[IAEP] OLPC and Sugar numbers

[Walter Bender]

In case you missed it, a recent "peer-reviewed" article about Sugar:

Lindgren, C and Brooks K (2015). Responding to the Coding Crisis: From
Code Year to Computational Literacy.  In Strategic Discourse: The
Politics of the (New) Literacy Crises.
http://ccdigitalpress.org/strategic/

enjoy.

-walter

On Thu, Mar 19, 2015 at 1:20 PM, Sean DALY <sdaly.be at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
> IAEP at lists.sugarlabs.org
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-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org