[IAEP] Into the classroom.

[David Farning]

Product.  		Check.
Delivery Mechanism. 	Check.
Customers		hmmm.

Last week I sent out a community outreach update in which I stated that
engaging the education community was blocked until we could put livecds
into educators hands.  Happily, I can now say that I was wrong.

The challenge is how to get Sugar onto the computers that are in fornt
of children.

My background is technology, so I was looking at problem as a matter of
pushing the technology downstream.  Instead, we can look at the problem
as matter of having teachers pull the technology into the classroom.

At this point we have a reasonable piece of software.  The Sugar desktop
is functional and there are a couple of demonstration activities.  Our
developers are doing a good job getting organized.  It won't be long
until we get a into a innovate-stabilize cadence which will allow us to
develop an excellent piece of software at good pace.

We have a delivery mechanism, the Linux distributions.  Redhat, Fedora,
Debian, and Ubuntu all do one thing very well.  They deliver software.
The olpc-team at Fedora is gaining ground at an amazing rate.  The
sugar-team in the .deb side of the fence is also doing well.

The education spins have not been doing so well.  Skolelinux is
establishing a pretty good foothold in Northern Europe.  But other spins
are less far along.  

Rather then use the education spins to push, we can use the education
communities to pull.  Some of the education communities that seem
promising are:

1.  Constructionist.
2.  Collaboration oriented.  There are many communities springing up
around collaboration oriented technologies such as Moodle.
3.  Open Source.  There is a small, but growing number of organization
based around spreading FLOSS in the school systems.
4.  On-line.  There are numerous organizations involved in online
development of lesson plans and books.

I would say our next step is to start engaging these organizations in
figuring out how they can best use Sugar in their own classrooms.

I am not naive enough to believe that we will get widespread adoption
overnight using this method.  But, the listen, learn, improve, release
model of open source development is a natural fit.

dfarning