[Sugar-devel] EduJAM day 3 Tour of Uruguay

[David Farning]

The theme for day was using the XO to help kids learn. Because this is not
my area of expertise I will defer summarizing the day and take a moment to
explain the rational for a technical focused summit for an education
project.

There are two aspect to the OLPC ecosystem, technological and educational.
Technologically we face three general classes of problems: hardware,
software, and connectivity. When these three aspects of the project work,
teachers and students have an outstanding tool. When one or more of these
aspects is not working teachers and students have a suboptimal tool.

Once the tool is created and understood, educators can train teachers to
take advantage of the tool, create content which builds on the affordances
of the tool, and create curriculum which enable teachers to build on their
understanding and available content to create lessons which align with the
needs of their class, school, and country.

The vision for EduJAM Montevideo 2011 is to bring people working on the
technical aspects together to learn from each other and understand the needs
of educators though a series of presentations and conversations.  The goal
of this process is:
1. Better understand educators needs.
2. Learn how we as developers and engineers can make a product which is more
effective for educators. 3. Learn and communicate with our fellow developers
and engineers to learn to work more effectively.

Ideally, another organization will sponsor a complementary event which
focuses on how educators can leverage the tool to enhance learning. These
complementary events can form the nucleus for a dialog which drive the
project forward.
 
david