Resumen en español al final del artÃculo
It's that time of the year, when we once again gather our ideas, our projects, our hopes and come together at the OLPC San Francisco Community Summit 2012.
As projects mature and insights become distinct, we are starting to fine tune our efforts. A spectrum has emerged. We see deployments that are structured, complete with curricula, teacher training, and support. Much credit goes to the planning and foresight of projects in Uruguay, Peru, Rwanda, Fiji, and many other places. We also see "helicopter" style deployments (note: helicopter is optional) where children have close to zero training, and are still able use the computers, support each other and come up with innovative ways of learning. Over time, we witness stories of children in projects such as in Uruguay, where they work wonders with robots. We also see how the XO laptop is a valued friend for children like Abel in Peru. In Jamaica, we see Jon Marc, a six-year old, who has figured out Python games and modifies these to make his own. Yes! It's working.
Once we get XOs into communities, there is a secondary effect. Children learn, but what if these machines could be used as a conduit for digital libraries? Everything from ebooks to Khan Academy videos could be made available on these green machines. That effort is under way. We need to make it better. Perhaps run solar-powered microclouds in remote environs?
Then there's new hardware such as the XO 1.75, running on very low power chips and the upcoming XO-4 promises to be even better. It even will have a touchscreen model. What will touch bring to learning? How will Sugar address this space? All of this makes for exciting anticipation.
Then there's Sugarcamp. More like Sugarcamp++. After our intensive weekend summit (Oct 19-21) reviewing a year's progress across education deployments small and large -- hearing powerful stories, learning painful and great lessons from Haiti, Philippines, Madagascar, Rwanda, Nicaragua, Lesotho, Nepal, Canada, Australia and continents far beyond -- the time arrives to focus on our "What Can We Improve?" weekday workshops (Oct 22-24). Teachers, hackers, content artists, contributors of all stripe are coming together to San Francisco State University building out these crucial next steps. You are invited! We'll be hacking together, on the many moving parts (technical and social) of our open education infrastructures:
- New School Server software (XS Community Edition) flexible enough to be used by all, with customizable
- Organized ways to gather statistics on kids' usage patterns -- empowering teachers/parents/principals/funders to deepen learning experiences in-school & after -- using Aleksey Lim's "sugar-client" ?
- New ways to access the Sugar Learning Platform like Sugar on a Stick on Fedora 17 and Sugar Dextrose as we prepare for Sugar 0.98 and 1.0
- Science projects using friendly Electronics/Sensor designs like XOrduino and Geographic Maps
- New deployment/volunteering opportunities, in North America and overseas -- whether involving OLPC's brand new 15W Solar panels, refurbished XO-1 laptops, or vital language translations
- Documentation, video tutorials, and actual books/histories of OLPC/Sugar's evolving movement
- And crucially: advancing curricular design one country after another -- among other topics!
Hacking education for a better world was never expected to be easy. But after half a decade building on our experiences, we see the transformation emerging and hope you will too. Please do join your talents & insights with our growing list of great community volunteers and leaders attending Sugarcamp++'s post-summit weekday workshops!
And as we get ready to kick off the weekend's larger OLPC San Francisco Community Summit 2012, we hope that you will join us in asking questions, solving problems and making things better for the citizens of tomorrow - all the things that make for an awesome community. See you soon!
Sameer Verma is Professor of Information Systems at San Francisco State University and chief organizer of the OLPC SF community. Adam Holt organizes OLPC/Sugar grassroots worldwide, recently organizing the new School Server Community Edition effort.
Resumen en español: En Octubre San Francisco estaré el centro de la comunidad mundial de OLPC y Sugar porque OLPC San Francisco esta organizando el Community Summit 2012 y Sugarcamp++.
Recent Comments
Could we consider develeoping a different face to sugar?. Perhaps metro?
Even better: https://twitter.com/sameerverma/status/186503999749492736
I am sure that it was a considerable effort. But that is Windows 8 with a metro like interface. Still is an OS with files, etc.
All I want is a metro-like interface to sugar which is a better OS for kids
That was an April 1 joke :-) Why do you think Metro-like interface is better than what Sugar already has?