[Its.an.education.project] An "About" statement? (Was: untangling constructionism)

[Kevin Cole]

On Fri, May 2, 2008 at 8:50 AM, Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com> wrote:
> Help me craft the about statement. I think the discussion should be
>  about Sugar as a technology in support of learning. That certainly
>  includes discussion of epistemology and learning as they inform the
>  Sugar development. There is also a need, especially at this juncture,
>  to discuss some mechanics of getting a sustainable development
>  community model set up.

Depending upon who you want to attract, it might be nice to have an
opening sentence which summarizes, for the unwashed masses, what makes
Sugar "sweeter" than anything that's come before it.  At the risk of
excommunication, I became aware of Sugar only after becoming aware of
a little green and white box.  Software's kind of useless without
hardware to run it on, and while I'm a strong advocate of open source
in education (and everywhere else), what drew me in to all these
recent mailing lists was the idea of a low-cost, low-power box with a
mesh network and a built-in webcam that converges with my open source
zealotry.  That box doesn't necessarily need to be the XO, and I like
to think that the XO et al are just the baby steps in what can and
will evolve.

Key to the "About" is explaining to "the unwashed masses" or even the
"washed masses".  Speaking as a member of the semi-washed, don't
assume people are already reading every mailing list out there and are
already up-to-speed with the history.  (Maybe a link to more in depth
coverage elsewhere to get them up to speed, but not lots and lots of
links to wade through.)