[IAEP] Who decides to install Sugar?

education at spatialmedia.com education at spatialmedia.com
Fri Apr 26 22:25:52 EDT 2013


Hi

I'm curious about use of Sugar beyond OLPC.

How much is known about how people come to use the platform?

If a kid is using Sugar (not on an XO) what are the circumstances?

Are they more likely to be on a school machine , a family computer at 
home,  their own "bring your own device" machine   -or what?

Did they most likely boot from a stick, run Sugar in a VM, run a 
terminal session on a shared server, install Sugar on a general purpose 
Linux machine,  or use a dedicated Sugar machine?

In a school scenario  -who is most likely to have made the decision to 
install Sugar?  Administrators of some "school district"?, a school?, a 
teacher?, a volounteer?, a student?




Presumably "all of the above" happen.  Presumably these are tough 
questions to answer (especially so if we are sensitive to user privacy 
and want to minimise "phone home" behaviour).

How good a handle does the Sugar project have on use beyond olpc??   
This is of course an eternal question for free software.


Just for the record (why am I asking), I'm a geek with teacher-envy :-) 
     I have been volounteering at a couple of (New Zealand) schools   
-where (surprise surprise) decisions about learning platforms are more 
or less being picked out of the air. More charitably "we are trying 
various alternatives". My sense is that we are still just falling back 
to what we know;  microsoft office training is being replaced by apple 
and google training    -big deal.

So  -I'm curious about how Sugar is finding its way onto computers and 
in front of kids, beyond OLPC.  Any comments, pointers, hunches, or 
stories would be appreciated.

regards
Peter












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