[IAEP] [sugar] list of complaints from sugarcamp community building talk

[David Farning]

Caroline,

Do have suggestions for other readings about how Communities of
Practice form and  operate, particularly in the field of education.  I
feel like I have my head wrapped around documentation, development,
and deployment COP's.  I am still totally confused how to engage
educators.

There seem to be significant cultural differences between people who
sit in front of a computer all day and those who spend their days
standing between a blackboard and and a classroom full of kids.

david

On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 9:07 AM, Caroline Meeks
<caroline at solutiongrove.com> wrote:
> This seems like a cool teachable moment if you are interested in learning
> more about learning theory and vocabulary.
>
> The Sugar community is a Community of Practice CoP -
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_of_practice
>
> The feedback of the Olin people is on inadequacy of the "legitimate
> peripheral participation" that is not having a clear path for people to
> participate at the margins of the group then move in.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legitimate_peripheral_participation
>
> How to use IRC is Tacit Knowledge
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge) for an open source
> developer.  So one of the ways we help people is turn it into Explicit
> Knowledge by explaining what it is and how to use.
>
>
>
> On Sun, Nov 23, 2008 at 9:05 AM, Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu at tomeuvizoso.net> wrote:
>>
>> Hi, this is awesome feedback. I'm going to speak from the SugarLabs
>> perspective.
>>
>> On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 3:53 PM, Elsa Culler <eculler at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Hi,
>> >
>> > Last night at sugarcamp, we(people from the Olin college OLPC chapter)
>> > were
>> > asked to come up with a list of roadblocks  we have run into in trying
>> > to
>> > volunteer effectively.  Mel Chua asked me to forward it to these lists,
>> > so
>> > here is the list in text format:
>> >
>> > we have to come up with jobs ourselves, and we're not too good at it
>> >
>> > we don't know what we can do that is useful
>> >
>> > when we are told what to do, we have to check with other people to make
>> > sure
>> > it's ok
>>
>> Point taken, we need to come up with a good list of interesting things
>> that people can start with. Somewhat related, I keep up a TODO list of
>> things in http://sugarlabs.org/go/User:Tomeu that interested people
>> can take from my hands. Wonder how we could make this more
>> discoverable?
>>
>> > we don't have easy access to cool things that are going on in OLPC that
>> > would get people excited
>> >
>> >  -for example - it would make people excited just to hear accounts of
>> > deployments
>>
>> Could you check out the weekly newsletter published in Walter's blog
>> (http://walterbender.org/) and see how much it suits your needs?
>> SugarLabs cannot say much about OLPC deployments, but we hope to have
>> pilots of our own soon, and hopefully deployments will follow.
>>
>> > most meetings happen when we are in class and we don't know what
>> > happened or
>> > give input
>> >
>> >  - especially with commute (it takes us 1;30 hrs to get here)
>>
>> Most SugarLabs meetings happen on IRC, so you wouldn't have the
>> commute issue. Please check out the meeting announcements in the
>> sugar-devel and iaep mailing lists and comment if the times don't work
>> out for you, we probably can change them.
>>
>> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/
>>
>> > it's difficult to find out what OLPC does beyond the broad
>> > mission-statement
>> > sort of thing
>>
>> Probably, SL could do better as well, can you comment about what's
>> missing in Walter's newsletter?
>>
>> > it took me 6 months to figure out how to use irc, i still don't know
>> > where
>> > trac is
>>
>> Definitely a problem. We are thinking about having a landing page
>> similar to the one in http://www.eclipse.org/ that hopefully will give
>> a way for everybody to find how to better interact with us depending
>> on their role. The idea is that a prospecting developer would just
>> click on one of those icons and would find a simple explanation of the
>> first concepts that need to be grabbed in order to move forward. How
>> does that sound?
>>
>> > olpc-dev list emails are kind of over my head
>>
>> Yeah, we should understand better this issue. Is a coder-newbies
>> mailing list a valid suggestion?
>>
>> > where are things? (on wiki, etc)
>>
>> David Farning is working on this, following a never ending list of
>> complaints from Greg DeKoenigsberg.
>>
>> > note - if you teach us how stuff works we can tell more people/translate
>> > the
>> > information
>>
>> Totally, we count on you to help us, we are totally aware that by
>> ourselves cannot do it.
>>
>> > I would like to develop activities, but up until now I didn't even know
>> > it
>> > was up for grabs
>>
>> Ooops ;)
>>
>> > Thanks for listening!
>>
>> Thanks to you, this definitely helps.
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Tomeu
>> _______________________________________________
>> Sugar mailing list
>> Sugar at lists.laptop.org
>> http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
>
>
>
> --
> Caroline Meeks
> Solution Grove
> Caroline at SolutionGrove.com
>
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