Here are the visuals for the presentation of Sugar and SugarLabs to Intertice - what to put water in his mouth!

Here is a video presentation of Sugar, the learning platform developed by Free SugarLabs and community. The version used here is not the latest (0.84), but it looks good Sugar.

There are several ways to test Sugar - do not hesitate to jump into the water, and send us your questions.

Congratulations to OLPC Mali for the launch of its website and for writing the final report ( French / English ) on the program of summer camps in the summer of 2008.

It is a pleasure to see all the efforts of Mpho and his team succeed as well. OLPC France has always followed the project closely and will continue to help as possible!

François Bocquet and I were invited to talk to OLPC France during the 14th meeting of the Elm , around a round table entitled "Free, from one screen to another. "

The panel was moderated by Jean-Pierre Archambault, coordinator of the competence center of the free software SCEREN . Other speakers were Bernard Lang ( AFUL ), Philippe-Charles Nestel ( APRIL ) and Patrick Sinz ( Gdium ).

Francois and I quickly made a point of the OLPC project and the activities of OLPC France. I presented the system Sugar and pedagogical principles that have guided its ergonomics. Then, to paste a little at the title of the roundtable, I tried to answer the question: why is it important or Sugar free? I give you here the short version of my answer.

The purpose of Sugar is to enable communities of educators to explore the educational uses of a computer. For a community to form, you need two things: content and collaboration. It is important that Sugar is free because it encourages those who use it to share educational activities they develop with Sugar - "share" in the strong sense ("free") of (1) make available and (2) allow others to take it by force to make improvements.

The roundtable discussion then focused on the issue of cloud computing and that of the educational exception ... but it all would take too long to summarize!

Tuesday, March 31, at 16:00, I will present the latest version (0.84) of the educational platform Sugar Lounge at Intertice , held in conjunction with Solutions Linux , the great annual gathering of open source.

This is how Intertice:

Intertice is a time for reflection and strong balance sheet to reflect the impact of Tice of the transmission of knowledge on the evolution of teaching and student activity.

Come!

Since the beginning of OLPC France is committed along with the association of heart G Antitourne on the project. A presentation of the project is here but I wanted to return in more detail on the project and our motivation to support this initiative.

Antitourne what is it?

Antitorona (or Antitourne) is a village on the island of Nosy Komba. The island is north of Madagascar near Nosy Be. The village of Antitorona is not the main village of the island but this village has chosen Stefano, an Italian who discovered the island in 1987. His project: not only help people but also make a scale model of harmonious sustainable development. Since then, Stefano has had continued to develop the village by incorporating aspects:

• Materials: water, electricity, housing hard,
• Social: education, medicine,
• Economics: planting, botanical garden.

The site http://antitourne.free.fr this place and the main aspects of the project.

I Heart

Several years ago that beyond Stefano, a real chain of solidarity was created around this project.

It is this solidarity that notament allowed through a project between 2004 and 2006 to bring electricity to the village through a combination ADEVE . A turbine has been specifically designed and carried on site. The full story is described here .

In 2007 they are medical students who leave one month on hand to lead a mission to prevent hygiene, health and educational support. The project is called Hypseus told here .

Antitourne 2009

Jonathan, one of the leaders of the association contacted us early in January to present his project. Jonathan is a student of final year at the GSS , a business school in Paris. For 3 years, he supports the project and participated in the project Hypseus.

This year he organized the project altogether to be held between July and August.

Two aspects are planned:

• Education: it concerns not only the deployment of computers in school but also the construction of a dormitory so that children who come from growing in the new school could sleep on site,
• Environment: installing a community garden and reforestation to replant 10,000 trees.

The brochure describing the entire project can be downloaded here .

OLPC France and Antitourne

Jonathan contacted us early in January to see how the XO can be used for the project.

In fact, we did everything to dissuade initially OLPC can not indeed be confined to the acquisition of computers. This is an educational project, the deployment of the XO must necessarily be linked to an on-site support. This is the local teaching staff who will guarantee the success of the project, implementation and motivation on site is essential. Furthermore, the interface of the machine must be translated which requires preparation of the project because nothing exists in the Malagasy language.

Antitourne soon?

Beginning in February we decided to support the project. Jonathan convinced us of its ability to conduct logistics and support the local teachers to complete the project. Teachers of the new school are also very motivated because they enjoy privileged conditions compared to other teachers Malagasy.

OLPC France is committed to support the project in several ways:

• Translation: in community-based Malagasy in France and our experience in translation Francophone, we will drive and support the translation of Sugar
• Fundraising: we ask the companies we know to become patrons of the project and participate in funding (€ 20,000 for the 100 machines),
• Deployment: we will bear the costs allowing Bastien, who already has experience deploying Haiti, to go on site to assist in the deployment.
• Support: technical support we will be privileged teachers on site once the deployment has been completed.

This project is important because it allows OLPC France to bring this great educational tool for children in a country that is a true target for the project.

Each of us is ready to give up for this great project, help us realize this dream!

Walter Bender has detailed goals for 2009 Sugar Labs. We offer here a translation of the mail sent on March 10 (also available on the blog of Walter Bender).

Now that the Sugar community and team update finalized version 0.84, it's time to talk about our "great ambitions for 2009." I wrote these notes in order to start the discussion.

"What are our objectives? "

In an era of "limited resources", the pressure is always the same for the 21st century skills are reduced to learn Microsoft Word, it is more important than ever to promote the use of free software, which encourages the user to develop their critical thinking, and continue building diverse communities and support development around the needs of teachers and learning. Children are not office workers and nothing in their future will not resemble the work of office 30 years ago. Our collective future depends on the ability of our children to develop skills of creative problem solving, which is not the same as "excel" in the use of software for word processing rather than another.

"What are our strategies to achieve these objectives? "

While there are hundreds of examples of very powerful tools for learning, there are only a handful of efforts that are underway to create platforms. Sugar is one of these platforms. This is not a solution "one size fits all" to learn the right way, but a culture change: the computer as a resource used by the student, rather than as a service to the learner. Sugar is new and is still incomlplet they will have their roughness. Over time, it will be refined. But Sugar will always be demanding. We impose a level of discomfort because we ask what level of commitment is lacking in most educational software: Sugar is the "hard fun" to learn, not easy consumption and empty.

It takes time to have a profound, systematic, and resulting in a change of culture. Our collective effort to Sugar Labs has influence, but the many challenges posed by the economic crisis, budget cuts, the energy crisis, globalization, the "clash of civilizations", etc.. ordered the status quo to change. We must be aware of these influences.

"What are our short and medium term? "

Growth is an ambitious goal for a global recession; Sugar goals for 2009 are still to expand its community, broaden its base code, and more importantly, increase the number of children using Sugar . Even if the development community of Sugar is extraordinarily dedicated, tireless and talented, we will always need more hands. While we have built this community as you - your enthusiasm is contagious - the growth will happen when the local Sugar Labs will begin to exist. The launch of a half dozen "labs" involving high school and college students to make real contributions to this global project of free software is not an unreasonable goal for 2009, and it would double the size of the readily community development.

Along with the growth of community development is the growth of the educational community around Sugar. We are to cultivate a climate in which teachers have used Sugar in their classrooms feel able to initiate discussions among themselves and, in some cases, with the development community. This trend is particularly evident on the list and in the blogosphere. Their feedback has been of enormous value. But most teachers do not work in deployment Sugar are barely aware of what it is, and they will engage only when their vague awareness of what it will turn into attention. Building a presence in the Sugar forums that teachers attend is an important goal of 2009.

Sugar is a learning platform, and therefore has meaning only in the hands of students. In late 2009 we will have reached over half a million children across Sugar deployments of OLPC XO-1 computers. This is an ambitious but reasonable goal to reach as many children as possible through other means of distribution of Sugar: Sugar on netbooks; Sugar on memory sticks; Sugar server. We have laid the foundations for six months, working with teams packing of a number of GNU / Linux distributions. It is now time to undertake such efforts.

Tchéhouali Destiny was kind enough to invite me to participate in the debate taking place right now on the site web2solidarite.org "TBI / OLPC: what tools and what educational content for digital education? "

Here are his questions and my answers (read also the site web2solidarite ):

DT: You often had to paraphrase Alan Kay, an American computer scientist fascinated by education, by recalling that "the computer is nothing by itself, but it can be a great vehicle. "But should we therefore replace the wheel of a" Ferrari "in the hands of someone who does not even have a driver's license. In other words, without really involving the XO has a ferrari (it was just a metaphor here), the fundamental question that arises is whether it is appropriate for children who have never been in contact with a computer to offer the first computer as an XO. How the OLPC XO computer or is it an educational tool that can contribute to digital literacy of children in developing countries?

BG: The idea that I go back to Alan Kay, is that no digital pedagogy
can not simply be to expose a child to a computer. If the computer is a vehicle, is not he who tells us where to go. Alan Kay said that the computer is an "amplifier of ideas" but as soon as it emphasizes the educational use of the computer needs to consider the ideas you want to convey with. We spend a lot of time to adapt the computer to our teaching practices, we must also move to rethink programs upstream.

The XO is it a Ferrari, and it must be put in the hands of children? In some ways, the XO is a jewel of innovation: I will only mention the screen to read in direct sunlight, and the mesh network (mesh network), which connects the XO them without going through the Internet. In other ways, the XO is a computer modest compared to other computers in its class, it has low memory and dead, and he sometimes gives the impression of slowness. This compromise between high and low performance is that the XO was not designed to surpass other computers but to be adapted to the needs of students from developing countries, the emphasis has been placed on strength and opportunities for collaboration rather than execution speed of programs.

The idea of ​​a "computer license" that children should go to use based on a common mistake: believing that the goal of OLPC is to train children to computers. No, the goal of OLPC is to use this tool to multiply the ways and opportunities to learn. We must therefore reverse the persective, and instead to ask whether children are "ready" for the XO, the question of whether the XO is tailored to the needs of students.

To answer, we must distinguish three aspects: hardware, software and usage. Hardware side, there is no doubt that the XO is a medium well suited to children. On the software side, again, no doubt that the platform Sugar offers many software all potentially very useful, yet most under-explored. From both points of view, the XO is promising. But it is at uses it all happens: the XO Gold is not delivered with predefined uses! It is for governments and teaching communities in each country to invent, to deepen and even share them.

The advantage of Sugar from other programs is that it is free - anyone can edit and disseminate their changes. I believe that this spirit of freedom in software can encourage teachers to get the communities in which they freely share the content they transmit using the XO, the activities they set up, etc..

DT: Learning independently all you want, when you want, "Learning to learn 'rather than to learn? How to actually apply those values ​​advocated by the OLPC project which calls for rethinking education? And what is the strategy to adapt the tool to educational resources and local content in different environments and cultural and linguistic contexts that differ by each deployment project in a different country?

BG: First of all, we must distinguish the educational values ​​of technological realities, even if they strive to serve the first to close. Thus, just as it is possible to install different operating systems on one computer, it is possible to use software sometimes from constructivist principles, sometimes from a more traditional pedagogy. A simple word processor can be used to support an ongoing collaborative, and a wiki can be used in a "front".

It means this: once the country receive the XO and that teachers learn to use software Sugar, has yet to begin. It remains to define the role the computer has the class to imagine the interactions between teachers, students and their computers, to define curricula adapted to the new tool. This is the work that governments must carry with teachers.

The fact that Sugar is free software facilitates the integration of certain aspects of the XO, including linguistic aspects: to translate the work of Sugar in a language, no need for an access code because the software can be freely changed. But I think the adaptation to the cultural context focuses mainly on the content of what is taught on a particular aspect of the software.

DT: In May 2008, you were part of the delegation that accompanied the deployment of OLPC in Haiti (13,700 XO in 60 schools). What is
your feedback, mainly on aspects of coaching and ownership of the tool by Haitian children (time of ownership, understanding capabilities, discovery
content)?

BG: In the summer of 2008, the OLPC Haiti made ​​a pilot with the Republic of Chile School, an elementary school preferred Port-au-Prince. One hundred students (all girls) split fifty XO for a month and a half and six teachers accompanied them. At the educational level, experience has shown us that teachers were quite receptive to constructivism, but they needed more training on the computer itself to implement the principles of this pedagogy. As for students, the computer has been a great tool of expression: many have written more in a month on the XO they would have done by hand in a term, teachers were all surprised . But access to content was more difficult, not only because there were still some pedagogical content in Haitian Creole, but also because the use of content requires a frame whose
teachers had not used.