing the OLPC OS 10.1.0 final release!
On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 10:48 PM, Chris Ball c...@laptop.org wrote: Hi, I'm very pleased to announce build os64 as the final 10.1.0 release build for XO-1.5 laptops. Here are its release notes: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_notes/10.1.0 Instructions for installing the release on an XO-1.5 can be found at: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_notes/10.1.0#Installation Many thanks to everyone who contributed to this release! - Chris. -- Chris Ball c...@laptop.org One Laptop Per Child ___ Fedora-olpc-list mailing list fedora-olpc-l...@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-olpc-list Hearty congratulations!!! Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Information Systems Director, Center for Business Solutions San Francisco State University http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://cbs.sfsu.edu/ http://is.sfsu.edu/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Peru, OLPC and Wikipedia
On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 11:46 AM, Cherry Withers cwith...@ekindling.org wrote: Excellent. Thank you for sharing this. Looking forward for more. On May 9, 2010 10:54 AM, Chris Ball c...@laptop.org wrote: http://vimeo.com/8709616 -- Chris Ball c...@laptop.org One Laptop Per Child ___ 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 A confession. I saw all this video last night, and I don't know why...maybe it was a long day...but I found tears streaming down my face when I saw the classroom scene with the kids (4:14). Very touching. Thank you for sharing. cheers, Sameer ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Peru, OLPC and Wikipedia
On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 12:39 PM, Martin Langhoff martin.langh...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 11:49 PM, fors...@ozonline.com.au wrote: the interviewed social Darwinist is Robert Wright, the author of Nonzero http://www.nonzero.org/ The filmmaker is Righteous Pictures http://righteouspictures.com/ Wright seems to believe that there is a higher purpose to biological and social evolution, that in some way, we will be fulfilling our destiny if we become one globalised culture. When I watched the videos, I did get a similar feeling of concern. And Robert Wright's answers can be read as neo-social-darwinist. But note the can be read... I am not sure if he is actually darwinist; reading his book right after reading Guns, Germs and Steel may lead to a completely different perspective. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep I didn't quite see the concern the same way as some others did. That's perhaps because I'm not a trained anthropologist :-) I do see a trail, in my own life, of changing cultures as I moved all through my life. My family comes from Varanasi in northern India, but I grew up in Hyderabad, in south-central India. Varanasi and Hyderabad are perhaps more distant culturally than Hyderabad and SF Bay Area these days. The move did not force me to shed cultural icons and language. Sure, I don't speak Bhojpuri, like my parents did (although I follow it), but I picked up Telugu, in Hyderabad. Moving from Hyderabad to Atlanta was another shift in ideas, etc. and I gained a few more things. Atlanta to SF was also culturally different (the southerners in Atlanta thought Californians were weird and vice versa). All through this journey, I don't feel like I've lost much. Its all still embedded somewhere. I can still relate to biryani (HYD), grits (ATL), and cioppino (SF) quite well. While I haven't read Nonzero as yet, looking at the summary, it indicates to the concept of zero sum game (vs non-zero) from game theory. Although my observations are a sample of 1, I'd argue that we don't really shed one set to gain another. Instead we absorb all that we can. cheers, Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Information Systems Director, Campus Business Solutions San Francisco State University http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://opensource.sfsu.edu/ http://cbs.sfsu.edu/ http://is.sfsu.edu/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Fwd: Videos from OLPC-SF may meeting
-- Forwarded message -- From: Sameer Verma sve...@sfsu.edu Date: Sun, May 16, 2010 at 9:02 AM Subject: Videos from OLPC-SF may meeting To: OLPC SF olpc...@lists.laptop.org Videos from yesterday's meeting: Carol Ruth Silver on OLPC -related efforts in Afghanistan and Nepal: http://qik.com/video/6688327 and http://qik.com/video/6689320 Cherry Withers on OLPC micro-deployment in Lubang, the Philippines: http://qik.com/video/6690657 Sameer Verma on OLPC micro-deployment near Hyderabad, India: http://qik.com/video/6691942 cheers, Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Information Systems Director, Campus Business Solutions San Francisco State University http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://opensource.sfsu.edu/ http://cbs.sfsu.edu/ http://is.sfsu.edu/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Working with a commercial entity.
On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 10:43 AM, David Farning dfarn...@gmail.com wrote: There has been discussion on development processes and a development team lead over the past couple of days. As this discussion moves forward, I would like the community to consider the effects of working with commercial entity. Over the past couple of months I have been exploring business opportunities to promote the adoption and development of Sugar. One of these opportunities is a service and support business for deployments. As such, we are building network of developers to work on deployment specific issues. One consideration is that these deployment specific issues are often boring -- stuff like bug fixes. As such we are paying the developers the going rate rate for developers in their country or region. This brings three advantages: 1. The deployment issues are fixed. 2. These fixes are pushed upstream for inclusion into Sugar. 3. There is a growing pool of skilled developers, with knowledge of how to work with the Sugar community, co-located with deployment david ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep David, Support and Service structure will be immensely useful. In my talks with schools around here and agencies interested in early childhood education, the no 1 issue that comes up is Who will support this deployment? I am talking in context of both (XO + Sugar) and (some computer + Sugar) in schools around here. If someone does decide to set up a for-profit or not-for-profit entity for a deployment, what will the rules of engagement be with SL? I'd be happy to put on my B-school hat and help out with the process, if necessary. cheers, Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Information Systems Director, Campus Business Solutions San Francisco State University http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://opensource.sfsu.edu/ http://cbs.sfsu.edu/ http://is.sfsu.edu/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] ANNOUNCE: F11 for XO-1 build 180py released
On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 5:13 AM, Bernie Innocenti ber...@codewiz.org wrote: This is a late announcement of the final release of the XO-1 images based on Fedora 11 and Sugar 0.84: http://people.sugarlabs.org/bernie/olpc/f11-xo1-py/os180py.img http://people.sugarlabs.org/bernie/olpc/f11-xo1-py/os180py.crc http://people.sugarlabs.org/bernie/olpc/f11-xo1-py/os180py.img.fs.zip This build is being deployed to 10 schools in Caacupé [1]. Feedback from teachers and teacher trainers has been very positive so far. == Changes relative to the previous release (os140py) == * GSM broadband support: add usb_modeswitch and usb_modeswitch-data, enabling more modem models to work with Fedora 11. (me) * Credit Sugar Labs in boot animation (me) * Add custom Browse home page with links to Paraguay Educa resources (rgs) * Update Turtle Art to pick Spanish translation (walter) * Re-enable olpc-update and the versioned fs (me) * Point software update control panel at http://wiki.paraguayeduca.org * Pull latest OS updates from upstream (fedora) == Bugs fixed == * Race condition with name widget in the activity toolbar http://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ticket/1948 * Some activities crashing when resuming from the Journal http://patchwork.sugarlabs.org/patch/15/ == Known bugs == * Unable to read FAT filesystems containing invalid file dates http://patchwork.sugarlabs.org/patch/43/ == How to help testing == Feedback from the entire community is very appreciated, although we're not planning any further releases of the Sugar 0.84 series. Bugs affecting upstream components are better filed in their respective trackers: * Sugar and activities: http://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ * Fedora 11: http://bugzilla.redhat.com/ * Drivers and OLPC customizations: http://dev.laptop.org/ * Paraguay-specific bugs: http://trac.paraguayeduca.org/ If you're unsure where a bug belongs to, use the Paragauy Educa tracker. Please, always assign these bugs to Carlos, who will keep our status summary updated. == Using this build outside Paraguay == A few customizations make this image somewhat Paraguay-specific: * Limited language support: to save space, we've included only English and Spanish translations. * Image signed with the Paraguay deployment keys. Laptops from other regions need to be be unlocked in order to accept this image. * The software update control panel icon checks for new activities on our wiki rather than on laptop.org. * The Browse home page contains the Paraguay Educa logo and a few links to our website. We may find the time to release slightly modified images to meet the needs of other OLPC deployments interested in upgrading to Sugar 0.84. More importantly, we're happy to help other deployments produce their own OS images independently of us, thus exploiting Free Software's most important advantage [2]. == How to join development == This development cycle is closed as a new development cycle based on Sugar 0.88 has started already. Public builds will be available soon. Build system source: http://git.paraguayeduca.org/gitweb/users/bernie/olpc-os-builder.git Yum Repository containing our custom RPMs (along with sources): http://repo.paraguayeduca.org/f11-xo1-py/i386/os/ http://people.sugarlabs.org/bernie/olpc/pyeduca-repo/f11-xo1-py/ IRC: #olpc-paraguay irc.feenode.net (English spoken) [1] The actual production build is os179py. The only difference between os179py and os180py is improved compatibility with GSM modems. [2] Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish. -- // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/ \X/ Sugar Labs - http://sugarlabs.org/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep How do I install this image? I tried the USB method on a XO1 with dev key and security disabled, but it still complains about not finding the right keys. Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Information Systems Director, Campus Business Solutions San Francisco State University http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://opensource.sfsu.edu/ http://cbs.sfsu.edu/ http://is.sfsu.edu/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] ANNOUNCE: F11 for XO-1 build 180py released
On Fri, Jun 18, 2010 at 5:42 PM, Bernie Innocenti ber...@codewiz.org wrote: El Fri, 18-06-2010 a las 18:24 +, Sameer Verma escribió: How do I install this image? I tried the USB method on a XO1 with dev key and security disabled, but it still complains about not finding the right keys. Are you pressing the four game keys together? This triggers a secure update through fs.zip. Yes. On unlocked laptops, all you need to do is drop into the Open Firmware ok prompt and type: copy-nand u:\os180py.img Got it. Its writing right now. If we have a wiki page for the py images, this tip would be helpful. Sameer -- // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/ \X/ Sugar Labs - http://sugarlabs.org/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Problems with Best OS Image Ever
On Sun, Jun 20, 2010 at 7:26 PM, Caryl Bigenho cbige...@hotmail.com wrote: Hi I would like to try the dual boot software for the XO-1 that Bernie and his team have developed in Paraguay. I've downloaded: http://people.sugarlabs.org/bernie/olpc/f11-xo1-py/os140py.img and http://people.sugarlabs.org/bernie/olpc/f11-xo1-py/os140py.crc I am trying to follow the instructions at: http://www.olpcnews.com/forum/index.php?topic=4768.0 I am trying to do the following: Step Four. Boot your XO. Hold down Escape while booting. This is the key on the upper left of the keyboard. Step 5. You are now hopefully at an OpenFirmware prompt. Type in disable-security and press Enter. Let it do what it wants to do. But, holding down the Escape key doesn't have any effect. It just does a regular boot. The XO is running Sugar 0.82.1. I have a developer key installed. Any suggestions? Is it possible I need to re-install the developer key? Caryl ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep Caryl, Double check your dev key. Its possible to erase it out when reinstalling an image. You can always reinstall the dev key. Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Information Systems Director, Campus Business Solutions San Francisco State University http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://opensource.sfsu.edu/ http://cbs.sfsu.edu/ http://is.sfsu.edu/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Announce: OLPC software strategy.
On Wed, Jul 7, 2010 at 3:01 PM, Chris Ball c...@laptop.org wrote: Hi, Now that the 10.1.1 release for XO-1.5 is out, it's a good time to talk about OLPC's software strategy for the future. We've got a few announcements to make: XO-1: = OLPC wasn't planning to make a Fedora 11 release of the XO-1 OS, but a group of volunteers including Steven Parrish, Bernie Innocenti, Paraguay Educa and Daniel Drake stepped up and produced Fedora 11 XO-1 builds that follow the OLPC 10.1.1 work. I'm happy to announce that we're planning on releasing an OLPC-signed version of that work, and that this release will happen alongside the next XO-1.5 point release in the coming weeks. So, OLPC release 10.1.2 will be available for both XO-1 and XO-1.5 at the same time, and will contain Sugar 0.84, GNOME 2.26 and Fedora 11. We think that offering this fully interoperable software stack between XO-1 and XO-1.5 laptops will greatly aid deployments, and we're very thankful to everyone who has enabled us to be able to turn this XO-1 work into a supported release! To prepare for this XO-1 release, we've started working on fixing some of the remaining bugs in the community F11/XO-1 builds. Paul Fox recently solved a problem with suspend/resume and wifi in the F11/XO-1 kernel, which was the largest blocker for a supported release. We'll continue to work on the remaining bugs, particularly the ones that OLPC is uniquely positioned to help with. The first development builds for this release will be published later this week. XO-1.5: === We'll be continuing to work on XO-1.5 improvements, incorporating fixes to the Known Problems section of the 10.1.1 release notes¹ into the 10.1.2 release. XO-1.75 and beyond: === XO-1.75 software development is underway. Today we're announcing that we're planning on using Fedora as the base distribution for the XO-1.75. This wasn't an obvious decision -- ARM is not a release architecture in Fedora, and so we're committing to help out with that port. Our reasons for choosing Fedora even though ARM work is needed were that we don't want to force our deployments to learn a new distribution and re-write any customizations they've written, we want to reuse the packaging work that's already been done in Fedora for OLPC and Sugar packages, and we want to continue our collaboration with the Fedora community who we're getting to know and work with well. We've started to help with Fedora ARM by adding five new build machines (lent to OLPC by Marvell; thanks!) to the Fedora ARM koji build farm, and we have Fedora 12 and Sugar 0.86 running on early 1.75 development boards. We'd prefer to use Fedora 13 for the XO-1.75, but it hasn't been built for ARM yet -- if anyone's interested in helping out with this or other Fedora ARM work, please check out the Fedora ARM page on the Fedora Wiki². We're also interested in hiring ARM and Fedora developers to help with this; if you're interested in learning more, please send an e-mail to jobs-engineer...@laptop.org. We'll also be continuing to use Open Firmware on the XO-1.75, and Mitch Bradley has an ARM port of OFW running on our development boards already. EC-1.75 open source EC code: OLPC is proud to announce that the XO-1.75 embedded controller will have an open codebase (with a small exception, see below). After much behind-the-scenes effort, EnE has agreed to provide us with a public version of the KB3930 datasheet and is allowing our new code to be made public. The code is not available yet due to a few chunks of proprietary code that need to be purged and some other reformatting. A much more detailed announcement will be provided once the new code is pushed to a public repository. The code will be licensed under the GPL with a special exception for OLPC use. The exception is because EnE has not released the low-level details on the PS/2 interface in the KB3930, so there will be some code that is not available -- relative to the codebase this is a very small amount of code. The GPL licensing exception will allow for linking against this closed code. We're going to investigate ways to move away from this code in the future. (As far as we're aware, this will make the XO-1.75 the first laptop with open embedded controller code!) Multi-touch Sugar: == We've begun working on modifications to Sugar to enable touchscreen and multitouch use (the XO-1.75 will have a touchscreen, as will future OLPC tablets based on its design), and we'll continue to do so. The first outcome from this work is Sayamindu Dasgupta's port of the Meego Virtual Keyboard³ to Sugar -- you can see a screencast of it in action here⁴. It's an exciting time for software development at OLPC. Many thanks for all of your support and efforts! - Chris, on behalf of the OLPC Engineering team. Footnotes: ¹:
[IAEP] Fall 2010...
Hello everybody, We did an event in the Fall of 2009, focusing on OLPC deployments hosted in the SF Bay Area. http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_SanFranciscoBayArea/OLPCSF_Community_Summit_2009 We are itching to do another event in the Fall this year. I'm told itches are good in the FOSS world :-) We can look into providing a venue in San Francisco (5th and Market). This time around, we'd like to involve educators from elementary education programs from around here, Pythonistas from around here, and of course the micro-deployments we have in the SF Bay Area (Deployments – Afghanistan (Carol Ruth Silver, MTSA) – India (Humaira Mahi Sameer Verma, SFSU) – Jamaica (Sameer Verma Univ. of the West Indies) – Madagascar (June Kleider, XO-ology) – Senegal (Drew Lick-Wilmerding Schools) – South Africa (EduWeavers) – San Francisco (Starr King Elementary) – Uganda (UC Berkeley) ). I've spoken with some of you offlist. I'm looking for feasibility, feedback and enthusiasm. We've had Sugarlabs events. We've had the Realness summit. This is somewhat of a mish-mash. A mingle-and-learn. Would any of you want to be a part of this? We are looking at September/October/November as possible months. cheers, Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Information Systems Director, Campus Business Solutions San Francisco State University http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://opensource.sfsu.edu/ http://cbs.sfsu.edu/ http://is.sfsu.edu/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] notes from today's OLPC-SF meeting
The plan is to organize a community event towards the end of October in San Francisco. Expected involvement? OLPC deployments, Sugarlabs, private/micro-deployments, local schools, community centers, Linux/Python groups, solar/alternative energy groups, wireless/network groups...all are welcome! A big thank you to all those who could attend. Notes and photos of the white board are up at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_SanFranciscoBayArea/OLPCSF_Community_Summit_2010 Please clean up (see photos for reference) and ...feel free to add items. cheers, Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Information Systems Director, Campus Business Solutions San Francisco State University http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://opensource.sfsu.edu/ http://cbs.sfsu.edu/ http://is.sfsu.edu/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Pathagar: A Book Server
Slides from yesterday's presentation at OLPC-SF. Some of you may find this interesting. http://opensource.sfsu.edu/node/689 http://www.slideshare.net/sverma/pathagar-a-book-server http://wiki.laptop.org/images/1/1c/Pathagar-bookserver.zip cheers, Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Information Systems Director, Campus Business Solutions San Francisco State University http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://opensource.sfsu.edu/ http://cbs.sfsu.edu/ http://is.sfsu.edu/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [support-gang] Youtube Downloads on XO??? How to???
On Mon, Dec 27, 2010 at 11:11 PM, Caryl Bigenho cbige...@hotmail.com wrote: Hi All, I am working with a project that wants to download Kahn Academy's math lessons ( http://www.khanacademy.org/ ) and use them offline on the XO-1. Khan, not Kahn. As in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRnSnfiUI54 :-) Sameer ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [support-gang] Youtube Downloads on XO??? How to???
On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 12:41 AM, Anna ascho...@gmail.com wrote: I've actually made flash videos available in a school environment. As we all know, Adobe Flash does not work well on the XO. I download requested YouTube videos on my Ubuntu desktop at home and use mencoder to transcode the flv to an avi. I use FlashGot in Firefox to grab embedded flash videos. Works on all sorts, like Youtube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, etc. Can you post your mencoder specifics? cheers, Sameer Then I scp them over to the school so they can be served up by the XS's Apache server. They do play really well over the LAN in the XO's browser. But we'd have to know more about the infrastructure at the school and the XO build before we can figure out the best solution for your particular situation. To answer your questions: yes, it's quite possible to convert flash videos to another format for the XO and yes, the videos can be stored on USBs, even with nice local html navigation. Same on SD cards. The XO doesn't have enough space, so not really doable to put a bunch of media files on there. You can install Adobe Flash on the XO, but it's really crappy. No, there's no special Flash for the XO. Depending on the XO build version used, you might have to install codecs depending on what you want to play. And you'll have to figure out the copyrights for the videos as well. And no, you do not have to have internet access to have an XS. Anna Schoolfield Birmingham On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 1:11 AM, Caryl Bigenho cbige...@hotmail.com wrote: Hi All, I am working with a project that wants to download Kahn Academy's math lessons ( http://www.khanacademy.org/ ) and use them offline on the XO-1. Has anyone done anything like this? Does anyone have any ideas about how to do this? Could the videos be stored on USBs? on SD cards? on the XO itself? Do you load Flash on the XO? Is there a special version? Are there any add-ons they will need? Does anyone have any ideas of a better way to do it. They do not plan to have internet access for the XOs. Caryl ___ support-gang mailing list support-g...@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/support-gang ___ support-gang mailing list support-g...@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/support-gang ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Youtube Downloads on XO??? How to???
On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 5:38 PM, Jim Tittsler j...@oerfoundation.org wrote: On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 20:11, Caryl Bigenho cbige...@hotmail.com wrote: I am working with a project that wants to download Kahn Academy's math lessons ( http://www.khanacademy.org/ ) and use them offline on the XO-1. [...] Could the videos be stored on USBs? New Zealand's Albany High School has transcoded many of the math lessons to the Ogg format as part of their open math textbook initiative. They have made the open format files available through the Wikimedia Commons. I've used the Jukebox activity to play the downloaded .ogv files from a USB thumb drive on an XO. Example: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Khan_Academy_Adding_and_subtracting_fractions.ogv The page states: All videos on Khan Academy site licensed under CC-BY-SA -- derivative work converted into ogv. Interesting. cheers, Sameer Jukebox activity: http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4045 -- Jim Tittsler Open Education Resource Foundation http://OERfoundation.org/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Fieldwork and Research by SomosAzucar's German Volunteer Antje Breitkopf
On Sun, Nov 28, 2010 at 4:24 PM, Sebastian Silva sebast...@somosazucar.org wrote: Hello dear list, This year we had the good experience of working together with Antje Breitkopf, a German doctoral student who also visited in Nepal the year before. She has great experience and a very insightful mind, and so her experience in visiting rural schools in Peru proved very fruitful in insights and observations which she has been so kind in sharing with us in an article she published in our Somos Azucar blog: I think it might be interesting for many of you. http://somosazucar.org/2010/11/20/informe-sobre-la-investigacion-de-las-laptop-xo/ I presented a version of this report to the DIGETE (General Department of Educational Technologies), Ministry of Education, Peru to inform them about the development of my investigation and field work of the project “una laptop por niño” (OLPC Peru). It contains experiences, observations, first conclusions and recommendations and is written in English, and open to be translated and used under “creative commons” license, attributing the writer. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep Is the original version available somewhere online? cheers, Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Information Systems Director, Campus Business Solutions San Francisco State University http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://opensource.sfsu.edu/ http://cbs.sfsu.edu/ http://is.sfsu.edu/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] For Sugar Everywhere, Google-ize!
On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 6:49 AM, Martin Langhoff martin.langh...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 10:32 PM, C. Scott Ananian csc...@cscott.net wrote: This seems to me to be a red herring. What does connectivity have to do with your choice of OS? While technically possible to write all sort of sw yourself, you choose an OS based on the affordances it offers. The OSs being discussed (Android, ChromeOS) have very strong assumptions about ubiquitous connectivity to the internet and the role of the device (network client, not peer, not server). With enough work and time you may be able to provide all the missing bits and fix the broken libraries and APIs. You might even rewrite the apps in the app store to work without connectivity. m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- Software Architect - OLPC - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep Three points come to mind: The issue of connectivity IMO is of great importance. We typically see four scenarios: XO only XO + XS XO+XS+Internet XO+Internet The case for ChromeOS (Google-ize as the subject puts it) requires a Google to be in the mix. Internet access isn't available in most places. Even in my projects in Jamaica and India, while we do have 3G coverage, its too cost prohibitive to scale Internet access to all the XOs. In both these projects, the XS plays a major role. So, if there is no Google in the mix, there is no service (unless we do offline apps and host these on the XS). The other thing that bugs me about this approach is that there is very little talk about the end-user (children and teachers). I remember from one of Walter's posts that teachers have had a concern for a rapidly changing Sugar UI. So, the guts of a system can be Android/Meego/Fedora, but the UI should not be radically different. Else, the adoption is going to be very difficult. Third, I am not convinced about the reasons behind why there needs to be such a radical change. Maybe the reasoning exists, but its not coming forth. It appears to be supply-driven as in Tablets+Android+Cool Stuff. I don't buy that. At least not yet. Definitely interesting discussion, though. Oh, and I do wonder how many people involved in these discussions have *actually* been in the field where these dire conditions exist. Not fingerpointing, just wondering. cheers, Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Information Systems Director, Campus Business Solutions San Francisco State University http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://opensource.sfsu.edu/ http://cbs.sfsu.edu/ http://is.sfsu.edu/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Jamaica pilots
Hello! Its been a very busy week in Jamaica. Here's an update on our pilots. We had an opportunity to visit the two locations of August Town Primary School and Providence Basic School this week. We have a bunch of pictures and videos of children engaged in their Sugar activities on their OLPC XO 1.5 laptops. We now have a channel on Youtube at http://www.youtube.com/user/olpcjamaica and on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=129075173804215 The project site is at http://olpcjamaica.org.jm More to come soon. cheers, Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Information Systems Director, Campus Business Solutions San Francisco State University http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://opensource.sfsu.edu/ http://cbs.sfsu.edu/ http://is.sfsu.edu/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Membership fees (was: Re: Next slobs meeting?)
On Sun, Jun 5, 2011 at 8:04 AM, Sascha Silbe sascha-ml-reply-to-201...@silbe.org wrote: Excerpts from Bernie Innocenti's message of Sun Jun 05 06:33:40 +0200 2011: * Membership fees Could you elaborate what you have in mind here? :-) It's a prototype idea, not yet discussed anywhere yet. I'd like to know what the board members would think about asking a yearly fee from members and, in case there's interest, how it could be implemented. Whatever you choose to do, please do not *require* membership fees. Their existence alone is enough to make it impossible for a lot of people to join. They might even be able to afford the actual membership fee, but not necessarily the associated costs of transferring the money to Sugar Labs - given that's possible at all. I wouldn't mind *optional* membership fees, i.e. yearly donations. But it should be the decision of the member. Don't require proof of being too poor to pay the fee. It's impossible to do; been there, tried that, failed to convince to other party. Besides there's a high psychological barrier to admit that you're poor. Instead just *encourage* people to donate a recurring amount of their choosing. Do a direct debit from their bank account, with a minimum amount to cover banking costs (they still have the option not to donate at all). Publish donations above a certain threshold on the website, maybe using several different thresholds and calling them bronze / silver / gold sponsors (or some sweet equivalent). Noisebridge in San Francisco does something similar. https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Membership/FAQ From what I understand, they have a few Sugar Daddies (pardon the pun) who do the heavy $$$ lifting, many starving hacker types, and several once-in-a-whilers (like me). They do have a strong need for $$$ to pay for the physical space. cheers, Sameer Sascha -- http://sascha.silbe.org/ http://www.infra-silbe.de/ ___ 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] Ancient Manners is on Project Gutenberg!
On Sun, Jun 12, 2011 at 8:44 AM, James Simmons nices...@gmail.com wrote: If you've read any of my FLOSS Manual E-Book Enlightenment you know that I've been preparing free e-books and contributing them to the Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg Canada, and Distributed Proofreaders Canada. Yesterday I reached an important milestone: my very first donation to Project Gutenberg has been accepted. You can check it out here: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/36378/36378-h/36378-h.htm It was a very challenging book to create. I had to deal with Greek transliteration, footnotes, umlauts, ligatures, accents of both persuasions, United States copyright laws, old pages that did not OCR very well, and 90 illustrations, many of them spicy. Project Gutenberg is the very finest source of free e-books there is. It is The Show. It is white balls in the practice field. It is women with long legs and brains. It is deep, soft, wet kisses that last for three days. It is the Navy Seals of free e-book repositories. Just getting a copyright clearance for your book is something to be proud of. Congratulations!!! I can tell you are *passionate* about this :-) cheers, Sameer Soon there will also be a hand-crafted version of this book in the Kindle Store. (The Kindle version that PG produces is generated from the HTML and is not optimized to look good on the KIndle). I would expect that lavishly illustrated translations of randy French novels will sell better than Make Your Own Sugar Activities! did. Regrettably, Ancient Manners is not suitable reading for young children. Their teachers should enjoy it. James Simmons ___ 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] Historian David McCullough endorses constructionism?
On Sun, Jun 19, 2011 at 1:45 PM, Nicholas Doiron ndoi...@andrew.cmu.edu wrote: This interview in the Wall Street Journal discusses history education and a couple of interesting, interactive lessons which could be programmed. We don't have many history activities in Sugar http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304432304576369421525987128.html?mod=WSJ_hps_sections_opinion -- Nick Doiron A really neat addition to the words activity would be a section on etymology. Where did that word come from? That would bring in a nice section of history from around the world! I've written about this before. If I knew enough about making the changes, I'd implement this myself :-) http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.linux.laptop.olpc.sugar/6786 cheers, Sameer ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Information Systems Director, Campus Business Solutions San Francisco State University http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://opensource.sfsu.edu/ http://cbs.sfsu.edu/ http://is.sfsu.edu/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Historian David McCullough endorses constructionism?
On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 2:05 AM, Yamandu Ploskonka yamap...@gmail.com wrote: It is a nagging feeling I have that in the lack of understanding of cause and effect lies a lot of what is wrong everywhere, especially in countries that do not seem to be able ever to get out of the subdesarrollo (underdevelopment) - and also help us to avoid debt ... I see History and Science as venues where cause and effect can be learned, understood, and hopefully become part of what people are empowered with. Interactive History can make that subject be useful, beyond the traditional memorizing of dates and events, and actually start reflections of the what if? type Yama, The are very good observations indeed. Not only does interactive history provide context, it provides a flow that explains how the world came about to being what it is today (not good or bad, but just how it is). Growing up in India, we were told how Sanskrit is the mother of all languages worldwide and nothing was ever before it. This is of course a very ethnocentric view, and is quite common around the world, but we were not allowed to question it. We also did not get to ask the how or why. For instance, learning about the origins of Brahmi script, which is considered to be the root of many South Asian languages, is very interesting because it connects Brahmi to Phoenecian and/or Aramaic (not to be confused with the language Amharic). Brahmi did not happen in a vacuum! Languages travel, and the world is a lot more fluid than a political map :-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahmi_script I also find that learning about cause and effect helps in understanding the difference between causality and correlation - perhaps the most important lesson I learned in my doctoral program :-) cheers, Sameer On 06/19/2011 11:19 PM, Gonzalo Odiard wrote: Good reading, thanks. Gonzalo On Sun, Jun 19, 2011 at 5:45 PM, Nicholas Doiron ndoi...@andrew.cmu.edu wrote: This interview in the Wall Street Journal discusses history education and a couple of interesting, interactive lessons which could be programmed. We don't have many history activities in Sugar http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304432304576369421525987128.html?mod=WSJ_hps_sections_opinion -- Nick Doiron ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Cannes Lions award for OLPC Australia
On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 9:15 AM, Sridhar Dhanapalan srid...@laptop.org.au wrote: As I have blogged about[0] OLPC Australia[1] have been awarded a Bronze Lion[2] at this year's Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival[3], the equivalent of the Cannes Film Festival for advertising. I think this is fantastic recognition for a Free Software project[4], especially one that is focused on assisting children in some of the most remote parts of the world. I feel honoured to have been part of this success. We’re happy for people to get involved to help us in our mission[5]. If you'd like to participate[6], especially (for me) in the technical field[7], please get in touch with me or contact OLPC Australia[8] through our Web site. Sridhar [0] http://www.dhanapalan.com/blog/2011/06/25/cannes-lions-award-for-olpc-australia/ [1] http://www.laptop.org.au/ [2] http://www.canneslions.com/work/media/entry.cfm?entryid=1762award=4 [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannes_Lions_International_Advertising_Festival [4] http://www.dhanapalan.com/blog/2011/06/20/why-free-and-open-matters/ [5] http://www.laptop.org.au/vision/mission [6] http://www.laptop.org.au/participate [7] http://dev.laptop.org.au/participate [8] http://www.laptop.org.au/contact/general-form Sridhar Dhanapalan Technical Manager One Laptop per Child Australia M: +61 425 239 701 E: srid...@laptop.org.au A: G.P.O. Box 731 Sydney, NSW 2001 W: www.laptop.org.au ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep Congratulations!!! You guys rock :-) cheers, Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Information Systems Director, Campus Business Solutions San Francisco State University http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://opensource.sfsu.edu/ http://cbs.sfsu.edu/ http://is.sfsu.edu/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [OLPC-SF] Oct 17-21 Doc Camp @ Google HQ, Mountain View, California
On Wed, Jul 13, 2011 at 6:16 AM, Holt h...@laptop.org wrote: This could be a major opportunity -- many Book Sprints within one week to create many free/open 'Quick Start' guides. Perhaps even more so given its schedule aligns so well with http://olpcSF.org 's own global community summit Oct 21-23 right in town there in San Francisco! Even if OLPC/Sugar participation in GSoC (Google Summer of Code) has unfortunately lagged this year. Fantastic! Last year we had the book server/OPDS at the Internet Archive to dovetail with OLPC SF Community Summit. This year the doc sprint could do the same. Getting to Mountain View from SF is easy on Caltrain. http://www.caltrain.com/ cheers, Sameer All the more reason several exceptional volunteer writers/communicators/educators across our OLPC/Sugar community should strongly consider applying+connecting+building with like-minded folk here: http://sites.google.com/site/docsprintsummit/ -- Help kids everywhere map their world, at http://olpcMAP.net ! Subject: Re: [FM Discuss] register for doc camp Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2011 07:41:49 -0500 From: Anne Gentle annegen...@gmail.comannegen...@gmail.com To: disc...@lists.flossmanuals.net This announcement is truly awesome. I plan to apply. Looking forward to seeing people in sunny (mild) California! Anne * * *Anne Gentle* my blog http://justwriteclick.com/ | my bookhttp://xmlpress.net/publications/conversation-community/| LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/in/annegentle | Delicioushttp://del.icio.us/annegentle| Twitter http://twitter.com/annegentle On Tue, Jul 12, 2011 at 4:46 AM, adam hyde a...@xs4all.nl wrote: Hi everyone, Please pass this on to anyone interested. This is a call for proposals for the 2011 Google Summer of Code Doc Camp. Individuals and projects are invited to submit proposals for the GSoC Doc Camp to be held at Google's Mountain View headquarters (California) 17 October - 21 October. The GSoC Doc Camp is a place for documentors to meet, work on documentation, and share their documentation experiences. The camp aims to improve free documentation materials and skills in GSoC projects and individuals and help form the identity of the emergent free documentation sector. The Doc Camp will consist of 2 major components - an unconference and 3-5 short form Book Sprints to produce 'Quick Start' guides for specific GSoC projects. The unconference will explore topics proposed by the participants. Any topic on free documentation of free software can be proposed for discussion during the event. Each Quick Start Sprint will bring together 5-8 individuals to produce a book on a specific GSoC project. All participants of the Doc Camp must attend a sprint. The Quick Start books will be launched at the opening party for the GSoC Mentors summit immediately following the event. Individuals with a passion for free documentation about free software may apply to attend by filling out the application form [1] and submitting before 5 August. Those wishing to attend do not need to be from a GSoC project. Accommodation and food will be covered by the GSoC Doc Camp. Part or complete travel costs can also be applied for as part of the application process. Quick Start Sprint projects will be chosen from proposals submitted to the GSoC Doc Camp before 5 August through the application form [1]. Applications for Quick Start Sprints are invited from projects that are part of the 2011 GSoC program. Quick Start Sprint proposals can nominate up to 5 individuals to attend and participate in the proposed sprint. A Quick Sprint proposal does not have to nominate individuals to participate - you can also use this as an opportunity to promote your project to Doc Camp participants. If the proposal is accepted the accommodation and food costs will be covered by the Doc Camp for any listed individuals and part or complete travel costs for each can be applied for (if applicable). The GSoC Doc Camp is co-organised by GSoC and FLOSS Manuals. Books Sprints and unconference facilitation conducted by Adam Hyde. [1] - https://sites.google.com/site/docsprintsummit/ Cheers, Carol and Adam ___ Discuss mailing list disc...@lists.flossmanuals.net http://lists.flossmanuals.net/listinfo.cgi/discuss-flossmanuals.net ___ OLPC-SF mailing list olpc...@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/olpc-sf ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [SLOBS]: Request for certifications of developing an activity
On Wed, Jul 13, 2011 at 3:27 AM, Gonzalo Odiard gonz...@laptop.org wrote: Yes. Also, we must recommend working more in the open, I don't know why, but in particular students in universities are very reluctant to integrate to the community, and are happy dropping a finished product without interaction. Gonzalo A lot of it has to do with motivation. Students typically pick up a project because they have a requirement, and may be passionate about the work at that moment, but needs of looking for a job, working on other course assignments etc. will quickly supersede their original project direction. The reluctance of integrating with the community stems from the requirements of the project (schedule/deliverables are course driven) and a usual lack of understanding of how FOSS projects work. Once the university requirement is satisfied, their motivation to continue typically goes away. However, if we are able to inculcate in these students, a desire for working on these projects while they are in the course, and integrate them into the community, then there is hope of continued work. cheers, Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Information Systems Director, Campus Business Solutions San Francisco State University http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://opensource.sfsu.edu/ http://cbs.sfsu.edu/ http://is.sfsu.edu/ On Wed, Jul 13, 2011 at 5:37 AM, James Simmons nices...@gmail.com wrote: I like the idea of giving certificates, but I think we should take the opportunity to enforce some simple best practices, like requiring a toolbar, requiring Share and Keep buttons to be hidden if they aren't used, requiring a proper icon for the Activity, etc. It might be nice to have two levels of certificate. Since shared Activities are more difficult to develop, maybe we have a separate certificate for those. James Simmons On Wed, Jul 13, 2011 at 2:53 AM, Martin Dengler mar...@martindengler.com wrote: On Tue, Jul 12, 2011 at 06:11:31PM -0400, Chris Ball wrote: Hi, On Tue, Jul 12 2011, Walter Bender wrote: Can we discuss this? I think it would be good to have a certificate program of some sort. I image that if we get sign-off by 2+ experienced developers, we should be willing to award some sort of certificate (perhaps we can get the design team to work something up.) Perhaps we could tie the certificate-awarding to posting an activity on ASLO and getting a review from someone on the Activity Team or something? Perhaps even prominent reviewers on ASLO (are there any?). Either way it's more sustainable and honest than herding developers to sign off on certificates. Thanks, - Chris. Martin ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] OLPC SF Community Summit - Suggested topics
Yesterday's OLPC SF meeting was very productive towards planning the October summit (http://olpcsf.org/summit). Take a look at the Suggested Topics page and add your own or add yourself to topics that you want to work on. http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_SanFranciscoBayArea/OLPCSF_Community_Summit_2011#Suggested_Topics Registration will open next week. cheers, Sameer -- Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Professor, Information Systems San Francisco State University http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://olpcsf.org/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [support-gang] Fwd: [OLPC-SF] OLPC SF 2011 Community Summit - Poster contest
On Mon, Oct 3, 2011 at 2:59 PM, Kevin Mark kevin.m...@verizon.net wrote: On Mon, Oct 03, 2011 at 11:11:40AM -0700, Cherry Withers wrote: Rules: • Posters will be 13 x 19 inches in size. • Only 1 entry per project. • All artwork and lettering must be original. Copyrighted images are not allowed. • Entries must be submitted electronically in by 9:00 AM Wednesday morning Pacific Time, October 19th, 2011. Submit entries to: poster-submiss...@green-wifi.org • Posters will be also posted to the OLPC SF website during the summit. The point Copyrighted images are not allowed does not quite seem useful. Every image has an author and that person (at least in the US) get a copyright on anything they produce. There are images that an individual might own the copyright to and images they dont. As well as images that you can use in accordance with the license requirements: CC, GPL, PD. So I think that needs a bit of revision. -- | .''`. == Debian GNU/Linux ==.| http://kevix.myopenid.com..| | : :' : The Universal OS| mysite.verizon.net/kevin.mark/.| | `. `' http://www.debian.org/.| http://counter.li.org [#238656]| |___`-Unless I ask to be CCd,.assume I am subscribed._| A Linux machine! because a 486 is a terrible thing to waste! (By j...@wintermute.ucr.edu, Joe Sloan) ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep I agree. I think what Bruce intended is that the images shouldn't be restricted for redistribution, although I'll let him confirm. How would you word it? Sameer ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] One Laptop per Child day in San Francisco | OLPC San Francisco
San Francisco Mayor Edwin M Lee has declared October 22, 2011 as One Laptop per Child day in San Francisco. What better way to kick off the OLPC San Francisco Community Summit 2011! http://olpcsf.org/node/44 cheers, Sameer -- Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Professor, Information Systems San Francisco State University http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://olpcsf.org/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] OLPC SF Sunday...
Today, we have two Internet-streamed panels. Those who aren't physically at the summit can participate at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/olpc-san-francisco-community-summit-2011 Photos thus far: OLPC SF Community Summit 2011 Photos from Friday - on.fb.me/oSESsk OLPC SF Community Summit 2011 Photos from Saturday - http://on.fb.me/n5DHlt OLPC SF Community Summit 2011 Poster Contest of the many Fantastic Projects around the Globe - http://on.fb.me/pSKK4q Nicholas Charbonnier's videos are showing up at http://olpc.tv and http://armdevices.net/ cheers, Sameer -- Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Professor, Information Systems San Francisco State University http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://olpcsf.org/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Teaching with computers / Enseniando con Computadoras
2011/11/19 Alan Kay alan.n...@yahoo.com: Hi David I think you make a valid point about open source software. The problem is that the end-users in this case have not bought into this dynamic -- and, given the real goals and the small windows of opportunity available, the open source dynamic is not just moot here, but is a real problem. I think what we all have quite a bit of difficulty with is doing *packaging* that is up to the level needed by the end users. This is a separate skill set (and set of talents). Just speaking for Viewpoints (but I think this applies to most of us) we are just much better at thinking of potentially good features and in implementing these up to some level of usability -- but *we* certainly fall short of what I would call real packaging. I was a champion of Hypercard at Apple and helped get it to be approved as a product ... and then was quite sobered, even shocked, by the amount of work -- hundreds of additional person-years -- that Apple put into turning something I thought was great for users, into something that *was* actually great for users. And it wasn't just the person-hours, but the check-list and vetting that was the key. Very best wishes, Alan This sounds like the product vs project distinction. Is Sugar a perpetual project (and therefore should be marketed as such) or is it a product (that's where the packaging comes in, I think). I sometimes use the analogy of pesto in my classes to talk about FOSS. Buying basil, garlic, olive oil, pine nuts, lemon and making pesto (a lot of work and personal satisfaction and perhaps as cheap as the store-bought jar), vs buying a jar of it at the local store (cheap and quick, but little labor), vs going to a restaurant, paying x3 for a wine pairing, and enjoying it all in the ambiance (much more expensive than any of the above, but the purpose at hand is very different (perhaps a date?) and people pay without a hitch!). The last option has all the spit and polish of a $100 bill but none of the self-actualization of making pesto :-) It all depends on what we are after - making pesto or going on a date! What is Sugar for? cheers, Sameer -- Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Professor, Information Systems San Francisco State University http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://olpcsf.org/ From: David Van Assche dvanass...@gmail.com To: Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com Cc: voluntarios y administradores OLPC para usuarios docentes olpc-...@lists.laptop.org; Carlos Rabassa car...@mac.com; argent...@lists.laptop.org; olpc bolivia olpc-boli...@lists.laptop.org; Lista de correo del equipo Somos-Azúcar somosazu...@lists.sugarlabs.org; IAEP SugarLabs iaep@lists.sugarlabs.org; OLPC Puno olpcp...@gmail.com Sent: Saturday, November 19, 2011 6:20 AM Subject: Re: [IAEP] Teaching with computers / Enseniando con Computadoras Also, what makes apple great to most people is their hardware not their software, their latest OS both on touchpads and laptops is horribly buggy, and feels more like beta software than even windows 7... Sugar isn't perfect, but its far far less bloated than any other option available, and that makes it comfortable to code for, fun to use, and hopefully easier to teach with. If only there were more marketing, more money, more coders, etc,etc... That's the deal with all open source software though... eventually it seems, if one holds on long enough, all those things do come... look at mozilla, apache, mysql, or suse... either individuals or very big companies come in and help out... why should it be any different with Sugar? David Van Assche 2011/11/19 Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com 2011/11/19 Carlos Rabassa car...@mac.com: Traducción al Español sigue al texto en Inglés Warning: This link promotes Apple: http://www.apple.com/education/profiles/punahou/#video-punahou?sr=hotnews.rss I am sending it to Sugar devotees, not to plant heretic ideas among them, but proposing that we read it as a practice of critical thinking in an attempt to mine any good ideas from it. Just think for a moment that Apple is frequently considered the birthplace of the concept of using computers in education; maybe they know something on the subject. May I suggest we read the text in this link replacing any working computer for Apple. Many of the statements will still be true. Please notice many of the applications they use are not exclusive of Apple, they are also the basic and easier to use applications in the Sugar XOs like Navigate, Write, Record. Let´s try to imagine ourselves for a moment in front of a classroom about to decide how to use our computers. Most of the text refers to the way they teach rather than to specific applications. I quote a paragraph that summarizes my point of the last few days about the urgent need to perfect Sugar: Because the Mac and its applications are so easy to use and so closely integrated into the curriculum
[IAEP] Hypercard in the news...
Hi Alan and IAEP, This Slashdot post reminded me of your Hypercard post from a few days ago. I find it interesting in the context of Sugar and the whole Buyers are builders vs Buyers are consumers debate and of course the whole spectrum in between.. http://apple.slashdot.org/story/11/11/30/1720214/why-was-hypercard-killed cheers, Sameer -- Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Professor, Information Systems San Francisco State University http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://olpcsf.org/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Sugar Digest 2011-12-01
On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 9:24 AM, Carlos Rabassa car...@mac.com wrote: Walter, thanks for taking a whole point of your report to discuss a subject I brought up. Unfortunately my point or its further clarification were not clear enough. You are still not getting it right. The only reason I offered a link to the game Circle-the-Cat was to offer an example of an easy to use application. What I meant by that is that you are already using it after a single clic on the link I sent. No downloading or installation is required. It works with any computer connected to internet (or to a school server??), using any operating system. Carlos, In some of my projects, we don't have the luxury of a school server. How would this work in a XO only environment? Let me offer another example, an application I constantly use: Real time translation http://tradukka.com/ ¿Want to test it quickly? I just translated the portion of your message that was written in French. This is the result, without any retouching: I have made it longer because I did not have time to make it shorter. By the way, if you tried to impress and/or intimidate me with your French, let me tell you that in the public high school I attended in Montevideo, we had French courses during 4 years. At the end of that period we all were able to read without any problem and to visit France or Quebec for business or pleasure without any communication problem. What you actually gave me with the French quote is another good example of how to alienate uruguayan teachers. Here in Uruguay we speak Spanish and that is the language teachers teach us in school. Not quite sure if they still teach French in public schools. Also, looking now at the meaning of the quote, I have to admit you perfectly describe the situation of Sugar. My question is now: ¿Do the children have the time to wait until Sugar is easily usable by everyone, not geeks only? We have children in India who use Sugar quite nicely without any prior computer experience (http://bhagmalpur.wordpress.com/2011/11/28/so-whats-working/). In fact, I would add that my personal usability with Sugar and GNOME is better than my usability with MacOSX, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and KDE. I don't buy your assertion. cheers, Sameer -- Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Professor, Information Systems San Francisco State University http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://olpcsf.org/ I believe I already told you very clearly why I refuse to discuss the value of Circle-the-Cat as an educational application: I am a firm believer no one, including myself, should discuss matters that are not within our field of expertise. By the way, this is a very good use of the signature blocks someone suggested long ago to be used in the mail lists. WIth the torrent of information we receive every day, it is important to evaluate the authors. Someone reading my signature block will see I am not saying I am a teacher or educator and will probably not invite me to engage in a discussion about the educational value of an application. I understand there are many teachers in Uruguay coaching children to do searches with Navigate and evaluate the results to decide which ones they may use for their homework and which ones they better discard. I strongly suggest we use these signature blocks to give a good example to the young users of the lists and keep reminding them they have to use their judgement to decide what to believe from all they can read. Carlos Rabassa Volunteer Plan Ceibal Support Network Montevideo, Uruguay On Dec 1, 2011, at 1:40 PM, Walter Bender wrote: 4. Carlos Rabassa posted a link to a fun game, Circle the Cat [5] in the context of a question he posed to the list: Why couldn´t all educational applications be as simple to use as this one? My glib response was to quote the French mathematician, Blaise Pascal: Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte. In other words, reaching to simplicity takes time and effort. Alan Kay chimed in about Hypercard, reminding us that it took years of refinement for it to reach its polished state. It is an open debate as to if and when Sugar will ever reach that level of polish and the path towards achieving it. But while Carlos did not want to discuss the value Circle the Cat as an educational program, to not do so seems to skirt the central question of Sugar: it is an education project after all!! I am interested in how we can use a simple game or activity to drive the children to deeper principles. So I wrote a Sugar Activity inspired by Circle the Cat, but with a twist: The user is invited to experiment with the algorithm (Please seeTurtle in a Pond [6])--of course I had to use a turtle instead of a cat. The game itself is fun to play and arguably of some educational benefit. But there is perhaps more to learn from algorithm development
Re: [IAEP] Teachers ask programmers / Maestros preguntan a Programadores
On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 3:52 PM, Iain Brown Douglas i...@browndouglas.plus.com wrote: On Tue, 2011-11-29 at 05:55 -0200, Carlos Rabassa wrote: This could open the competition to write applications to every programmer in the world who has the required knowledge. Teachers with ideas for good educational applications could write them themselves or find a programmer willing to do it. The teacher could select the programmer without restricting the choice to those willing to work as unpaid volunteers under the rules of SugarLabs. How can Sugar address this point and its misapprehension that Sugar looks like a closed shop? It was good to see a reply from Bert Freudenberg, that paid contributors are welcome. It would be good to hear it shouted loud that (for example) if a school were to commission someone to produce work suitable for the Sugar Activity Library, both the school and the writer would be credited. Carlos writes eloquently and with nice metaphor about the world in which he works. I think part of the content of his message tries to address the lack of response to his earlier message, Subject - Where may developers meet educators? As a generous community Sugar does well at harnessing individuals who can do some of their best work alone at 3am. How does Sugar go about giving support to service users? One small idea, could Sugar provide teachers with an area to upload and share lesson plans? This is a major chore, and in a subject anywhere near the edge of ones experience, harder still. When a lesson plan has been copied from elsewhere, it does not mean the children will hear it twice! This is something a bunch of us are working on (cc'ing them). In OLPC Jamaica, we started to build a forms-based interface where the lesson plans could be uploaded not as Word documents, but as text, etc. filled out in forms so that someone else may come by and clone an existing lesson plan and modify as needed. Unfortunately our main driving force behind this is no longer in Jamaica (she moved) so things have become a bit slow. This also came up at the recent OLPC San Francisco Community Summit as well. There are a few challenges, but nothing unsurmountable. I agree that lesson plans are a major challenge in any school environment. cheers, Sameer To Carlos I would say ask again: Where may developers meet educators? The education of an individual is a massive undertaking, it is built with small blocks, like the cat which I too enjoyed, and with other blocks with which it is sometimes difficult to work. Iain Brown Douglas Parent and Grandparent. Carlos Rabassa Volunteer Plan Ceibal Support Network Montevideo, Uruguay www.tiny.cc/AprendoILearn ___ 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 -- Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Professor, Information Systems San Francisco State University http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://olpcsf.org/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Thanks for the Media links... new request
On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 9:41 AM, Caryl Bigenho cbige...@hotmail.com wrote: Hi Folks! Thanks so much for all the great media links so many of you sent. I am now compiling them into a short slideshow for SCalE 10X which I will happily share when finished. I will simply put a title on each slide identifying where the deployment shown is located. Thus, sound will not be needed in the big expo hall. I will probably include some nice open source music for playing it in small places where background music would be nice. Now, I have another media request. If I have time, I would like to make another, similar, slide show about volunteering with OLPC and Sugar Labs. If you have a photo of yourself or other volunteers that you would be willing to share I will try to include it. All kinds of volunteering would be appropriate... CP projects, helping with deployments everywhere, testing, hacking, translating, etc., etc., etc. Preferably showing everyone having a fun time (or an interesting time if that is more appropriate). Thanks again... I look forward to seeing and sharing your adventures! Caryl ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep You can grab volunteer pictures from the summit photos. These are not in the field, but its surely a whole bunch of volunteers. 2010 http://www.flickr.com/photos/curiouslee/sets/72157625235030544/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/curiouslee/sets/72157625361491634/ http://codewiz.org/wiki/pictures/conf/olpc-sf-summit-2010 http://flickr.com/photos/55110273@N07/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/wtstelzer/sets/72157625292239134/ 2011 http://olpcsf.org/CommunitySummit2011/media cheers, Sameer ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] openhatch
I was wondering how many of you have looked at http://openhatch.org as a way to bring in new volunteers, and provide mentorship. We had Asheesh Laroia of OpenHatch on campus today, talking about the project, its approach and how they pull from various bug trackers including Sugarlabs. cheers, Sameer -- Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Professor, Information Systems San Francisco State University http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://commons.sfsu.edu/ http://olpcsf.org/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [OLPC library] OLPC/Sugar Doc Sprint Apr 6-10 @ OLPC HQ in Boston
On Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 12:55 AM, Holt h...@laptop.org wrote: Plz read all the wiki details RSVP here if you will contribute+attend, as we will very shortly reach capacity: http://j.mp/xomanual 20 People Expected in Person, from 4+ continents: Sameer Verma, Mike Lee, Walter Bender, Claudia Urrea, Richard Smith, Christoph Derndorfer, Reuben Caron, Mark Battley, Paul Fox, George Hunt, Chris Ball, Nancie Severs, CScott Ananian, Craig Perue, Saadia Baloch, Bill Stelzer, Bernie Innocenti, Dogi Unterhauser, Laura de Reynal, Adam Holt, etc -- even Sugar Labs' new finance officer Robert Fadel, and Pablo Flores if we are lucky! Awesome! I hope we do get lucky :-) BONUS PREGAME: Apr 2-6 video tutorials sprint proposed for our favorite Sugar activities, thanks to Bill Stelzer, Mark Battley, Laura de Reynal, Christoph Derndorfer and a growing list of talented mediamakers. I would like to re-kindle the idea of screencasts. Here it is briefly: The idea was to script a handful of basic show-and-tell in any activity (start, work through the activity, highlight the various toolbar items, and close with a Journal reflection). Record using a VM or recordmydesktop directly in Sugar, then make the OGV available someplace. The OGV can be split into audio and video, so we can redo the audio in different languages and do localization. We start with a few (six maybe?) and let others jump in. cheers, Sameer VIRTUAL ROMANCE AIN'T: Please talk to Caryl Bigenho ca...@laptop.org and our public list libr...@lists.laptop.org if you are motivated to write a particular chapter, but cannot attend in person, thanks!! A huge thanks to Master of Ceremonies Laura de Reynal who will be organizing nightly social events for all. She'll be working with Chris Ball (though he doesn't know it yet!) to organize several actual soccer/frisbee/etc matches too, get you limbered up, DO bring your April windbreaker sneakers, as I/she/we WILL be bouncing you out of the office on REGULAR occasions to fire up yr adrenaline =) -- Help kids everywhere map their world, at http://olpcMAP.net ! ___ Library mailing list libr...@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/library ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] All continents covered.
Really? It appears so. Thanks to Tony Forster's blog posting. http://tonyforster.blogspot.com/2012/02/xo-laptop-in-antarctica.html We now have a XO 1.5 in Antarctica! You can click on the photo and look for three dots on the hinge in the larger version. Three dots on the hinge indicate that it's a XO 1.5 When you heat Sugar it caramelizes. What happens to Sugar in extreme cold? Hmm... cheers, Sameer -- Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Professor, Information Systems San Francisco State University http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://commons.sfsu.edu/ http://olpcsf.org/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Scratch released under GPL 2.0
On Wed, Apr 11, 2012 at 10:22 AM, Bernie Innocenti ber...@codewiz.org wrote: On Wed, 2012-04-11 at 17:34 +1000, Sridhar Dhanapalan wrote: This is great. Does this mean that future versions will also be GPL? No guarantee, it's up to the Media Lab to decide. Is there any further news on the Scratch 2.0 plans to move to the non-Free Adobe Flash platform? http://wiki.scratch.mit.edu/wiki/Scratch_2.0 One has to be really stupid to base new development on Flash after Adobe announced its death. They are looking for a ActionScript developer... Sameer -- _ // Bernie Innocenti \X/ http://codewiz.org ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] a little magic, Jamaica style!
A short clip to show how our effort in Jamaica has been growing, one step at a time, with one XO, a few XOS (thank you, Contributor Program) and then some more, and then the idea begins to take root. Those smiles you see are real. So are the math scores. And fototoons. And the kid who goes around the school yard in August Town (http://olpcMAP.net?id=813006), documenting sources of water using Record, for his Water Cycle lesson in Grade 4. Or the six year old at Providence Basic (http://olpcMAP.net?id=810009) who has figured out - on his own - to modify Python code in Pippy to make his own version of the games in there. Kudos to everyone who has helped make this a reality, all the way back to the first meeting on September 5, 2008 at the University of the West Indies, Jamaica. Of course, many are still plugging away and will continue to do so. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMAZlPWCkw4 We're jammin', Sameer -- Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Professor, Information Systems San Francisco State University http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://commons.sfsu.edu/ http://olpcsf.org/ http://olpcjamaica.org.jm/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] The Agility of One Laptop Per Child with CTO Ed McNierney 06/05 by IE Radio | Blog Talk Radio
Approx. 30 minutes. Link: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/ieradio/2012/06/05/the-agility-of-one-laptop-per-child-with-cto-ed-mcnierney cheers, Sameer ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] getting books and media from the Internet Archive...
Some background here. http://olpcsf.org/node/61 fetch_IA_item script here: https://github.com/rajbot/fetch_ia_item Try it out and see if it breaks. Then fix it or let the author (rku...@archive.org) know :-) cheers, Sameer -- Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Professor, Information Systems San Francisco State University http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://commons.sfsu.edu/ http://olpcsf.org/ http://olpcjamaica.org.jm/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] OLPC San Francisco Community Summit 2012
Registration is now open for the upcoming OLPC San Francisco Community Summit 2012. http://www.olpcsf.org/node/70 See you there! cheers, Sameer -- Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Professor, Information Systems San Francisco State University http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://commons.sfsu.edu/ http://olpcsf.org/ http://olpcjamaica.org.jm/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] OLPC San Francisco Community Summit 2012
Note that we will be hosting SugarCamp++ right after the summit. SugarCamp++ will be Oct 22-24 at the same location. cheers, Sameer On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 10:14 AM, Sameer Verma sve...@sfsu.edu wrote: Registration is now open for the upcoming OLPC San Francisco Community Summit 2012. http://www.olpcsf.org/node/70 See you there! cheers, Sameer -- Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Professor, Information Systems San Francisco State University http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://commons.sfsu.edu/ http://olpcsf.org/ http://olpcjamaica.org.jm/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] OLPC San Francisco Community Summit 2012 - Poster Gallery | OLPC San Francisco
Can't make it to the OLPC SF Community Summit this year? Submit to our poster gallery! Blog post with details at http://www.olpcsf.org/node/71 cheers, Sameer ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Grassroots-l] send in a poster
We have 5 submissions. Send yours in soon! cheers, Sameer On Wed, Oct 3, 2012 at 11:53 PM, Rabi Karmacharya r...@olenepal.org wrote: Sameer. According to the announcement, the first 10 submissions will be printed and displayed. Can you let us know many you have received till now? We would like to submit one from Nepal, but it will take a few days for us to discuss and design the poster. If you are close to hitting your target, then we will have to plan accordingly. Cheers. Rabi Karmacharya Executive Director OLE Nepal T: +977.1.551 C: 98511.04280 S: rabzkarma http://www.olenepal.org * Visit our Digital Library at http://www.pustakalaya.org * On Thu, Oct 4, 2012 at 1:02 AM, Sameer Verma sve...@sfsu.edu wrote: Do you run a OLPC [related] project, but can't make it to the OLPC SF Community Summit this year? Submit a poster! http://www.olpcsf.org/CommunitySummit2012/posters cheers, Sameer -- Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Professor, Information Systems San Francisco State University http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://commons.sfsu.edu/ http://olpcsf.org/ http://olpcjamaica.org.jm/ ___ Grassroots mailing list grassro...@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/grassroots ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] OLPC San Francisco Community Summit 2012 on USTREAM
Live stream at 11:30 am and 1:45 pm Pacific time today! http://ustream.tv/channel/olpc-san-francisco-community-summit-2012 Look for schedule details at http://olpcsf.org/summit Sameer + olpcsf gang ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
