Sebastial Dziallas organized a day-long session on Open Education at LinuxCon last week. They spent half the day discussing the needs of teachers and Sugar development. Caroline Meeks, Karlie Robinson, Colin Zweibel and others presented.
Mairin Duffy wrote up the event well, and the OpenSource Education channel offers lovely newsmag-style overviews as well.
David Leeming of OLPC Oceania has developed detailed deployment docs for a recent pilot in Kosrae, Micronesia, over at Wikieducator.   It is an excellent summary of what has been learned in the region to date, and useful guidance for anyone trying to organize a deployment for anywhere from 10 to 10,000 students.  I hope to see more great things from this project.
UPDATEÂ (Aug 20): David has published an excellent Teacher Training Manual based on those notes.
Sugar has been moving steadily to many platforms and distros beyond the XO and Fedora. Last year Guy Sheffer helped to get it working on the Nokia 810. This February it was repackaged for Ubuntu. And Mirabelle, the latest version of ”Sugar on a Stick”, is a bootable image for a USB key that lets you use almost any computer to run Sugar.
Have you tried the latest Sugar Activities on your favorite laptop? Give it a try, run an intro session at show-and-tell or a local computer lab, or introduce it to a child you know who is learning to use computers… and let us know about it.
An update on Uruguay’s deployment of olpc in high schools: Plan Ceibal has posted some details and images of the laptops that will be used in this project. Some schools will use the new blue XO-HS laptops, and others will use Magellans — the only implementation of the Classmate design that has been used in large scale deployments (in Portugal and Venezuela).
You can see their take on a feature comparison of the machines. While there’s no check box for “sunlight-readable screen”, robustness, or power management, it’s a good look at how schools perceive their options. I would be glad to see classrooms worldwide adopting any platform like this — both can share the same software and materials.
We have been working on a new XO laptop for high school students — one with a larger and more responsive keyboard better suited to the hands of older students. And Uruguay’s Plan Ceibal, expanding into high schools across the country, will be the first recipient — they’ve ordered 90,000 of the first production run.
These XO-1.5 HS machines are largely the same as a regular XO-1.5: they are VIA machines with Sugar and Gnome desktops, running both Sugar activities and Gnome apps. Â Only the bottom half is different: they have ‘clicky’ rather than membrane keyboards by default, and the base has been redesigned so that keyboards are much easier to swap out or clean — there are two screws you can access from the battery compartment that release the keyboard, then you can pop it out. Â No more 10-minute teardowns!
The new machines will be shades of dark and light blue; the factory is still working on getting the plastics and dye selection just right. Â I saw an early stab at this design, and it was very sexy — but I haven’t seen the final keyboard model they are using yet. As a keyboard fanatic (I can get 70wpm on my XO-1), I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled for the first one back in the office and will post a review for you.
Now that we have a half-dozen designs or models, we’ll need to come up with a better naming scheme… I’m taking suggestions for names and themes.