[Grassroots-l] Favorite Projects for XO Development?

[Yama Ploskonka]

Let me quote John Adams "I must study politics and war that my sons may 
have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study 
mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval 
architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give 
their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, 
statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."

Right now we are not ready for Constructivism.

Hopefully the stage of war is over for most of us (scratch that off if 
you are you-know-where), but the stage of Industry and Commerce never 
yet happened for what we call the Developing World.

Jumping ahead to discovery and arts, or even something as basic as 
sharing, criticism, exploration, while very tempting indeed, might 
require quite a while, and *it cannot be forced*, by definition.  You 
cannot *order* people to be critical thinkers.

Meanwhile we need *relevance* to what is the system now, so we can 
change it *as we go*, while having full buy-in.  The whole OLPC project 
is doomed because it did not notice that need.  We need Content.  We 
need results, objective ones.

Sugar has a chance. It is good if it builds an environment for what 
Walter points at, of course, yet we need right now to feed the users 
what they can take and feel they need.  I applaud quite a few people 
coming to that conclusion recently, getting closer and closer to the 
right answers, so in my lifetime I might see kids among my peoples 
getting the second stage of what John Adams was listing, and /then/ we 
might look for the third.  Yet trying to rush the process will not serve 
them much, or the project

Yama, doing his usual rant


Walter Bender wrote:
> There is nothing ambiguous about the Sugar Labs plans:
> 
> In Sugar, have in hand the tools to reinvent how computers are used
> for education. Collaboration, reflection, and discovery are readily
> integrated directly into the learning experience. Children and
> teachers have the opportunity to use computers on their own terms,
> reshape, reinvent, and reapply both software and content into powerful
> learning activities. Learning can be focused on sharing, criticism,
> and exploration. We have a lot of work ahead of us to refine these
> tools and to refine the practice around them, but we have a solid
> beginning.
> 
> We can raise a generation of critical thinkers, armed with the
> complementary tools of science and the arts. All of the necessary
> tools are freely available under free software licenses. But we do
> need to invest in engaging teachers, parents, and children in learning
> learning. So let's make it happen.
> 
> -walter
> 
> 2009/2/17  <david at lang.hm>:
>> On Tue, 17 Feb 2009, Caryl Bigenho wrote:
>>
>>> Hello Friends,
>>>
>>> OLPC will have a booth this weekend (2/20-2/22) at the Southern California
>>> Area LInux Expo (SCaLE).  This is a large conference (up to 1000) of
>>> open-source aficionados including programmers.  It is a great chance to
>>> recruit folks for our team of volunteer developers of Activities for the XO.
>> I spent a large chunk of time in the OLPC booth last year, and one
>> significant problem was that many people in the booth (including myself)
>> didn't have a good understanding of the politics and/or current status of
>> things.
>>
>> this year things are _much_ messier, I've been trying to understand things,
>> but it's been hard.
>>
>> could folks who know what's going on make it a point to check mail
>> frequently this weekend so that as questions come up that the people there
>> disagree on the answer to the question can be fired off and gat a fairly
>> prompt answer? it won't stop the wrong answer then, but it can at least get
>> clarified rather than repeating the wrong thing all weekend (or worse,
>> giving several answers)
>>
>> if there is a good 'state of OLPC/Sugar/XO/etc' document to point at (such
>> as the info that came out in the 'Please update etoys in 8.2.1' thread a
>> couple of weeks ago), it would really help make sure everyone is on the same
>> page.
>>
>> I will have my two XO's there, I will try to have them running different
>> flavors of DebXO (from USB sticks if nothing else, but quite possibly from
>> the NAND), since the future direction is to have them run relativly standard
>> distros, having examples of the different distros would be nice.
>>
>> David Lang
>>
>>> I am putting together a brochure to pass out at the conference and want to
>>> include information about some of the projects and proposals we have.  Could
>>> you all take a look at the page listed below and make any additions and
>>> updates you would like included?  I need this done by Wednesday Noon (PT).
>>> Thanks!
>>>
>>> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Projects_and_proposals
>>>
>>> Caryl  OLPC Support Volunteer
>>>
>>> P.S. Excuse the multiple copies of this if you are subscribed to more than
>>> one list.  I will get several copies myself.
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> 
> 
>