Sugar Labs is sponsoring professional cycling team Team Chipotle, alongside Garmin, cervelo, and others, to raise awareness about the Sugar Labs mission.
The question now is: will there be Team Chipotle swag at the Montevideo eduJAM next month?!
Professor Hopeton Dunn of the Mona School of Business in Jamaica writes and speaks about the need for more widesperad access to computers in his country. Citing a recent ICT indicators survey, he notes that Jamaica has hit a plateau of access, and that while projects like OLPC are introducing more children to computers and the Internet (a kind thing for him to say, since we are working with under 1000 children and teachers in the region, largely thanks to the efforts of Sameer Verma and Charlie Nesson), new plans are needed to provide access in the workplace and at home for the whole country.
Read more at the Jamaica Observer.
Tim Berners-Lee declared access to the Web a human right at an MIT symposium this week on Computation and the Transformation of Practically Everything. He noted that it’s incredibly important to push things, in designing the Web’s infrastructure, to help the Web affect society and culture positively. Nicholas spoke later on the current impact of OLPC and the future of the XO-3.
Dextrose2, a revamp of the popular XOOS flavor developed by Activity Central and Sugar Labs, in partnership with Paraguay Educa, is now available for both XO-1 and XO-1.5 laptops. It has a number of performance and other improvements, including 3G modem and connection sharing. I can’t wait to try it out on my old XO-1s.
The original Dextrose build + activities that was released last fall was based closely on the latest XOOS release available at the time (OS 10). This version has one major difference from the main OS: it does not offer a traditional Linux desktop as an alternative to Sugar. Â (Some students managed to delete their Sugar home directories from within their Gnome desktop, making work with Sugar difficult until they had reinstalled it. Â As a result, some teachers asked to return to a Sugar-only system.)
This work is now formally supported by Plan Ceibal, which has started to use Dextrose in their schools. It is good to see this much attention being given to activity development and Spanish-language documentation, and to close feedback loops with teachers who use the latest tools every week with their students.
So don’t wait — download a copy of Dextrose2 and try it out!
NB: If you’re looking for the latest Dextrose with the Gnome desktop option added back in, you can request this on the sugar-devel mailing list. It’s on the list of versions to make, but not a high priority at the moment.
Mentors from the Santa Cruz have started an ‘education alternative’ project and creativity center at a Children’s Home aiming to combine younger students with university students studying programming. They started working with 9-year olds on XOs and with Sugar, and after a few months have moved to working with 6-year olds and older students.
They offer some early feedback on using Sugar and Etoys in afterschool projects, and are working on engaging teachers and starting some programming projects. I look forward to seeing their reflections at the end of this season.
Rodrigo reports on his experiences with OLPC Nicaragua, and how the Zamora-Teran Foundation got the program off the ground. Their deployment has been progressing quickly, and working with children in Bluefields and elsewhere.
