[IAEP] Walter's book, was Re: Sugar Digest 2012-12-29

[Yamandu Ploskonka]

congrats! almost missed this!

Walter said:
"
Finally, in 2012, I wrote a book about the OLPC story [2], which
includes a chapter on Sugar, but I need to write a more complete story
about Sugar, its goals and its impact. I am setting that as a personal
goal for 2013.
"

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Change-World-Social-Impact/dp/0230337317/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1356809905&sr=1-1&keywords=

2012/12/29, Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com>:
> == Sugar Digest ==
>
> 1. We have a newly elected Sugar Labs oversight board. Joining us are
> Claudia Urrea, Gonzalo Odiard, and Daniel Francis. Continuing are Adam
> Holt, Chris Leonard, Gerald Ardito, and Walter Bender. It is a nice
> group -- quite diverse -- which will bring some new perspectives to
> the board. Departing are Chris Ball, Aleksey Lim, and Sebastian Silva.
> All three will be missed: Chris's calm, thoughtful guidance, Aleksey's
> cool insight into the needs of developers and also the reminder that
> our mission is broader than just our current collection of tools, and
> Sebastian, who lives and breaths on the ground of Sugar deployments,
> and has well represented their needs. I hope that our departing
> members will continue to participate as non-voting contributors to our
> discussions and I also am very grateful for everything they have
> contributed in the past.
>
> 2. Two more weeks of Google Code In [1]. It has really been fun trying
> to keep pace with all of these new contributors to Sugar. If you have
> ideas for "tasks", it is not too late to add more. Please contact me
> or Chris Leonard.
>
> 3. 2012 is coming to an end, a natural time to reflect on where we
> have been and where we are going.
>
> From the technical perspective, Sugar 0.96 and 0.98, which include the
> port to GTK3 and support for touch are important milestones. The
> tireless work of the development team under the leadership of Simon
> Schampijer have really born fruit. They have guaranteed the stability
> Sugar on GNU/Linux for the forseeable future. (A tip of the hat to
> Martin Langhoff and OLPC Association, who generously supported Simon
> and the much of the devel team in 2012.) Their work will be featured
> as the OLPC XO4 is unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES)
> early next month.
>
> From the learning perspective, through the participation Claudia and
> the Learning Team, we made a lot of headway on the understanding how
> Sugar is used and how it can be used to more have more impact on
> learning. Their work on "making learning visible" has both academic
> merit and practical implications for the learner.
>
> From the user perspective, we continue to expand our user base, both
> in terms of new deployments and new platforms. In 2012, we made
> renewed headway in the US market, with projects in Miami, Florida and
> Charlotte, North Carolina (sponsored by the Knight Foundation). On the
> other side of the globe, Barry Vercoe has launched a program in New
> Zealand. Meanwhile, existing programs, such as those in Nicaragua and
> Paraguay, continue to expand. In Argentina, while the growth of OLPC
> has been slow, the growth of Sugar on other platforms is steadfast.
> While it is difficult to track where it is being used, the number of
> visits to the Sugar-on-a-Stick download page is >> 600,000.
>
> We have also grown our developer community. Of particular note is that
> the next generation contributors is in large part coming from Sugar
> users. Daniel, Agustin, Christofer, Ignacio, Rafael, and others whom
> Flavio Danesse has been mentoring in Uruguay have become central to
> the Sugar development process. They have realized our goal of having
> real responsibility for learning and the tools for learning lie in the
> hands of the learners themselves. This is an unprecedented
> accomplishment for which the Sugar Community should be proud. Sugar
> Labs participation in Google Code-in is icing on the cake. We've got
>>50 new youth contributors since the contest began in November.
>
> From the point of view of localization and internationalization, the
> highlights of 2012 are the progress we have made in Aymara and
> Quechua. Edgar Quispe and Irma Alvarez have done wonders. (A tip of
> the hat to Chris Leonard and Aymar Ccopacatty for their help and
> support.) Barry Vercoe has personally funded work on Maori and we have
> had much progress on several indigenous languages in Mexico.
> Meanwhile, Chris has made numerous contributions upstream, both by
> hosting some upstream projects on our Pootle server, but also by being
> a strong voice and advocate within the glibc and pootle communities.
>
> More technical highlights include the work of Daniel Narvaez on
> sugar-build, which provides a much more stable development environment
> than the unwieldy sugar-jhbuild environment. Under the shepherding of
> Peter Robinson and Tom Gilliard, Sugar on a Stick and our virtual
> machine support continue to improve in quality and stability. Aleksey,
> Sebastian, and Laura Vargas have made contributions to enhance our
> ability to support off-line deployments with their work on the Sugar
> Network. The work by Team Butia on expanding Sugar into the sphere of
> robotics continues to impress me and the work of Guzman Trindad and
> Tony Forster, integrating Sugar into the world of rich sensing,
> provides endless pleasure.
>
> Another highlight, seemingly innocuous, was the creation of the
> Amazonas page in Facebook. This simple use of social media to provide
> a support network for teachers in one of the most isolated places on
> earth has exceeded my expectations. It has three times as many members
> as had attended the workshop in Chachapoyas, and it has daily updates
> of projects, questions, and progress. The recent work by Raul
> Gutierrez on integrating Turtle Art with Facebook is a harbinger of
> how we might make sharing of the Sugar experience more seamless in
> 2013.
>
> Personally, my biggest thrill in 2012 was working with children, in
> Miami and in Khairat (India). I had a chance to teach Turtle Art
> workshops and in both cases, the children did dance animations that
> were impressive in their depth.
>
> So what is next? In 2013 we will see the fruit of some of our efforts,
> including a chance to see Sugar with touch in the field. OLPC
> Australia will be the first deployment of the OLPC XO4. It will be
> interesting to learn what impact it has in the classroom. One thing we
> already know is that touch makes Sugar more accessible to younger
> (pre-K) children. It also is congruent with the expectations of
> children coming of age in the tablet/smart-phone era.
>
> Daniel has been working on revitalizing our automated testing suite,
> which will help with maintenance and QA.
>
> We will see advances in localization. Already, the Ministry of
> Education in Peru has opened a bid to follow up on the work of Edgar
> and Irma. Translation of other language groups is also being advanced.
>
> The topic of support for Special Needs was raised numerous times in
> 2012. I hope to convene the various interested parties in early 2013
> to lay out a new road map for Sugar in this area. (The work on GTK3
> has helped in that we know have, for example, an on-screen keyboard.
> And by eliminating Hippo, we have removed the last vestiges of Sugar
> that were preventing us from using the GNOME tools.)
>
> Perhaps these themes will be the focus of Sugar 1.0, due to be
> released in Q2 2013. A few things queued up include setting a
> background image on the Home View (thanks to Agustin Zubiaga) and
> multiple Home Views (thanks to Daniel Francis).
>
> I also expect that we will be seeing more learning guides in 2013, a
> harbinger of which was pulled together for the Charlotte deployment:
> teachers sharing best practice.
>
> There are two elephants in the room: The Cloud and Android. How we
> face these opportunities will certainly become more clear in 2013.
>
> I hope to organize a Global Sugar conference in 2013. Perhaps at MIT
> or perhaps at a deployment. It is time to bring our community together
> face to face on a larger scale.
>
> Finally, in 2012, I wrote a book about the OLPC story [2], which
> includes a chapter on Sugar, but I need to write a more complete story
> about Sugar, its goals and its impact. I am setting that as a personal
> goal for 2013.
>
> === In the community ===
>
> 4. Rita Freudenberg announced that a new Etoys book is available:
> ''Learning with Etoys  Imagine, Invent, Insprire''[3].
>
> === Sugar Labs ===
>
> Visit our planet [4] for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments.
>
> -walter
>
> [1] http://www.google-melange.com/gci/homepage/google/gci2012
> [2]
> http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Change-World-Social-Impact/dp/0230337317/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1356809905&sr=1-1&keywords=learning+to+change+the+world
> [3] http://wiki.squeakland.org/index.php/LearningWithEtoysI3
> [4] http://planet.sugarlabs.org
>
> --
> Walter Bender
> Sugar Labs
> http://www.sugarlabs.org
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