[Sugar-devel] Sugar Digest 2010-08-10

[Walter Bender]

==Sugar Digest==

1. Since the early days of One Laptop per Child I spent a lot of
energy combating the accusations that OLPC's plan is to give hardware
to children, sit back, and wait for miracles to happen. The sustained
efforts of the Sugar community and the enormous investment in support
made by the various deployment teams around the world are tangible
evidence that we do not waiting for miracles – rather we are doing the
hard work to ensure that the opportunity to learn is made available to
every child. It is therefore disheartening to hear Nicholas Negroponte
once again say "You can, you actually can" [give a kid a laptop
connected to the Internet and walk away].
[http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-20012926-56.html] While there is
much evidence to suggest that the informal time spent with computing
is valuable, we have a lot of work ahead of us in order to bridge the
gulf between using a computer and using a computer for learning. While
the much-hyped Whole-in-the-Wall Project demonstrated that children
can learn to use computers without any instruction, if we want them to
engage with "powerful ideas", we must offer them more and better
contexts for learning – on their own, among their peers, and under the
guidance of a mentor.

2. I was on a short holiday last week, but I did have time to have
some fun reworking the Sugar Home View so that we can better support
more Activities (and perhaps eventually content). You can see some
sketches here: [http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/Spiral_Home_View#Detailed_Description].
While there are many ideas kicking around about how we might improve
the Home View, including making it a normal Sugar Activity and further
integrating it into the Journal, I am hoping that this one change will
be complete in time to meet the looming feature freeze for 0.90.

3. Hilaire Fernandes announced the release 10.08 of the DrGeo Activity
[http://blog.ofset.org/hilaire/index.php?post/drgeo-xo-10.08-release].
For those of you have never used it, DrGeo is a great tool for
exploring advanced concepts in geometry.

===In the community===

4. There was an education mini-summit
[http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/LinuxCon_2010] at LinuxCon in
Boston. It was heavily geared towards Sugar with talks about Sugar in
RHEL 6 (Sebastian Dziallas) and Sugar on Ubuntu (Ian Daniher). There
was a very nice talk about using Inkscape in middle school by Máirín
Duffy of Red Hat employee. Alas, I missed both Karlie Robinson talk on
her Beginner Guide to FLOSS education and David Trask's update on the
Maine 1-to-1 computing initiative.

5. Constructionism 2010 - Paris
[http://www.aup.fr/news/special_events/constructionism2010.htm] begins
16 August at the American University of Paris.

===Sugar Labs===

Gary Martin has generated SOMs from the past few weeks of discussion
on the IAEP mailing list.

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:2010-July-24-30-som.jpg| (25 emails)
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:2010-Jul-31-Aug-6-som.jpg (44 emails)

Visit http://planet.sugarlabs.org for more updates about Sugar and
Sugar deployments.

-walter

-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org