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

[Bill Kerr]

On Wed, May 28, 2008 at 11:49 AM, 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




by my reading of innovative and really useful software development the basis
has never been the felt needs of teachers -- I'm not dumping on teachers (I
am a teacher) here, it arises from the logic of their over worked and locked
in (to "the system") situation

   - new technology creates new felt needs, most teachers lag behind the
   development curve
   - children's epistemological development breakthroughs fuel new learning
   ideas (piaget, papert)
   - new ways required because the old ways don't meet needs (smalltalk oop)

I also think some of the best work has been done by PhD candidates, eg. Idit
Harel's study which was part of Project Headlight - in a position to combine
advanced theory with real practice in a disadvantaged school setting
(although much of academia may be crap it doesn't mean that it all is)

-- 
Bill Kerr
http://billkerr2.blogspot.com/



>
>
> 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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>
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