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Sugar Digest

1. The New York Times reported on a FailFaire gathering last month “over drinks and finger food”, where MobileActive, “a network of people and organizations trying to improve the lives of the poor through technology”, presented a prize for the worst ICT for Development project. The prize was an OLPC XO laptop, “a program that MobileActive members regard as the emblem of the failure of technology to achieve change for the better.” The Chronicle of Philanthropy subsequently picked up on the article: “One Laptop Per Child was recently laid off some staff members [SIC] after falling far short of its goal of providing inexpensive laptop computers to tens of millions of children in the developing world.”

I asked Katrin Verclas, a founder of MobileActive, for the evidence that OLPC was a failure and she said “OLPC was not discussed or presented at the FailFaire.” It seems she has no evidence and yet she is sufficiently tone-deaf to be unconcerned that her using the XO as an emblem of failure might be damaging to the efforts of the thousands of people trying to help the millions of children who are using the XO and Sugar. I would expect better from the New York Times, the Chronicle of Philanthropy, and from an organization that purports to shed some light on what works/doesn’t work in development. I recommended that Verclas read Aristotle and and Aardvark go to Washington as she might learn a few more techniques for character assassination from Cathcart and Klein.

2. On a positive note, I’ve archived a short exchange on the #sugar channel on irc.freenode.net.

<marcopg> erikos: approve my trivial patch! I want to push again to sugar after so long
<erikos> marcopg: just because you have just one module does not mean to not need to specify the module anymore!
<erikos> marcopg: r!
<erikos> marcopg: welcome back!
<marcopg> erikos haha
<marcopg> thanks

For those of you who a relatively new to Sugar, Marco was a lead developer on the Red Hat team that worked with OLPC and Pentagram to develop Sugar. He helped found Sugar Labs but has been missing from our ranks over the past 12 months due to other obligations. It is great to have Marco contributing again.

3. Dinko Galetic, Lucian Branescu Mihaila, and Sebastian Dziallas all successfully completed their Google Summer of Code projects. Congratulations and thanks to Google for sponsoring the work and to their mentors Stefan (Dogi) Unterhauser, Luis Gustavo Lira, Michael Stone, and Sascha Silbe, and to Tim McNamara for organizing the Sugar Labs GSoC program.

4. This review was posted on the Physics page on activities.sugarlabs.org. I had to share it:

I love it! It’s doodling for inventors! I’ve had so many ideas from this.
Starting live is the only thing that makes sense. Otherwise it would
not be obvious what the thing does, silly! Also, stopping time is for
losers. build stuff on scaffolding, big tall blocks, then delete them
when everything is pinned, or jointed, just like real life.

In the community

5. There is a call for presentations for an on-line global education conference that may be of interest to the Sugar community (See [1]).

6. There is a comprehensive write up of last week’s education summit at LinuxCon (See [2]).

Tech Talk

7. We are making great progress towards Sugar 0.90. Follow the fun at [3] .

Sugar Labs

Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list.

August 7th – 13th (61 emails)

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Sugar

1. Squeakfest Part II: The final day of Squeakfest as was uplifting as
my first day at the conference. There were reports from the field
using Etoys and many “oh-the-things-you-can-do” presentations by
teachers who use Etoys in the classroom. There was a nice mix of
projects built by learners – an amazing physics model built by
high-school students in North Carolina was a highlight – as well as
projects intended to let a learner explore a powerful idea – a
beautiful-in-its-simplicity model for estimating the area of a circle;
these small projects – “Etoy-lets” – are being shared on line along
with an extensive collection of simple guides to using Etoys. Again I
was impressed by the extensive use of flaps and books that are created
as part of the project generation process and the use of versioning to
monitor a learner’s progress. These facilities represent a major
usability improvement in Etoys in support of pedagogical goals. Etoys
is great stuff, well worth the initial investment in time and effort
to learn.

2. I contrast this with the sad state of the computer industry’s
attempts to sell computers to schools: “[] says teachers need high-end
laptops but students will just be accessing content and communication
so need basic functionality.” While there is nothing fundamentally
wrong with giving children access to content, does that really
constitute the basic functionality needed by the learner? The good
news is that Sugar (and Etoys) can run on these “basic” platforms. We
should stop selling teachers and learning short by dumbing down the
opportunities to use computation as a thing to think with.

3. Christoph Derndorfer, who is on another of his world-wide tours of
OLPC deployments – this time to Latin America – just reposted a link
to Michael Trucano’s restating-the-obvious article on 1-to-1 laptop
deployment pitfalls on the World Bank’s website. (Most of Trucano’s
well-worn advise applies to any learning initiative; alas, he does not
provide much insight for those of us trying to actually solve real
problems on the ground.) I will give Christoph the benefit of doubt
that with the coincidence of his post that he is not deliberately
making a backhanded disparagement of the deployments in Uruguay and
Paraguay he has visited. While these deployments have not yet reached
the status perfection, the deployment teams at Ceibal and Paraguay
Educa have never strayed into the dangerous waters described by
Trucano:

1. Dump hardware in schools, hope for magic to happen
Far from it, there have been extensive support mechanisms in place
in .ur and .py from Day One

2. Design for OECD learning environments, implement elsewhere
While there is some sharing of content and best practice, it is the
local pedagogical team that calls the shots in both deployments.

3. Think about educational content only after you have rolled out
your hardware
Again, pedagogy has driven the pace of deployment. At the same
time, the entire deployment has been thought of within the context of
a learning platform, which includes laptops, connectivity, servers,
training, content development, documentation, support, community
outreach, etc.

4. Assume you can just import content from somewhere else
The key here is “just”. Both .uy and .py think deeply about
content, but they are also opportunistic – taking advantage of great
content developed elsewhere, for example, by the Etoys community.

5. Don’t monitor, don’t evaluate
At Ceibal, they have an extensive operation for monitoring the
state of the network, servers, and laptops within their deployment.
There are numerous ongoing evaluations of the program, both internal
and external. Paraguay Educa was the subject of an external evaluation
by the IADB, which issued a very positive report.

6. Make a big bet on an unproven technology (especially one based
on a  closed/proprietary standard) or single vendor, don’t plan for
how to avoid ‘lock-in
Both programs have used a open bidding process and have some
percentage of hardware from multiple vendors. Both programs use Free
Software.

7. Don’t think about (or acknowledge) total cost of
ownership/operation issues or calculations
.uy has been diligent in publishing their total-cost-of-ownership
numbers – these numbers, based upon the costs measured in the field
happen to be much less than the inflated numbers fabricated by
naysayers.

8. Assume away equity issues
While no one is claiming that equity issues are no longer a
concern, the fact that the per-household penetration of computing in
.uy is inversely proportional to household income says a lot. And in
everyone of these households, the children have free Internet access.
Wow.

9. Don’t train your teachers (nor your school headmasters, for that matter)
The biggest investment in the .py program has been in teacher
training. As the project scales, finding ways to make this process
more efficient will be key. But no one has ever suggested that it was
not a vital part of the process.

Trucano leaves #10 as an open exercise for the reader. I’ll add:

10.Don’t involve the community

In both .uy and .py community involvement is part of the project by design.
In the community

4. I have some passes for Sugar community members to attend LinuxCon 2010 in Boston on August 10–12 (thanks to the Linux Foundation). Please let me know if you are interested.

Sugar Digest

1. Over the past month I have had the pleasure of visiting Sugar/OLPC deployments in Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina, Nicaragua, and Peru. Each has been different from the next, but all share a common goal of bringing the opportunity for learning to the children of their communities. I’ve gotten to spend time with the local deployment teams, teachers, trainers, technicians, government officials, children, and even some parents. Sugar, GNU/Linux and OLPC volunteers and community members has also been present everywhere I have gone.

I cannot begin to describe the dedication and energy I have observed and what it means to me to see the efforts of countless thousands of volunteers being put into practice.

In Nicaragua, the deployment is being run by Grupo Financiero LAFISE BANCENTRO. They are focusing their efforts on the Atlantic Coast, where the needs are greatest. Daniel Drake, who deserves to be knighted for his tireless efforts – he has volunteered in Ethiopia, Nigeria, Nepal, Argentina, Paraguay, and Peru – was in Managua, helping yet another technical team get on top of all of the issues they face in scaling up a deployment. Claudia Urea led a series of discussions with the pedagogical team and I had a chance to hold a workshop on hacking Sugar with the local GNU/Linux community; we covered a lot of ground and managed to submit a patch by the end of evening.

In Peru, I spent time at the ministry of education, giving them an update on the latest from Sugar Labs and discussing with them a strategy for upgrading their XO 1.0 computers while phasing in XO 1.5 machines as well as Sugar on a Stick. The highlight of the trip was a day-long seminar with 1000 teachers from schools in the Lima region. (These teachers will be working with Sugar in the next phase of the Peru deployment.) I gave two presentations: a morning talk on Sugar and pedagogy and an after-lunch demonstration of Sugar (we ate chifa). I had a very good reception, but I was out-staged by the presentation by Sdenka Salas, a teacher from Puno, a city on the shore of Lake Titikaka. Sdenka, as you may recall, wrote a book about Sugar for teachers, ”La Laptop XO en el Aula”. She also hosted Sebastian Silva at a recent Sugar Camp in Puno that made major inroads into translating Sugar into Quechua and Aymara. As usual, I gave my presentation using Turtle Art. Sdenka used Etoys for her talk. Needless to say, the teachers were blown away by seeing the accomplishments of one of their own. It was breathtaking. Victor Castillo ended the meeting with a call for more regional autonomy and sharing among them – a great direction.

2. While in Lima, I got my first look at the OLPC “High School” machine. It is a blue XO 1.5 with a “standard” non-membrane keyboard. The keyboard exceeded my expectations. I am guessing that it will be quite popular with deployments.

In the community

3. Squeakfest will be held in Wilmington, North Carolina on the 26th–28th of July.

4. There will be a Turtle Art Day at the Arlington Career Center in Arlington Virginia on 7 August. Jeff Elkner’s team will be showing off the activity portal they have build for uploading and sharing Turtle Art projects. (It could serve as a prototype for a general Sugar project portal.)

Tech talk

5. Chris Ball announced the release of build os206 as the final 10.1.1 release build for XO-1.5 laptops. Release notes are available at [1]. Instructions for installing the release can be found at [2].
Sugar Labs

Gary Martin has generated SOMs from the past few weeks of discussion on the IAEP mailing list.

2010 July 3rd-9th (38 emails)

Visit our planet for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments.

Sugar Digest

1. In their humorous treatise on political double-speak, Aristotle and an Aardvark go to Washington, Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein define ‘contextomy’ as “a subtle variation on the straw-man argument” where you ”yank” your victim’s words out of context. A straw-man argument attributes an opponent to a position that in fact they do not hold. Contextomy adds the twist that you de-contextualize a quote in order to misstate (or overstate) their position.

An example of contextomy is Mark Warschauer’s post, OLPC: How Not to Run a Laptop Program. The premise of Warschauer’s article is that the ‘OLPC model’ is “simply passing out XOs and getting out of children’s way.” No planning, no training, no teacher engagement… He goes on to say that this is an ill-advised model that does not work. In the article itself Warchauer never cites an evidence that this is in fact the ‘OLCP model’, but in a comment he refers the reader to the OLPC mission statement as justification for his straw-man argument. Contextomy.

I am not aware of any OLPC (or Sugar) deployment that in any way resembles Warshauer’s straw man, in the United States or elsewhere. (The largest deployment in the United States is the city-wide deployment in Birmingham Alabama, which has involved extensive engagement of teachers, parents, the local university, libraries, churches, and other community assets. As with most deployments, there is extensive [http://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=116638 observation and longitudinal data] are beginning to become available.) Frankly, it is irresponsible for Warshauer to ignore these data. If he has any actual data to back up his position, he fails to cite it.

Meanwhile, in this week’s IRC discussion with teachers running Sugar projects, some evidence surfaced that contradicts Warshchauer’s argument. (Apologies for my poor translation of the Spanish-language original.)

[snip]
C: It is best to hear directly from the actors themselves …
C: What can different group members tell us about their approaches to the training of teachers …
F: In Nicaragua selected schools participate in the program, then teachers are invited to eneral training workshops three or two days. After that process initiated the visits and support in schools.
C: I can share one important element in what I do personally is to make sure that teachers can experience tools in the same way I expect them to do with the children …
M: In Paraguay at this moment we are training teachers in seventh grade and we are developing a total of 150 hours where we develop educational issues. Principally develop their curricula in various activities.
C: We can not expect teachers to teach in a “Constructionist”, which taught for instructions …
J: The workshop of the last two days had a lot of participation active teachers, and they built their own learning projects
S: J. took that approach.
J: [The teachers] said in their evaluation that what they liked most was the process
J: To share and create something with the other
I: It was very fruitful because the projects were assembled collaboratively
J: It is good to see that people value this opportunity, whether they are aware of their base “constructionist” or not
C: Another important element … we do not want to sell the idea that after a workshop (2, 3 or up to 5 days) we will teach ALL … the best way to learn is by doing and using XO Activities …
M: The constructionist approach to ours is the challenge is that teachers so they understand
C: M, do you mean by that develop curricula of the various activities?
I: There is no construction without collaboration
I: Going from theory to practice and vice versa
M: to touch directly the issues that develop in the classroom
F: In our workshops we work in groups or tables work, we try to have a facilitator at each table. to Teachers are provided guidelines we have developed learning here at the Foundation.
C: According … construction in collaboration .. I like that!
M: for those who can not be present, there information on a web site or examples of projects?
C: Thanks Mary … perfect!
C: F. … and there is a space for teachers develop their own guidelines?
I: They are rich in sharing desks, and guides such as built?
S: It is simple to really understand the idea let children explore, that each child has their skills and why the proposal should be diversified classroom, for example. The Teachers are great instructions. Yesterday there were many corrections at this point.
I: it is interesting that teachers construct their own guides …
F: Right. At some point the workshop alongside teachers of each level and each plan their own activities
I: Interesting …
S: In Colombia we have four objectives with the Qualifications [of deployments]: 1. Create local capacity to respond to administrative, technical and related educational implementation; 2. Explore routes that allow the introduction XO’s success as a teaching resource; 3. Promote culture constructionist as an innovative learning models; 4. …

[this thread continues for an hour]

Granted there were some legitimate and useful criticism of OLPC in the comments to Warschauer’s article, but the article itself was unhelpful doublespeak.

2. Carolyn Meeks and I submitted the final report for the Gardner Pilot Academy Sugar-on-a-Stick pilot.

In the community

3. It is not too late to participate in the Sugar World Cup 2010 beginning 11 June.

4. Logs of the Spanish-language weekly IRC meetings of teachers working with Sugar are archived here.

Tech talk

5. 0.88.1 landed… thanks Simon, Tomeu, and all those who reported bugs and submitted patches: Aleksey, Korakurider, Aleksey Lim, Bernie Innocenti, Benjamin Berg, et al.

6. Chris Ball reports that “I got Sugar running on the ARM SoC we’ll be using for XO-1.75 and XO-3, and it didn’t require any porting at all.” There has been some discussions about enhancements to Sugar to better accommodate touch and multi-touch. Join the discussion.

7. There has also been a discussion of potential features for 0.90. See the devel list archives.

Sugar Labs

Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list.

2010 May 29–June 4 (62 emails)

Visit our planet for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments.

Sugar Digest

1. I heard a Sugar story today from a school in Oaxaca Mexico. At a ceremony for the governor to celebrate the laptop program a young girl gave a speech in Spanish. At the end of her speech, she launched the Speak activity and proceeded to have Sugar give the same speech in her native language, one of the indigenous languages of the region.

2. Futbol: I probably shouldn’t say this on a public list, but I am not a fan of Italian Football. I prefer the “beautiful game” played in the South. Even in the United States we know that the FIFA World Cup is coming soon – June 11–July 11.

Gonzalo Odiard from Sugar Labs Argentina has suggested we use it as an excuse to organize a Sugar World Cup. Beginning with the observation that many of the open bugs on the Sugar [bugs.sugarlabs.org] and OLPC [dev.laptop.org] Trac systems are relatively simple (most could be resolved in just a couple of hours effort), Gonzalo is proposing we establish country-based teams that compete to close as many tickets as we can during the same time frame as the football tournament. For each bug fixed, a “goal” is scored. (A bug is considered fixed when a patch is approved on the Sugar-devel list.) Note that, like Maradona, you are allowed to use your hands. At the end of the tournament, after Ghana wins the FIFA cup, the Sugar Bowl will be awarded to the team that fixed the most bugs. Not only will we fix a lot of bugs, but we will be strengthening local development/deployment teams.

3. Congratulations to ceibalJAM for winning honorable mention in the international Cyberart competition (Prix Ars) at Ars Electronica.

4. Congratulations of Gerald A., who defended his thesis last week. Gerald studied the impact of Sugar on the culture of five fifth-grade classrooms in a NY public school.

5. John Maloney has led an effort to “Sugarize” Scratch v13 (See [1]). Notably, thanks to Bert Freudenberg, there is now support for the Journal. (I’ll have to update my review on ASLO.) In addition, Scratch read data from the camera and resistive sensors plugged into the microphone jack on OLPC XO computers. A tip of the hat to Claudia Urea whose persistence kept the effort moving forward.

6. Last summer at the Desktop Summit I was asked by Linux Magazine Espaniol to write an article about Sugar. It appeared in their print edition in October and is finally available on line [2] (in Spanish).

In the community

7. Raúl Gutiérrez Segalés reports that there will be a Sugar Workshop at the National University of Asunción. See [3] for details.

8. Claudia has been organizing IRC discussion on learning (in Spanish) on Wednesdays at 10:00 EST (14:00 UTC) at forum.laptop.org. The English-language learning chats organized by Joy Riach are on Thursdays at 10:00 EST.

Tech talk

9. Mirabelle has landed. The Fedora Sugar-on-a-Stick (SoaS) team, which includes Sebastian Dziallas, Peter Robinson, and Mel Chua, has released a new version based on Fedora 13 and Sugar 0.88. The goal of this release was to integrate SoaS more completely into the Fedora “Spin” process, provide a structure for longer-term maintenance and stability. While there are only ten Sugar activities bundled with Mirabelle, Tom Gilliard has put together a collection of activities that can be loaded onto a separate USB key from which they can be installed locally. For information about further customizations, please contact the SoaS team at soas AT sugarlabs.org.

Sugar Labs

Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list.

2010 May 15th–21st (68 emails)

Visit our planet for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments.