[IAEP] Funding - Full-time educator needed for Sugarlabs

[Bryan Berry]

Walter,

I feel pretty strongly that sugarlabs should acquire funding to hire a
full-time field-educator to manage communication b/w developers and
teachers. This is really critical to make sure that Sugar meets "felt
needs" of teachers in the developing world rather than perceived needs.
This person would also manager feedback on activities and requests from
the deployments.

It is really critical that this person be an experienced teacher who has
worked full-time at the primary or secondary level, ideally in a
developing country.

An education Ph D from Harvard or MIT would be the wrong person. Those
folks tend to focus on policy and theory, and tend not to have teaching
experience in public schools. We need someone who is thinking about the
problems of teaching long division in a constructionist way and the
subjunctive tense in English.

My 2 cents

On Wed, 2008-05-28 at 01:12 +0200, 
> ------------------------------
> 
> Message: 5
> Date: Tue, 27 May 2008 18:25:42 -0400
> From: "Walter Bender" <walter.bender at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [IAEP] Funding
> To: "Edward Cherlin" <echerlin at gmail.com>
> Cc: its.an.education.project at tema.lo-res.org
> Message-ID:
> 	<fd535e260805271525m1b983177vc108da97c62f7055 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
> 
> Good question to which there is not a definitive answer yet. The model
> I have been kicking around in my head is to have a small team that
> keeps its focus on top the various infrastructure needs of the
> community and raises money to support community gatherings and such
> incidentals as the filing of trademarks (expensive), etc.
> 
> We've also been discussing other needs and models for supporting Sugar
> development and Sugar deployments. To what extent should we strive
> towards having an in-house team dedicated to such efforts? I lean
> towards a minimal footprint in keeping with the spirit of maintaining
> a diverse and distributed project, but it has been pointed out that
> model is asking perhaps too much at times. Plus it is a very young
> effort and will need some nurturing to reach a level of stability.
> 
> We will need so some commitment of engineering resources from industry
> and other parties interested in Sugar as well as some commitment to
> Sugar Labs itself.
> 
> These commitments would scale depending upon how much work is required
> (for a port or some necessary customization). At a minimum we'll need
> the commitment of liaisons from industry and deployments and enough of
> a community with whom they can reliably interact.
> 
> The types of things that need to be worked on (by someone) include
> support for different distributions (and operating systems?), hardware
> platforms, localization, maintenance of existing activities, support
> for new activities, QA, documentation, evaluation, storytelling, etc.
> Some of these things require bootstrapping; some may require dedicated
> resources.
> 
> If we leave things entirely up to hardware vendors and their partners,
> this would require an unrealistic commitment of engineering resources
> on their side (at least initially) and there is little evidence of
> their commitment to resources beyond engineering; OLPC has made such a
> commitment in the past, but it is not yet clear they will continue or
> that others would (could) follow their example.
> 
> Should we choose to support just a single distribution, we are going
> to run into distribution wars both on the community and on the
> deployment side, so we really need to be at a cross-distribution
> level, which is where we are heading, but this is a lot to ask of an
> all volunteer community.
> 
> I can imagine there would be a need for Sugar consultants--both
> technical and pedagogical--but it is not clear that Sugar Labs needs
> to be more than a clearinghouse for such services.
> 
> Your thoughts?
> 
> -walter

-- 
Bryan W. Berry
Systems Engineer
OLE Nepal, http://www.olenepal.org