[IAEP] OLPC and Sugar numbers

[Sean DALY]

Dan,

I am pleased my comments were useful, however I must say I don't understand
some of your points.

I'm not aware of any transparency issues with Sugar Labs. Nearly all of
SL's discussions are open and public. The Oversight Board has regular
meetings and the minutes are posted, you will find what financial
information there is in there (we are an all-volunteer nonprofit). I can't
speak for OLPC since I am a volunteer with Sugar Labs, you'd have to ask
them.

I have often heard disparaging remarks about OLPC's "failure" to deploy the
10-20 million units planned. However, any serious study of OLPC must
include an analysis of how the for-profit IT educational market providers
did their level best to sabotage the project. In the end, OLPC jumpstarted
the netbook revolution which immediately preceded tablets. As to the actual
numbers, which remain very impressive, OLPC publishes a map (
http://one.laptop.org/map) - to obtain figures I suggest you write to the
ministry of education in each country.

I would welcome a peer-reviewed paper about Sugar, but the absence of one
doesn't prove anything one way or the other. Sugar's constructionist
orientation though has very well-researched foundations as mentioned on our
website.

Here are two papers for you from 1972 and 1975:
http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED072258.pdf
http://www.ascd.org/ASCD/pdf/journals/ed_lead/el_197504_brudner.pdf

These are about American Institute for Research/Westinghouse's PLAN
(Program for Learning in Accordance with Needs) program, begun in 1967 and
deployed from 1969 to about 1976. The idea was to allow grade school
students to learn at their own pace (slower or faster than the existing
curriculum). There was extensive use of computer tech: learning module
documents were stored in computers and adjusted/updated as needed, testing
was automated, progress reporting of each student or by learning module was
available to teachers and faculty. I cite this program because as a 9 and
10-year-old, I was in one of the PLAN schools cited in the article. It
turned out that there was a weakness in PLAN - the teacher's role was
reduced to mere class administrator and tutor for students in difficulty;
so I learned by myself, with both the advantages and disadvantages of the
self-taught. At every school, one or two students like me would race
through the most interesting modules (I remember doing 36 biology modules
one of those years), but dawdle in the boring modules (English, where I
spent a couple of months on a single module while reading Jules Verne and
accounts of the First World War). PLAN was abandoned in part because of the
high costs of upgrading the computer infrastructure, but also because
educators were concerned about both underperforming and overperforming
students slipping through the cracks. So did I lose two years? Well, I
graduated grade school with college reading level, later went to a
specialized high school for math and science, and became a National Merit
Scholar. However, that's only haf the story. My two years in PLAN taught me
to be skeptical of authority, that there are multiple sources of
information and it's your own self who must seek them out, that everyone
must find their own path, that thinking outside the box leads to
discoveries. I left university - where I was bored - to play music, and to
earn a living, I taught myself programming and built a career out of it. I
tell this story because I am convinced that Sugar offers many of the
benefits I had to today's children.

Sean.


On Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 9:28 PM, Dan Tenason <dan.tenason at mail.ru> wrote:

> The recent posts on the Future of Sugar have been insightful. Mr Daly's
> comments on marketing have been particularly poignant. Both OLPC and Sugar
> Labs have been calling for more money, more developers, more time to solve
> their problems. Both organizations have suffered due to a lack of
> transparency about how that money and time is converted into useful results.
>
> The limited number of peer reviewed papers on Sugar raises red
> flags. Unreviewed papers are the equivalent of taking medical advice from
> the Marlboro Man. They are interesting to read. One should still consult
> their doctor before taking the decision to start smoking.
>
> A second issue is user numbers. Dr. Negroponte's imagery of dropping
> laptops from helicopters combined with the lack of data from OLPC, Sugar
> Labs, or most of the deployments about usage numbers leaves us to assume
> that this project is not preforming as well as promised. We often see the
> number 2.5 million laptops sold. We seldom see how many are usable or in
> active use. Interviewing a few deployments about their repair and spare
> parts statistics, it is more likely that 0.5 million are in a usable
> condition with less than half of that in active use.
>
> Until Sugar Labs clarifies these issues, any efforts Mr. Daly puts into
> marketing will feel like Sisyphus pushing his rock up the hill.
>
> --
> Dan Tenason
>
> _______________________________________________
> IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
> IAEP at lists.sugarlabs.org
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
>
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