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

[Bill Kerr]

I liked Tom Hoffman's blog post (reposted here as "My Thoughts on Sugar")
because he did attempt to integrate the technology features of OLPC with
some of the desired educational advantages  (eg. collaborative writing,
saving without a file system):
" 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"

I think the Human Interface Guidelines are great as general guidelines
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Human_Interface_Guidelines
 - Tom's post connected some of those general principles to how would they
would be applied in situ by a teacher in a classroom, or under a tree ;-)

Perhaps evolution could also be a unifying theme?

Like everything else operating systems and  user interfaces evolve - Sugar
is part of that ongoing evolution, eg. we need a community user interface to
supplement the old desktop idea

(Dan Ingalls has argued that we should do away with OS altogether --> "*An
operating system is a collection of things that don't fit into a language.
There shouldn't be one.")*

The idea that learning theories evolve too - referring to Walter's arguments
with Seymour (untangling constructionism thread) that MicroWorlds is too
stand-alone and we need to add to that more communication and collaboration
features:

The one point that Seymour and I argued about quite a bit was the role of
collaboration. Tools such as Microworlds tend to be solo
activities--although there can be a culture of sharing around the activity.
With Sugar, we strive to add additional affordances for communication and
sharing so that it would, again, be more likely that children and their
mentors would interact.

Piaget: constructivism (learners create their own internal connections and
structures)
Papert: constructionism (that process is facilitated by meaningful tools for
building such as logo, LEGO, ISDP etc)
Bender: (and also by meaningful tools for communication and collaboration
such as OLPC and Sugar)

Through necessity the OLPC had to initially focus on solving hardware and
software problems - those issues are still very important but we have
reached a stage now where the educational issues require more focus too (the
need to build some sort of bridge between those who want to focus on the
educational issues and  developers who want to focus on improving Sugar)

"its an education project"

Summary:

   - Learning practice and theory needs to evolve as technology evolves
   - There needs to be a wide bridge built connecting developers to
   educators
   - Sugar software development and understanding its educational
   importance is a current focus of those principles




On Sat, May 3, 2008 at 1:24 AM, Kevin Cole <kevin.cole at gallaudet.edu> wrote:

> 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.)
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