[Its.an.education.project] My Thoughts on Sugar...

[Martin Sevior]

Hi Tom,
          I'm one of the primary authors of Write and the
collaborative feature, (abicollab), that allows students to easily
share a document, thank you for sharing these thoughts! This is
exactly the vision we had for abicollab and collaborative work in
general.

For our part we have every intention of continuing the development of
AbiWord and Write. The current development strand of AbiWord has a
powerful annotation feature to enable teachers to correct documents
and to allow different authors to easily add suggestions for
replacement text.

Cheers

Martin

On Fri, May 2, 2008 at 11:32 PM, Tom Hoffman <tom.hoffman at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
>  This blog post I wrote recently on Sugar has been pretty well
>  received, so it seemed like a good thing to interject near the
>  beginning of this conversation:
>  http://www.tuttlesvc.org/2008/04/obligatory-sugar-post.html
>
>  As I see it, Sugar is a set of tools for writing creative and
>  collaborative activities for children. I think a lot of the confusion
>  about, say, "porting" Sugar for Windows mis-places the reader's
>  emphasis on Sugar as a window manager, rather than Sugar's potential
>  advantages for the activities (née applications) which are built on
>  it. Put another way, what's most important about Sugar is not what I
>  see and do up to the point I launch an activity, it is how the
>  activity works.
>
>  As an English teacher, here's what grabbed me about Sugar: it was
>  designed to make it as easy to pass a copy of a student's work across
>  the room electronically as it is to carry a piece of paper across the
>  room. A close second in importance is automatic saves that don't use a
>  hierarchical file system. Not using a hierarchy isn't such a big deal
>  in high school, but if you've ever sat in the back of a room full of
>  third graders while their teacher tries to make sure they've all saved
>  their PowerPoints to the right folder in a networked drive, you'll
>  understand the value (although the computer teachers tend to have
>  internalized the idea that that teaching 9 year olds to use tools
>  ill-suited to their needs is part of their job).
>
>  What is important is not just that the Sugar HIG requires that
>  functionality, but that the Sugar libraries should make it easy for a
>  developer to generate it. With mature Sugar, it should be possible to
>  create a basic implementation of what I describe above by importing a
>  Python-wrapped GTK rich text editing widget, doing import sugar and
>  writing 100 lines of code or so to tie it all together.
>
>  In a sense, the whole OLPC project is designed to maximize the
>  opportunity for kids to undertake collaborative Sugar activities.
>  That's why you need a cheap laptop with great power consumption and
>  mesh networking. In this context, porting Sugar to other platforms is
>  simply furthering children's access to those activities.
>
>  As a teacher, if one kid fires up an OLPC running the full Sugar shell
>  and clicks on the Write icon in the frame, and another kid double
>  clicks on a icon on his desktop or selects Write from his Start menu,
>  I don't care as long as they can easily collaborate. I don't really
>  care if on Windows Write opens as a regular window, with a separate
>  window for the neighborhood view. I can deal with that. I don't care
>  if my Windows desktop running Write has any concept of mesh
>  networking, because it is plugged into an ethernet jack anyhow. I just
>  want my kids to be able to have writing circles with the least
>  technical hurdles possible.
>
>  In a perfect world, Sugar would pre-date OLPC by about three years,
>  and the relationship between hardware and software would be more
>  apparent -- we've got this revolutionary learning software, now we
>  just need to design a device to get it to as many kids as possible!
>  Back in the real world, however, "Sugar" is the software written to
>  run the OLPC, not vice versa, and it is all getting really confusing.
>
>  >From where I sit, there has been a distinct lack of interest in Sugar
>  from the "learning sciences" and other communities that are involved
>  in research and development around software for kids. They have not
>  seen Sugar for what it is, which is the one chance in this
>  generation,and I'm talking human generations here, not technological
>  ones, to create a common set of open source tools specifically for
>  writing applications for kids. They don't seem to get that this is a
>  singular opportunity to invest in the foundation of their discipline.
>  I don't understand why, but one hope I hold out for Walter's software
>  spin-off is that he can engage this community. However, I only see
>  that happening if Sugar is not limited to OLPC or Linux. Also, it is
>  certainly true that as long as Sugar is a subset of OLPC, OLPC doesn't
>  have a strong motivation to dedicate resources to non-OLPC platforms.
>  Sugar needs an home outside of OLPC that can look at the software in a
>  broader context.
>
>  --Tom
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