[IAEP] Volunteer-driven development of educational software

[Greg Dekoenigsberg]

On Tue, 11 Nov 2008, Greg Smith wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> On the question of Open Source to develop applications which are not
> necessarily used by the people who write the code. That is a challenge
> which I think we should address directly.
>
> Greg D's strategy (programmers code for themselves then we re purpose it
> for schools) may be the most fruitful in terms producing lots of
> applications quickly. I certainly hope so.

To be clear, this is not exactly what I said.  The spirit is correct -- 
have more developers involved more directly with Sugar -- but that really 
only helps with (a) the core of Sugar itself, and (b) activities that are 
not strictly educational but have educational uses (Browse, Write, Chat, 
maybe some games, etc.)

I think that producing useful activities that are intended solely for 
kids, with a strong pedagogical element, is still a largely unsolved 
problem.

Having more developers in the ecosystem definitely helps mitigate that 
problem, though.  Therefore, my first goal is to create more developers 
who understand Sugar and use it effectively.  Making Sugar available in 
all the major distros is a crucial step down this road.  Seems like 
orthogonal work, I know, but from my perspective it's absolutely critical.

> It still leaves open the question of how to adapt the result for use in
> classes and how to tie the applications in to the learning theory. Maybe
> that last stage is a job for paid programmers instead of open source
> volunteers. As more applications become available for the XO/Sugar we
> can see which get the most demand in schools and go from there.
>
> On the other hand, I hope David is correct that we can find people who
> will work on things which the teachers and students need, even if they
> don't "scratch your own itch". In addition to finding such programmers,
> the challenge is to define what teachers and students need in a way that
> is easily actionable.

This is a key challenge for almost every free software project.  The 
majority of the hard work is actually articulating what work needs to be 
done, in sufficient detail to make it easily actionable.  That work is 
surprisingly difficult.  :)

> We have lots of input from the field and some input from educational
> theorists. The hard part is focusing that in to something easily coded.
>
> There is one nice synergy between the educational theory and the 
> development strategy. I believe that a tenet of the educational theory 
> is that teachers and students together choose the most relevant topics 
> for learning. If programmers and users also follow that strategy of 
> working together to choose the relevant "topics" maybe we could pioneer 
> a new paradigm for open source development.
>
> I wrote a brief explanation of this strategy here:
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Gregorio

Yep.  Could work.  Assuming enough talented and motivated developers in 
the first place, of course.

> On the question of asynchronous vs synchronous collaboration. If you
> read the beginning of the thread
> (http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-October/020588.html)
> you'll see that neither Juliano nor I are opposed to synchronous
> collaboration ala "CollAbiWord". Juliano was just pointing out that we
> also need asynchronous collaboration (e.g. multi-kid projects) and that
> wasn't on the roadmap.
>
> We need both and my impression is that the shortest path to major new
> functionality is on the asynchronous side. Any help defining the
> requirements and scope of that is welcome.
>
> Please add your input here:
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#Asynchronous_collaboration
>
> We need more input on the educational research to see if either
> synchronous or asynchronous is better correlated to the theory. Any
> pointers or comments welcome.
>
> Clearly the idea of learning by creating projects is central to the
> educational strategy  (see
> http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/41706?show=full).
>
> So is learning by doing and working together. I'm just not sure if it
> has to be real time or not.
>
> I can say that the kids love the real time write sharing when it works
> and they hate it when it fails. See:
> http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/olpc-sur/2008-May/000118.html
> When it worked: "they loved it ... it seemed like magic"
> When the collaboration broke: "¡QUË DESILUSIÖN!!!!"

I think that's gonna be my new sig.  :)

--g