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

[Seth Woodworth]

I agree.  For such a large education project, there are far too few
educators.  I'm not critiquing accomplishments and structure of Sugar,
I just don't really understand constructionism all that well.  A
full-time educator might be able to help translate the tech-ese and
produce/repurpose some course outlines based on Sugar.

So +1

On Tue, May 27, 2008 at 6:49 PM, Bryan Berry <bryan at olenepal.org> wrote:
> 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
>
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