[IAEP] Teacher in Uruguay enchanted to see his ideas integrated, , > into global Sugar update (C. Scott Ananian)

[Greg Smith]

Hi Scott and Michael,

In general I still think this is a good statement but its short and may 
be misinterpreted.
 > Everything
 >we do must be tied to a high level goal and to specific input and
 > users. That is my most fundamental request!

There are two parts:
Goals - The only point there is that we should say why we are doing 
something. Write code to scratch your own itch if you like. Whatever, 
the reason, it helps us work together if you can say why you are working 
on something and what is the goal of the work.

User input- I'm not saying that users deliver edicts which we must act 
upon. I'm saying that we should work with the users and create a 
cooperative effort where we all try to achieve the goal of educating 
children. The teachers know how to teach, how to work with children, how 
to spend the whole day in a room of 50 young kids, and so much more 
(culture, language etc). Engineers need to hear from them about how our 
product  works for them. Engineers and teachers need to find common 
languages so we can work together. Then engineer-teachers need to come 
up solutions that everyone understands and can use. Then we evaluate and 
try again ++

I'm mystified as to why that would be controversial, but I appreciate 
you raising the concern. I can't wait to see Wad's reaction when I ask 
him how his proposed EC code changes will help the users :-)

To drill down on the Lesson plan example. If teachers need lesson plans, 
that doesn't mean engineering writes the lesson plans for them! However, 
engineering may want to think about what it means to write a lesson 
plan, what is needed, how you do it, etc. Then engineering can come up 
with ideas where they may be able to participate (e.g. a piece of SW 
that helps write a lesson plan, share it and associate it with an 
activity). Maybe there's nothing engineering can do. That's OK too but 
it helps to know that lesson plans are important to this teacher and 
probably to many more.

I haven't received any comments on my wiki home page. 
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Gregorio Maybe that will help you 
understand where I'm coming from. Seems like people don't read URLs that 
often so I'll post a relevant piece here:

"any development model needs an optimal process for synchronizing the 
work with the users expectations. Developers don't fully understand 
user's daily activities and users don't fully understand the constraints 
of the development process. Even for open source, the challenge remains 
how best to achieve a problem-posing methodology of mutual education. 
Both sides need an efficient way to engage the praxis (action and 
reflection) of creating relevant applications. Transformation of the 
process from developers giving users features (banking method) to 
developers-users learning from each other (problem-posing method) needs 
attention that empowers all to participate.

That challenge is especially acute when there are larges gaps of 
culture, age, economic status, language, and geography (urban - rural 
and north - south). Even as users learn to develop their own code, 
there's a need for all users to have a say in what gets prioritized and 
delivered. "

Believe it or not that was from my first e-mail to David Cavalho when I 
was trying to find a way to work at OLPC. Needless to say, it was way to 
long and confusing and I had to find a different way in :-)

Last point. By happenstance, I'm reading Understanding Computers and 
Design by Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores:
http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Computers-Cognition-Foundation-Design/dp/0201112973/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1222092782&sr=1-1

All the AI stuff seems dated but there are some great nuggets in there. 
One is that when a user interacts with a program, they are not 
interacting with the computer so much as interacting with the developer 
of the software!

One more section to read then I'll comment more if it the book has 
anything useful to say about how we actually design the sharing 
interface and the next generation XO SW.

Back to the bug database :-)

Thanks,

Greg S

PS I will try and use engineers-teachers to refer to the "we" of 
everyone involved from now on. I don't want to just be part of the 
engineering team. When I say "we" I want it to be all of us, teachers, 
users, engineers, volunteers, testers.