nubae's Habari | Linux and Education

Massive strides were made in community integration and community driven projects which will be considered or worked on in the coming months for the next release of Sugar, referred at this time as 0.86, and to be officially released in August of this year, following a 6 month release cycle of Gnome and many other open source projects.

Some of the more interesting changes that are being considered are a move away from matchbox to metacity, the well known and supported backend window manager used by Gnome. This should in theory allow for much greater integration into Gnome itself of individual sugar activities, as well as the launching of sugar in Gnome, and even speed improvements. This move is possible because the XO 1.5 will have more memory and better cpu speeds, as well as a move away from sugar being agnostic to that hardware. Sugar on a Stick was the big focus, which is now working quite well, but still not perfect.

A desire for a revival of the help application was shown and that will become one of the core fructose activities, though likely it will be totally updated and perhaps even interactive. Browse will be upgraded to have tabbed browsing, and have better support for integrated flash/gnash, pdf support and youtube casts. A demo was shown of a screencast of the usage of an activity coded at the camp, using turtle art. These quick advances show that it is not only possible to strengthen the Sugar Core and its activities, but also that one day soon we will have a ubiquitous sugar solution that will run on all distributions and platforms and most hardware.

The mention of fundraising was raised and there is a target in place of aquiring 100,000 euros within the next release cycle which will be used primarily in marketing and gathering core sugar people to the places they need face to face talks like the one provided in Paris.

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So I was pondering these 2 little pieces of relatively similar technologies, wondering if there migh be much use for them in collaborative classrooms of tomorrow. It came to me that since tweeting or denting doesn't just need to be focused on the use of text, there could be countless possibilities. All of them involving human interaction, some even being easy open solutions that would otherwise be expensive and even computationally difficult.

Take the class that is studying Spanish, for example, and they want to know how certain words or sentences sound in different Spanish accents. Well, a twitter group that was linked either countrywide or even globally could then tweet the sentence in his/her accent (expaining where they are from somehow, geo location, tagging or whatever), and then a couple seconds - minutes later a reply via twitaccent.com with a reply from someone somewhere else. Such a simple application, with the advent of wonderful collaborative backbones like mesh networking and scalable solutions like ejabberd would allow for little activities to be made. I could imagine an activtiy like this one being quite the hit on Sugar.

Since I gave an example on how to do audio based twitter examples, how about a picture based one. A Biology class goes out with their laptops or mobile phones or cameras. They are told to take pictures of any edible plants they might find in their surroundings, not forgetting to tag their pictures with the area, altitude, near water or not, and other such items. At the end of the class they compile their data and the kids enter their edu-twitter accounts, or twitter-wiki accounts and this data is then uploaded to groups, where people can use that data or compare to that data in the future. Others can even grade the quality of tha data, or if its a professional botanist, tell them their right or wrong and why.

The strength of both twitter and much more so identi.ca is that they allow following and followers, so groupings of people interested in similar material. It would just take the participation of schools together to implement such little experiments to get great results. Identi.ca's grouping abilities as well as its open source platform base obviously make this the ideal choice. And anyone can go out right now, set up a laconica server and implement an idea like the 2 I've just mentioned in a couple of days, make it a web based app, but it would be much nicer to imagine such particular apps on the XOs and on Sugar in particular.

The last kind of activity I thought about was really a video based one, but then it starts to become far to similar to youtube videos and its ilk. Still, the idea that one could localise video streams that are very small (ie, perfect for sending to blogs, mobile phones etc.) and group them according to followers and following might work for ideas like multi-day events, parties, etc.

So to end with, how about a pic based identi.ca/twitter app that shows sugar deployments/OLPC in action around the world? Wouldn't that be quite simple to get updated. Someone at a particular deployment, even a student, takes pictures of the equipment, the staff, the students, teachers, etc, and groups them by tagging. Just tweets the pic with the tags and it goes into is appropriate groupings, which then everyone can look at. We could get an idea of what is going on in deployments around the world very easily this way in a matter of days (with a little coordination of course...)

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SchoolTool aims to be a globally used school management system that manages student records, class schedules, terms and years, teacher records, events, grading, roll call, journal, and the management of academic and logistic records.

The closest competitors in this area are Open Admin, a Canadian product, and SchoolMation, a proprietary solution that actually looks the best. Although there are many more, both open source and proprietary. For Schools in the British system, ClaSS deserves a mention, as it comes with the entire subject and year matrix already integrated. But SchoolTool is designed in such a simple way it is by far the easiest to use, and its end aims are ambitious indeed.

SchoolTool is not teaching software though. You will not use SchoolTool to teach math or chemistry. SchoolTool is not a framework for teaching content, it is a framework for school administration.

It's installation is not trivial, seeing as there is so much development going on at the moment with it. I have managed to get it working on Intrepid Ibex by following these steps.

These are the developer instructions, and will build a full environment for editing. For end user instructions look here: http://www.schooltool.org/installing-schooltool although intrepid Ibex is not supported there yet.

1. First grab all the bzr images:

bzr branch lp:~schooltool-owners/schooltool/schooltool.stapp2008spring/
bzr branch lp:~schooltool-owners/schooltool/schooltool.gradebook/
bzr branch lp:~schooltool-owners/schooltool/schooltool/
bzr branch lp:~schooltool-owners/schooltool/schooltool.lyceum.journal/
bzr branch lp:~ignas/schooltool/schooltool_date_management

2. Edit the buildout.cfg in all main directories and change setup-tools-0.6c8 to setup-tools-0.6c9

3. Create the build environment for python, zope and schooltool

apt-get build-dep libxml2 libxml2-dev python-imaging
apt get install libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev subversion build-essential python-all python-all-dev libc6-dev python-libxml2 python-imaging libicu-dev python-setuptools python-profiler

4. In schooltool.stapp2008spring/buildout.cfg change "develop = ."
to "develop = . ../schooltool ../schooltool.lyceum.journal ../schooltool.gradebook schooltool/schooltool_date_management"

5. Add the following lines to schooltool.stapp2008spring/buildout.cfg :

[test-all]
recipe = zc.recipe.testrunner
eggs = schooltool.stapp2008spring
    schooltool
    schooltool.gradebook
    schooltool.lyceum.journal
defaults = ['--exit-with-status', '--tests-pattern', '^f?tests$', '-v']

6. Change "parts = schooltool.stapp2008spring scripts test tags" to
"parts = schooltool.stapp2008spring scripts test tags test-all"

7. Run buildout.cfg

cd schooltool.stapp2008spring
sudo make ubuntu-environment
make build
make run

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