nubae's Habari | Linux and Education

Starting the session was a little chaotic, as this was the first time we've tried a group collaborative session, and there were no specific goals we had in mind. The idea was generally to see how collaboration worked in a mixed environment (0.82, 0.84, different distros, different network connections, etc)

The good news is, that for the most part, getting connected worked, and once in a collaborative session response times were quite good. This means that the underlying sharing mechanism works, it just doesn't respond very quickly. The bad news is that the server load is much worse than originally thought and expected.

From our initial experiences, it was clear that the sugar-presence framework had some huge problems in terms of visually representing who was connected, which activities were being shared, and who was sharing these activities. It was not clear where the major bottleneck was in terms of reaction and response, but suspicions lie at the ejabberd end of things. In future sessions we will have to restrict connections and individual details to the point that we can make proper measurements, and thereby find out what is going wrong, and at what point it is going wrong. Suspicions are that the jabber server in question (jabber.sugarlabs.org) didn't have gadget enabled, and was therefore broadcasting the list of all registered users continously, which would burden the server severely. The lag and server load also affected the visual clustering of users around specific activities

Though reaction times were very slow, the underlying sharing framework clearly works very well. Once users were connected, their connections were stable, and within specific activites, reaction times were fast and reliable. We were able to test a fair set of activities, some of which had better implementation of collaboration than others, and some of which didn't seem to have collaboration enabled at all.

We started off with the chat activity, which took a good 10 minutes before people started being able to connect to the initial shared session. Once connected, reaction times were pretty decent, and the frame showed all the connected users. There was a large variance between the shared buddies shown. Some users reported seeing 5 buddies, some 3, some 7, and some even saw buddies with a ??? as their handle. The screenshot below shows how it looked:

Speak was another interesting activity to share, as it allowed multiple people to join a session where the computer speaks out what's typed in the accent of the user's choosing. The choice of accent is used for the proper pronounciation in different languages normally, though there was much fun to be had speaking English words in the various accents. Below is a screen shot:

Reaction times were again very good once users had joined the activity. Buddies connected was highly variable from user to user again, and though clustering around activites did take for ever, it did eventually start to happen, as can be seen from the screenshot below:

Etoys was a surprisingly good collaborator. Once users were connected they were able to create various items, even animated and custom coded, and then send them through to the connected buddies. We just scratched the surface of this activity, and it was clear that some really interesting things are possible with collaborative etoys:

Other activities that worked quite well were Cartoon builder, connect, Maze, Colors, and Tam Tam. We were unable to get write or paint to collaborate, and are unsure as to why. Talking with the authors of these programs seems appropriate, though it has been verified that write, at least, does collaborate. Below is a screenshot of what it looked like when multiple activites were being shared:

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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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