[IAEP] Contents of Sugar Labs 2010 Goals Review

[Tabitha Roder]

>
> >    * Encourage new people to join our project
>
> We have a welcoming join page ( http://join.sugarlabs.org ). Most
> members of our community are also nice to newcomers, as long as they are
> sufficiently technical to understand our jargon.
>
> We're definitely intimidating to non-technical people. At least, this is
> what I sensed at the Realness Summit. OLE also seems to be doing a
> better job at connecting with educators. I'm not completely sure what
> corrective actions should be. We might need to do some work on the wiki,
> maybe add web forums, which non-geeks tend to prefer...
>
> --
>   // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
>
>
I am an educator.

I feel my contribution to olpc and Sugar over the past two years has mostly
been in the technical space (opinions may differ here but this is how I see
it). I am coordinating testing efforts from NZ and trying to grow a
community of testers here. Even as an educator, showing my educator friends,
I have struggled to recruit educators to help, yet getting programmers
interested has been easier. I feel my education background is important --
conversations  about how activities are used are very different when
programmers talk without educators. What is defined as a bug or feature is
different; ease of use is different for an educator to a techie ("stupid
icons" from programmers turns to "thank goodness there is no reading
requirement for young students and non English speaking students" from a
teacher). It took over a year to get another educator in the testing
community here.

Both educators and programmers that I have asked are similar in that both
are likely to have the same time constraints and same willingness to give
what little time they have for free to worthy projects.

I have come to the conclusion it is perception of olpc and Sugar being for
technical people. The reason I am now seeing a shift and getting more
educators and translators is because I am more able to see the ways
educators can contribute.

The olpc and Sugar wikis are both wikis, that requires a level of computer
literacy that a lot of teachers don't have. It is not easy to find
information. It is not possible to make Sugar on a Stick without another
level up again of computer literacy. I can't just try Sugar on a website, or
buy a live CD (I learned how to use Ubuntu with a live CD). There is a level
of hand holding required for teachers to get started. I follow a lot of
mailing lists and many posts are duplicates of others and written in geek
speak so I have to ask for help to understand what is going on. The join
sugarlabs page does not welcome educators at all, it seems to be some sort
of geek idol, or maybe a metal monster (really, should it be a picture of a
computer rack?).

I don't have any answers sorry, but hope talking about it helps us find
some.

As a teacher I don't care about applications for school administration - I
think this is the case for most teachers. In my work role (VLE/Web 2.0
Academic Advisor) I have to consider administration but only to get it out
of the way for teachers so they can get on with the teaching and learning.
It is nice to have tools that either automate all the administration or
minimise the time required to do administrative work as it distracts from
the time with the learners.

As a teacher I care about things my students can use to help them learn. I
care that I can help them find these applications and help them use them,
it's okay by me to learn how to use it at the same time as them, but in that
I am not a normal teacher. I care that I can find tools to help me
demonstrate to students, give examples, engage them in the learning
activity.

I can't do everything in Sugar currently. One day I might be able to. As a
teacher, I need: tabbed browsing, skype, irc, jabber client. I live online
and every tool is somehow related to collaboration and connection.

Tabitha
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