[Its.an.education.project] Sugar talk at PyCon Due

[Edward Cherlin]

On Fri, May 2, 2008 at 8:24 AM, Bernie Innocenti <bernie at codewiz.org> wrote:
> Ciao,
>
>  I asked for the opportunity to give a public talk about the Sugar
>  spin-off within an annual Italian Python conference on May 9th-11th:
>
>   http://www.pycon.it/
...
>  Notwithstanding my short notice, the organizers did their best to
>  make this fit somehow.  There may be an opportunity for a short talk
>  on Friday 9th, just before Richard's talk.  There's a second
>  possibility as the last talk of Saturday evening, which lets us go
>  on as long as we want with questions.

Both?

>  In both cases, the event will be recorded and broadcast, so it's
>  a wonderful opportunity to increase our visibility.  At this point
>  we need to do more communication, or the press will keep repeating
>  that a bunch of Linux fundamentalists are trying to sabotage
>  Negroponte's educational project.

The big story in the tech community, widely quoted, is Slashdot |
Negroponte vs. Open-Source Fundamentalists
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/28/1529201&from=rss

It presents the two sides, although there are many more Linux
advocates there than Microsoft advocates. The rest of the press has
repeated Negroponte's words balanced with quotations from Walter
Bender. I don't think that this is a problem for us. The only
publications that I have seen to be against OLPC in their reporting
are the Wall Street Journal and Business Week, both of which appear to
be in favor of more proprietary software and against Free/Open Source
Software in any form. As far as I can tell through Google, neither of
them has picked up Negroponte's accusation.

>  Without knowing how much time we have I've tentatively set objectives
>  as follows:
>
>   - Really short introduction of One Laptop Per Child, Sugar, and
>    Constructionism

My elevator pitch starts out with "learning by doing in a process of
collaborative discovery" and then briefly describes the collaboration
and discovery features of the XO hardware and software, including its
use of Free Software almost exclusively.
(http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Marvell_microkernel is the exception.) RMS
will make that point, explaining that that is the reason why he
replaced his aging Thinkpad with an XO.

The Nigerian children's XO Hospital is a good example of how
Constructionism is working in the field. Ivan Krstić talked about
being able to go beyond the limited educational texts provided in poor
schools in his talk at PyCon2008. I'm sure there are others, although
I am concerned that the volunteer community and the user community
don't get to talk to each other.

>   - The subtle distinction between OLPC and olpc
>
>   - The OLPC mission, the 5 principles

And the fact that Negroponte has unilaterally changed the mission statement.
http://www.olpcnews.com/use_cases/education/olpc_mission_constructionism.html

>   - Summary of what Negroponte announced publicly, with a
>    few quoted excerpts

Also the newly announced CEO, Charles Kane.
http://www.technologyreview.com/Biztech/20711/page1/
http://www.olpcnews.com/people/leadership/olpc_new_president_laptop_project.html
"The OLPC mission is a great endeavor, but the mission is to get the
technology in the hands of as many children as possible," he said.
"Whether that technology is from one operating system or another, one
piece of hardware or another, or supplied or supported by one
consulting company or another doesn't matter."

"It's about getting it into kids' hands," he continued. "Anything that
is contrary to that objective, and limits that objective, is against
what the program stands for."

>   - Why this plan alienated employees, volunteers and grassroots
>    from the uppercase OLPC

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Controversies has links to the various
e-mail discussions, blog posts, and interviews with Negroponte, in
addition to a summary of numerous issues. Here is another post.

One Laptop Per Child Liberation, Benjamin Mako Hill
http://www.olpcnews.com/software/windows/laptop_liberation.html

>   - A few quotes from GregDeK, RMS, Walter Bender, etc.

How about Scott Ananian, about the difficulties of a Windows port?
A technical assessment of porting "Sugar" to Windows
http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-April/thread.html#13242

Also Microsoft's statement that it is not in fact working on dual-booting?
"While we have investigated the possibility in the past, Microsoft is
not developing dual-boot Windows XP support for One Laptop Per Child's
XO laptop. As we announced in December, Microsoft plans to publish
formal design guidelines early this year that will assist flash-based
device manufacturers in designing machines that enable a high-quality
Windows experience. Our current goal remains to provide a high-quality
Windows experience on the XO device."

>   - Who we are and what we are up to

Which 'we' are you thinking of? Walter's group? The active volunteers?
The entire OLPC community including schoolchildren, teachers, parents,
and others?

>   - Call for help from the Python and FLOSS community

About time. One of my major complaints against Negroponte is his
consistent refusal to talk to the wider community and recruit more
volunteers to both development and marketing. In fact the volunteers,
including the various OLPC country groups, have been almost completely
excluded from the OLPC marketing program, and have had to work blind.

I'm on the staff of PyCon2009 in Chicago, and bid chairbeing for
PyCon2010/2011 in San Francisco/Silicon Valley.

>  How does it sounds?
>
>  Walter, you are of course invited, and you should do the speech if you can.
>  I'm not such a good speaker, and I think the ought to be given in English
>  to reach the widest possible audience. Marco, same offer to you.  I'm going
>  to do it only as the last resort :-)
>
>  --
>    \___/
>   _| o |  Bernie Innocenti - http://www.codewiz.org/
>   \|_X_|  "It's an education project, not a laptop project!"
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-- 
Edward Cherlin
End Poverty at a Profit by teaching children business
http://www.EarthTreasury.org/
"The best way to predict the future is to prevent it."--Alan Kay