[Its.an.education.project] lists.sugarlabs.org

[Edward Cherlin]

On Wed, May 7, 2008 at 7:23 PM, Bernie Innocenti <bernie at codewiz.org> wrote:
> Seth Woodworth wrote:
...
> > Content organization is a hard business.  And subsequently, not a lot of
> work has been finished at OLPC as it stands now.  To create division in
> these projects would be detrimental to educational goals overall.  And they
> would have little to no relation to the forking of free / non-free software.
>
>  It is not clear to me whether OLPC still wants to be in the business
>  of content creation, for these reasons:
>
>  1) Nicholas says that it makes no sense to pursue the perfect
>   educational model;
>
>  2) Nicholas and other sources said that the only important thing
>   for now is giving as many laptops as possible to as many kids
>   as possible; and lastly,
>
>  3) OLPC is apparently partnering with a company that provides
>   commercial content for schools!

Source?

>  Moreover, should contents be bound to a particular brand of laptops?

Sugar is going to run on a wide variety of hardware. Right now, it
runs best by some education-related measures on an XO, but parts of it
run faster on other, more expensive hardware. There are about two
dozen candidates listed under Competition on the Wiki. It will take at
least a year to create other laptops using Mary Lou's screens and
compatible mesh networking. More likely two. But that's where this
project is headed. The Pixel Qi Web site expresses the hope that the
$75 laptop can come out in 2010.

These new nanolaptops run a real mish-mash of different Linux and
Windows versions. Supporting various Linux distributions can be done
in a more or less normal way, once some of the XO kernel work in
support of collaboration and the Journal gets into general use. I
leave Windows work to others. It's hard, and they have my sympathy.

> > I apologize if I am stepping out of bounds here.  But I'm still unsure
> about what 'an education project' is and isn't.

The whole world is. from a Constructionist point of view education is
about people constructing new versions of themselves through their
actions and experiences. That covers everything in your life.
(Dhammapada 1,1 "All that we are is the result of our thought," where
thought includes volition, intention, sensation, and cognition) The
distinction between what you learn in school and what you learn
elsewhere is quite artificial, and becomes much more so with
computers.

But we can pick certain threads out of the tapestry as places where
our attention is likely to do the most good. Threads like software
freedom and breaking down the conventions of traditional education
systems. The convention that collaboration is cheating, for example.
Or the one that says that adults can't learn to read after leaving
school.

>  I'd like to think we do not have fixed bounds here ;-)

Just so.

>  --
>   \___/
>   _| 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 invent it."--Alan Kay