[IAEP] Sugar Digest 2009-05-11

[Kathy Pusztavari]

Walter, how does one report problems with Soas - directly to Sebastian
Dziallas or is there a place for that?  If to Sebastian, what is the email
address?
 
-Kathy

-----Original Message-----
From: iaep-bounces at lists.sugarlabs.org
[mailto:iaep-bounces at lists.sugarlabs.org] On Behalf Of Walter Bender
Sent: Monday, May 11, 2009 8:40 AM
To: community-news at lists.sugarlabs.org
Cc: iaep; sugar List
Subject: [IAEP] Sugar Digest 2009-05-11

===Sugar Digest ===

The discussion about pedagogy on the IAEP list intensified this week.
My takeaway from the discussion is that while we won't (and don't need
to) reach consensus about "one right way" to teach, we must have consensus
around our goals as a community or our efforts will become too diffuse to be
of any practical use; we are not engaged in an academic exercise-we are
touching the lives of real children on a global scale. Indeed, the primary
reason we spun One Laptop per Child from MIT (and Sugar Labs from One Laptop
per Child) is because we intend to deliver "things to think with" to
learners everywhere.

As a community, we have consensus that Sugar and Sugar activities should be
freely and readily available to learners everywhere. This would suggest that
the developer community continues to strive to make it "simple" to create
and share Sugar activities and its efforts to create versions of Sugar that
run on multiple operating systems and on multiple hardware platforms.

But what is Sugar? At one level, Sugar is an API that provides a unified
framework for activity developers to support collaboration, reflection, and
sharing in their programs. But those features were chosen with a purpose: to
encourage learners to engage in authentic problem-solving and a critical
dialogue about whatever problem in which they are engaged. This engaged,
learners will develop skills that help them in all aspects of life.

Sometimes that dialog is with your peers, sometimes it is with a teacher or
mentor. Sometimes it is open-ended and sometimes it is within the context of
structured instruction. In every case, it involves expressing, debugging,
critiquing, and reflecting. In every case, it is enhanced by "the hard
things to learn", Alan Kay's "non-universals", e.g., reading and writing;
deductive abstract mathematics; model-based science; etc.

The culture of FLOSS, with its emphasis on ''en plein air'' debugging and
critique, is part of our pedagogy. Sugar embodies the message that everyone
has an opportunity and responsibility to contribute to our knowledge
commons. That contribution need not be Python code. Members of the Sugar
community must:

* explore, share, evaluate, and debate best practices;
* provide technical and pedagogical support; and
* create new learning activities and pedagogical practice.

----

Roland Gesthuizen has a concrete set of suggestions for teacher
participation in our community:

* report back issues that make using the Sugar interface difficult when used
it in the classroom (collaborate)
* develop and share lessons built around applications that work on Sugar
(curriculum)
* share by word of mouth, blog and twitter with colleagues that we are using
Sugar (communication)
* ask deep and hard questions about the learning that goes on when students
use Sugar (pedagogy)
* work to answer these questions (research)
* and more...

===Help Wanted===

In the run up to the June Beta release of Sugar on a Stick, Sebastian
Dziallas has asked for help with testing all of the activities being
considered for inclusion. We'd like to be more thorough in finding any
problems so that we can be sure to address them in time for the final
release in September/October.

===In the community===

The OLPC France Sugar Camp meeting will be held in Paris on May 16 (See
http://sugarcamp.eventbrite.com/).

There will also be a Sugar meeting on the 17th (See
Marketing_Team/Events/MiniCamp_Paris_2009).

A team of Babson College management students will be working with Sugar Labs
beginning this fall as part of a Management Consulting Field Experience
(MCFE) Program.

===Tech Talk===

Christian Schmidt led a Design Team meeting this weekend that covered topics
such as improvements to the Home View, a clock extension on the Frame;
support for printing within Sugar; a global strategy for keyboard shortcuts;
and a global dictionary (See
http://meeting.laptop.org/sugar-meeting.log.20090509_1013.html).

The Food Force team has a new release and is looking for feedback (Download
the .xo bundle from http://code.google.com/p/foodforce/downloads/list).

===Sugar Labs ===

Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP
mailing list (Please see [[Image:2009-May-2-8-som.jpg]]). It is worth a
close look this week.

-walter

--
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org
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