[sugar] [Community-news] where is Walter?

[Tomeu Vizoso]

2008/4/23 Martin Edmund Sevior <martines at unimelb.edu.au>:
> I've stayed away from this discussion until now. But for my own part, if the
> OLPC becomes just another laptop running "standard" educational software of
> the kind that inhabits my daughters primary school, I'm no longer interested
> in the project.
>
>  I really bought into the "new paradigm" of pervasive collaboration and
> constructionist education. I'm not particularly interested in a cheap laptop
> clone and in any case I guess my own work on Write and abicollab will be
> ditched for some stripped down version of MS Word.
>
>  It would nice to know if this is the new vision or not. If it is the new
> vision I can stop wasting my time here.
>
>  Martin Sevior

In case people don't know Martin's work on OLPC (I think he's not very
vocal about his achievements), he designed and implemented along Marc
Maurer (uwog) the technology behind the collaboration feature of
Write, AbiCollab. I believe this feature has had a big impact in
showing the collaboration focus of Sugar.

http://www.abisource.com/wiki/AbiCollab
http://msevior.livejournal.com/21245.html

If OLPC fails to understand what it takes to maintain such
enthusiastic contributors on board, we're pretty much doomed. Is
Microsoft going to provide those features that bring enormous value to
education? Or translate its software to every language on earth?

Call me fundamentalist, but I don't see how proprietary software can
fulfill our educational goals.

Regards,

Tomeu