[Sugar-devel] L-earning

[Charles Cossé]

Hi Walter, James, All,

On Mon, Jun 12, 2017 at 3:21 PM, James Cameron <quozl at laptop.org> wrote:

> Several reparsing attempts later and I think this is a plan for
> monetisation of learners?  But not really sure;


It is a plan to stimulate development of free education software and
provide a valuable tool for parents, at the same time.  You've got
Sugarizer, for example -- everything is freely available.  Now imagine an
additional lightweight service which allowed parents to configure
activities (and rewards), to queue-them-up for their kids, and which talked
to their router at home for the purpose of performing a credit transfer.
For that special service you charge $10/month, and let the
parent-subscriber distribute that amount among activity developers of their
choice, thereby stimulating free education software development and
possibly ongoing user-developer feedback cycles.  It also has potential for
education research.


> unclear separation between motivation,
> actions and outcome.  All blended.


Motivation: I've discovered that using internet access as a currency
results in effective learning.  Furthermore, using a self-serve kiosk-type
system takes you, the parent, out of the picture and kids develop a
bird-birdfeeder relationship with the system, returning to earn more
credits when they need to.  As an education software developer, this means
that kids are getting more out of my software because they are focused on
completing the objective.  Indeed, in this scheme learning is just a
side-effect to the kids' objective of earning online time, but learning
occurs just the same.  That's actually a potential research area right
there. My motivation is that I believe this creates opportunities to
advance free education software by not only compensating developers, but by
providing a type of physical "glue" (i.e. the Raspberry-Pi credit meter /
router) between the user and developer communities -- something to come
together around.  I put this project on ice a couple years ago when I was
working abroad.  I still think that it's a good idea and thus find myself
working on it again.  I had a poster slot at PyCon in which I officially
began to reach out to people again, and there was a lot of interest.  I
needed more credit-earning activities for the PyCon demo so I wrapped a
bunch from Sugarizer in iframes and it made the demo look much better.  I
collected almost 100 emails of interested people.  My goal is to stimulate
creation of more software, and all of it would work with Sugarizer, and
vice versa.

Action:  I believe that this experiment and Sugar-Labs could benefit each
other tremendously.  Thus might as well start by offering it for adoption.

Outcome: An engine for free education software fueled by involved parents

google group <https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/netdispenser>
(everyone invited)
github pages website <http://netdispenser.github.io>
white paper
<https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ymiI-l-yJZko1_N2LfPypsMm2XKnwBK5g7TZB9gEOtk/edit?usp=sharing>
presentation
<https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/18iCCO1HyCC7xMkfivN0mkTNyGs1eFdCnoFX34mVrmFY/edit?usp=sharing>
(old)

I haven't added too much here, but I hope it helps to clarify things
nonetheless.
-Charles
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