nubae's Habari | Linux and Education

I'ts certainly been a while since I posted anything, but I figured, if u have nothing worthwhile posting, don't. Well here is something worthwhile I think:

Edu Jam

The idea here is to represent the latest advancements in techology using not the XO laptops, Sugar on a Stick, LTS Sugar, or Sugar , the operating system running on multiple environments and embedded devices. Right now it stands head to head with both Android and iOS, but the big difference is that sugar was never meant to be or designed as a toy to be played with, so that later on kids might migrate to the extremely popular MS Office or even Oracle openoffice.org, becoming another one of the zombies running their lives uncreativealy through the rat race.

In any case, it seems that nature is taking things into its own hands. Both players seem to have come to the market just a little late. Apple slightly got it with its online ability to edit documents of any kind, thoughb with severe restrictions and regulations, and Google went straght for the juggular vein, allowing any user to use its office suite for free, completely compatible with previous incantations of their competitors. They got what the others just didn't appreciate or understand... I'm talking about the cloud baby, Yes... it may seem a stupid misnomer... but its very real in business terms, and Google knows it. It is really just an extension of what already was, web 2.0, web 3.0, and so on.

But lets break it down a bit. We now have smartphones, tablets, iphones, ipods, apples's flopped TV, gmail, youtube, itunes, facebook, twitter, and google's 2 crown jewels, search and Android.

Had you asked me 2 years ago, I would have said we live in boring times, but the blatant backstabing that seems to have become common place on wallstreeet and even Silicon Valley can really only mean one thing. With the lack of a trusting society, having been taught, be it on the streets of major cities, or prep schools where manners and all that crap was spoonfed to the youngsters that now walk down the halls of our ivy leauge colleges, only to be leading hthe country in a couple of years, becoming celebrities that even us skeptics thought impossible.

Yes, those individuals who ran goldman sachs into the ground, Lehmman brothers, bankrupt 2 days before anyone took notice. And hey.... lets not forget whole countries going bankrupt because of our notion that people are inhrently NOT greedy (newsflash, apart from a very very small minority... they absolutelyt are)... I speak of Iceland, who lost 10 times its GDP, Portugal, whose figures I forget but aren't really important. Today, even the EU cannot find ways to REGULATE its economy again. For more information on that, watch the documentary narrated by Matt Damon, "Inside Job", it will certainly make you think carefully about where you next invest your money :-)

So Where do we go from here?

Ok, so I started a little rough right? But if I stood up like all the ex presidents adn even our new golden boy, an simply said.... its business as ususal, that we had a couple of problems in the middle east, but that all in all the economy was geting better., but that due to certain past events he was not able to make any of his promises true. Using the same excuse ever predecessor used before him... that he'd been left with a situation caused by previous presidents.... So... we stand at a breaking point.

Our World leader cannot help to increase educational spending. My answer to that is something that stuck with me for months and haunted me:

Deep in a Spanish village , a kid came to, he knew I was a teacher, implementing a large scale educational project based on Linux. He said.... how come my 2 borthers of 17 are forced to go to military service, when they could be advancing their knoweldge, things they could use for the future, by using these academic systems you are putting in. I felt silent, becuase I had no reasonable explantaion to give the young boy.

So, I ask you, with utmost humility, could u find it in your heart to help a child obtain a laptop for under 200 dollars. Or at least donate so that vounteers like me and others at Edu Jam can try and give everyone an equal possibility at an equal education? We.... we merry few, we take care of the rest, which includes but is certainly not limited to:

• Working 12-18 hour days to update the XO computers and csutomise the laptops so that what children learn is both culturally and academcally correct.
• Create social Networking portals whereby children can publicise their unique takes on the current state of the planet, either using tools like wordpress, wikipedia, or habari
• Work with more advanced tools (sometimes called content managment systems) like Joomla and Drupal, though to be honest, they really are all the same and do the same things, perhaps slightly diffferently, but the important thing is not to get confused by the mirirad of terms. They basically all can make u a journalist or even a you tube VJ.

I'm sure I've forgotten many things, but I have been priveledged enough to be a teacher for almost 10 years, and quite an efficient science engineer for almost 15.

My main point here is is that there is no one stopping you from learning how to code in Python, Django, Photohsop, Gimp, Inkscape, Scibus, Blender 3D. Its just about picking your poison, or perhaps a couple of them.

The open source community has made it easy for us, now its time to give something BACK!

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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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