Planet Sugar

The little kid that could

2013-05-17T16:31:10+00:00

This is Sumit, a little kid who lives next door from us in Bhagmalpur. I took this picture casually, as I walked the streets of the village back in 2003. I was amused by the tripod of a walker. It’s locally made, probably bought at the local faire, and it works well for what it’s supposed to do. It’s not something you’d find at your local Toys R Us, but then again, if you did, it would be in the retro throwback section, and would cost you a fortune!

Sumit and his tripod, circa 2003

Coming back to Sumit, I saw him again in January 2013. I didn’t know his name was Sumit, or he was the same kid in the picture! He showed a lot of interest in the XOs, the repair sessions, the reflashing, and installing new software. I asked him to help me with some minor tasks, like running a command, but he wanted to know the “why and how” of it. So, I explained to him how the datastore backup happens, and why it takes a random window of 30 minutes to backup (those who know ds-backup would know!). He was curious. He wanted to learn. This was surely not in his curriculum! Nor in a lesson plan! He had gotten the bug of curiosity, and that’s something I can relate to.

Eventually, Sumit helped me with installation, backup, running Python scripts, bash commands, rsync and such. He did a site survey of the village and helped us with installing the Wi-Fi access points. He took apart his XO laptop, repaired a WiFi antenna cable that had popped out, and put things back together. He learned how to access the server, install new Sugar activities, install the Hindi Wikipedia bundle, browse for a ton of offline TED talks, books and music, all locally hosted on the server. In fact, given that I had a very short window to get a lot done, he became my point of distribution of information to the rest of the kids – a student assistant of sorts, and a fine one at that Then, one day, he told me that the photo of the kid with a tripod was really him! How cool is that?!

Sumit helping with a Wi-Fi site survey

Sumit repairing by flashlight – we had no electricity.

Could any of this be possible, if we didn’t have OLPC laptops there? Probably not. The local private and parochial schools have “computer classes” where the computer is always broken, and the teacher never shows up, and the parents still pay for all that’s not delivered. A little green laptop is making a difference where it matters…and Sumit is the little kid that could.

Sumit repairing a broken screen, circa 2013

Scratch Day DC 2013 at Gallaudet University

2013-05-15T16:19:20+00:00

Scratch Day DC 2013 will be hosted by Gallaudet University in collaboration with Uplift, Inc. and Elsie Whitlow Stokes Community Public Charter School.

What: Scratch Day DC 2013 for Everyone!
When: Saturday, May 18, 2013, 10 am to 5pm
Where: Gallaudet University [map, aerial photo], Student Academic Center in computer labs SAC 1010 and SAC 1212, Washington, D.C. 20002
Lunch is on your own. The SAC cafeteria kitchen is closed, but you can bring lunch to eat in the dining area. Off campus, try Union Market nearby or this map.

You will have a chance to try out the free MIT Scratch software which enables kids of all ages to author multimedia stories and interactive games by snapping together visual programming blocks. The software runs on Linux, Mac and Windows. Scratch also connects to sensors in the physical world using the PicoBoard USB accessory from SparkFun Electronics. We will have one of those on display and two of them will be raffled off!

Kevin Cole has his labs set up to run Scratch 1.4 and the new web-based Scratch 2.0. Bring a USB drive if you want to save your project, or we can help you set up an account on the MIT Scratch web site where you can upload and save your projects. If you have your own projects, bring them on a USB drive or laptop to show off!

Photos here and here of our previous Scratch Day events.

And some excellent Scratch Resources:

A backend for Sugar’s sharing to a Web Service feature

2013-05-11T06:00:15+00:00

Recently, Walter and Tincho finished twitter-gobject and got it integrated with the Web Services infrastructure that Walter wrote for Sugar. But today Walter told me that while he was in Oz he learned that the deployment there is interested in the sharing-to-a-web-service capability from the Journal, but probably not to Twitter nor Facebook. So this weekend I’ll be hacking with Tincho on a backend and front-end for a sharing Web Service that can run on self hosted infrastructure (i.e.: the School Server). An initial commit of the django backend service is here. Whilst Tincho will be working on the frontend pieces tomorrow. Stay tuned.

OLPC weekly update 10/05

2013-05-10T15:33:39+00:00

Fixed mwifiex frequent multicast wakeup preventing XO-4 from sleeping.
Fixed an XO-4 audio recording regression.
13.2.0 build 5 release and testing.
13.1.0 final release.

Doodling on the XO-4 Touch

2013-05-09T06:25:27+00:00

I was simply doodling on the XO-4 Touch. One thing led to another, and before I knew, I was adjusting brush sizes, mixing colors and finger-painting away. Given that the "touch" is based on infrared LEDs and photodiodes, the resolution and response is impressive - even for a terrible finger-painter like me!

Hint: I think those are really tall Redwood trees :-)

<script type="text/javascript"> </script>

Sugar Digest 2013-05-08

2013-05-08T13:13:03+00:00

Sugar Digest

1. Sugar Labs has been given 8 slots for student interns for Google Summer of Code. This means we’ll be able to cover a lot ground this summer: we have some very strong proposals and a great mentoring team. The next step is for the mentors and the sugar-devel team to narrow the applicants down to a short list. Many thanks to everyone who has lent a hand so far and to Google for giving us this opportunity.

2. The sugar-devel team has been really busy pushing new features for the next release and doing a general clean up of the code base. It is remarkable the current pace of activity, especially around the efforts to make HTML5/Javascript a first-class approach to Sugar activity development. You can follow the work on the devel list or by reviewing (and submitting) patches on github.

3. I’ve been trying to contribute to the overall Sugar effort, but I tend to get distracted by Turtle Blocks (AKA Turtle Art). When I was visiting RIT a few weeks back, I was inspired to enhance the debugging features Turtle Blocks. I came up with a simple way to introduce the concept of break-points to the code. I had already introduced blocks to “hide” and “show” the program as it executes. And through the “rabbit” and “snail” buttons, the user can control the speed of program execution. What I did was to combine these two concepts. By introducing a “hide” block into your code, the code executes at full speed. Introducing a “show” block causes the program to run slowly and display the status of all of its “variables” as it runs. A subtle change, but what it allows one to do is to surround code you want to debug with a “show” and “hide” blocks. Small blocks of code can be examined while the larger program runs at full speed. Really helpful for debugging complex projects.

4. I am also working on another new feature, this one at the request of the teachers who have been using Butia in Uruguay. The idea is to be able to save a stack of blocks for reuse in multiple projects (instances). The way to do that currently is to open a project, copy the stack to the clipboard, and then paste it into a new project — too clumsy to be used on a regular basis. The new feature allows users to save a stack to a custom palette. This palette is loaded with each instance of Turtle, so it means the stacks are available as if they were extensions of Turtle itself. It makes it even easier for end-user customization.

In the community

5. We’ll be celebrating International Turtle Art Day (Día Mundial de TortugArte) in October. Our objectives are to:

Promote the use of Turtle Art
Share and promote best practices
Celebrate projects for children and teachers

Details on how you can participate will be made available soon.

6. How embarrassing.

Tech Talk

7. Laura Vargas reports that Hexoquinasa v0.9 (BETA2) has been released and is in the hands of the Ministry of Education of Perú, where it will undergo testing.

8. Daniel Narveaz reports that “the initial bits of the HTML activities work has landed. It should now be relatively easy to start writing an activity.”

(1) You’ll need the latest Sugar development environment.
(2) Then open a shell and move to the source directory:
make shell
cd source
(3) Create an activity based on a template
volo create my-activity ./sugar-html-template
(4) Install the activity for development as usual
cd my-activity
python setup.py dev
(5) To interact with the platform you will need to add the sugar-core-html library to your activity
volo add -f ../sugar-html-core

Sugar Labs

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OLPC weekly update 03/05

2013-05-03T14:34:10+00:00

Fixed eToys audio recording on XO-4.
Fixed TamTam crackly sound on XO-4.
Fixed GNOME hang regression on XO-4.
Organised, documented and built vmeta support for XO-4.
Fixed two instabilities with vmeta video playback in gstreamer.

Focus

2013-04-29T20:04:00+00:00

I've been playing with the camera and lens combo using the Tuk Lens Kit and a XO-4. The camera on the XO does not autofocus, like most smartphone cameras do. So, instead of holding the object steady, one has to move the object into focus, and while holding steady, click on the "circle" button. I wanted to have a better way to move the object, and keep it steady for a picture - sort of like a microscope.

I put together a quick prototype using Lego. This rig moves up and down using a rack and pinion mechanism. Eventually, I'd like something cheaper and easily replicable in the field, perhaps using cardboard, or wood, or clay, but for prototyping, Lego works well.

The lens is fairly good to magnify things like bank notes. I'm using a Jamaican $1000 bill here (approx 10 USD). Here's a magnification of the word "Governor" from the banknote.

"Governor" on the banknote. Taken using Record activity on a XO-4.

Focus rig, up close.

Here are the closeups.

"Governor" on the banknote.

"Michael Manley" with Bank of Jamaica "BOJ" watermark

"ONE" from "Out of Many, One People<wbr></wbr>" from the Coat of Arms of Jamaica.

Hexoquinasa entrega versión 0.9 BETA2

2013-04-26T15:58:55+00:00

El equipo SomosAzúcar se complace en presentar a la comunidad la entrega de Hexoquinasa 0.9, versión Beta 2 del sistema operativo Sugar para las laptops XO entregadas por el Ministerio de Educación de Perú.

La serie 0.x de Hexoquinasa se basa en el Sistema Operativo de OLPC versión 11.3.x el cual hasta la fecha ha demostrado ser el más estable y de mejor rendimiento. Hexoquinasa cuenta con acceso directo a la Red Azúcar, el foro de soporte de la comunidad para la distribución y discusión de software actualizado, contenidos y recursos de aprendizaje.

Agradecemos a la Dirección General de Tecnologías Educativas del Ministerio de Educación de Perú (DIGETE) por su apoyo a este proyecto que busca aumentar el aprovechamiento tecnológico-pedagógico de las XO, iniciando con la campaña de actualización, “Actualiza XO”.

En esta versión además de múltiples correcciones de fallos, se incluyeron los siguientes ajustes solicitados por los grupos de testeo:
- Ctrl-Alt-Borrar reinicia Sugar otra vez
- Vecindario ya no se llena de otros usuarios
- Se quitó GCompris y Etoys, dejando más de 400MB libres para el usuario en total
- Se incluyó la actividad Agenda de Contactos desarrollada por Ignacio Rodriguez y Rafael Cordano
- El sistema de instalación desde la Red Azúcar ahora soporta instalación de dependencias de paquetes
- El motor de renderizado de HTML de la Red Azúcar se ha migrado de Webkit1 a Gecko (Firefox) – esto para mejorar el rendimiento y la estabilidad
- Sincronización completamente automática de recursos offline al conectar con la red
- El manual de instalación ha sido actualizado
- Correcciones de detalles gráficos y de funcionalidad

Esta versión puede es considerada BETA 2 y preliminar a la candidata para distribución final, por lo que el equipo agradece a la comunidad su descarga, instalación, y pruebas. Las ideas, problemas y observaciones de la comunidad docente serán muy valiosas para que el equipo pueda mejorar la experiencia de todos los usuarios finales.

Para usuarios de versiones anteriores, les recordamos que pueden actualizar los paquetes de Hexoquinasa mediante el comando “sudo sweets-distribution sync”.

Descarga directa:
http://download.sugarlabs.org/hexoquinasa/release/v09/xo1/hxp95.img
http://download.sugarlabs.org/hexoquinasa/release/v09/xo1/fs.zip

Instrucciones de Instalación:
http://pe.sugarlabs.org/go/Proyecto_Piloto_Hexoquinasa/Instalar

Manual de Instalación:
http://network.sugarlabs.org/artifacts/download/11f88584ae7211e2bee8525400e4dcb5

Why your 8-year-old should be coding | VentureBeat

2013-04-19T02:51:01+00:00

Why your 8-year-old should be coding | VentureBeat.

An article about another learn-to-code program called “Tynker.” Screen shots suggest it has a lot in common with Scratch, including Scratch 2.0: web-based.

We’ve been trying out Scratch with our students and appreciate the stability of the platform (no more sticks that won’t boot), as well as the potential home-school re-enforcement. Tynker, starting online, has started in the right place for a global audience.

skepticism on collaborative learning, Sugar and OLPC

2013-04-17T08:42:03+00:00

It's natural for people to feel skeptical about projects that claim to be able to do miracles, which I suppose is what it might seem that many people think about the actual results that came from testing children that were learning using the OLPC XO laptops running sugar, and allowing for collaborative learning without much need for the interference of a teacher. The results of the studies showed that children who used the devices were at least 4-5 months more advanced in their learning during a 2 year period when the devices were used, compared to their counterparts who continued with the normal education. 2 years is little time in which to study the true potential that these learning devices really had, but clearly, it was not negative, but highly positive and didn't result in the need for more money to be thrown at the project as was initially expected (teachers were supposed to be trained to use the devices, but it was shown that the children and teachers using them, found them intuitive enough, that formal training was not necessary) In many ways, perhaps the project felt like it might threaten the livelihoods of the education industry in the countries where it was practiced, and of course, in impoverished regions, people already have it rough enough that they dont want to be loosing jobs too, which many thought might be the case, if the devices were so effective in eliminating the need for teachers as such,
However, that's not at all the case. The point is, the children in Peru, Uruguay and Paraguay using OLPC xo netbooks running the sugar operating system were able to eagerly learn it by themselves, but surely with the aid of teachers, the process may have been even more successful than it was, and its that kind of rhetoric, political discussion, and dare I say it, marketing that needs to happen to embrace the users, the technology, the teachers, and the whole project itself. Marketing has never been a strong suit of the people involved in this project, as they are not sales people, but mostly teachers, developers, hardware integrators, and people involved in the day to day management of the running of such a system. I imagine they understand the need for marketing and a good image, but it has never been at the top of their agenda, they're just not that type of people. This is not apple, or microsoft, trying to sell an idea that is just that, they are not selling anything but the results of trials conducted during a 2 year period which were successful. Attacking those results and especially the people who gave their time and energy to a project that frankly is far better for our planet's future than many other things, seems perverse.
For more information check the blog itself that explains what I've stated above in better detail:
edutechdebate.org/massive-open-online-courses/the-one-laptop-per-child-corollation-with-massive-open-online-courses/

Sugar Digest 2013-04-16

2013-04-17T02:20:00+00:00

Sugar Digest

1. I have been on the road the past two weeks and consequently a bit behind in my communication. I don’t recall if I announced beyond the sugar-devel list that Sugar Labs was selected to participate in Google Summer of Code. We have a great collection of project ideas and students are starting to engage in discussions. Please, if you are interested in being a mentor, sign up at rhe GSoC website.

2. One of my trips was to Sydney, Australia, where I spent a few days with the team from OLPC AU. I really appreciate their approach: a tight coupling of educators, technology, documentation, marketing and business. They are in the process of expanding their program with a systematic, sustainable approach. A seriously good website [1, 2] is part of their strategy for supporting teachers. More on that theme in the coming weeks.

3. My other trip was to Finland, where I gave the keynote at the Finnish Interactive Technology for Education (ITK) conference. Jarmo Viteli was my host. There is the potential of intimidation, going to Finland, with its reputation for great schools, to talk about learning. But I found a receptive audience, appreciative of the fact that technology means more than fun and games. I began my talk with a reference to the former CEO of Nokia, who once described his role in his company not as a conductor in front of an orchestra, but as a member of a Jazz ensemble. I suggested that teachers are not conductors either. There was a real appreciation of the Sugar platform approach to reflection and collaboration. Also the FOSS culture in Finland seems alive and well — the idea of children and teachers taking responsibility for their tools resonated with the audience. That responsibility and risk-taking are two complementary goals for learners. My talk should be posted on line soon.

4. Right before I left for my two weeks of airplanes and hotel rooms, there was an interview with Alan Kay in Time Magazine. A favorite quote he dusted off in the interview was “the music is not in the piano”. Nor is the music in the teacher. For a number of different reasons, Alan’s interview is timely. As we see the proliferation of low-cost Android tablets into schools, it is important to ask if we giving children toys or tools; and are we letting them play music or make music?

Another quote from Alan in the interview is: “people love change except for the change part.” Case in point, there has been grumbling on the sur list that Sugar keeps changing and as a consequence things break. While undoubted there is are still plenty of bugs in Sugar (and even more in the older versions of the software deployed in, for example, Uruguay), the grass is not greener in the commercial software world. One need not look farther than the evolution of Android or iOS over the past 4 years to see vast amounts of change. As the Greek philosopher Heraclides said approximately 2300 years ago, “Change is the only constant.” Get used to it.

I end with another quote from Alan: “Modern science was only invented 400 years ago, and it is a good example of what social thinking can do with a high threshold. Science requires a society because even people who are trying to be good thinkers love their own thoughts and theories — much of the debugging has to be done by others. But the whole system has to rise above our genetic approaches to being social to much more principled methods in order to make social thinking work.”

In the community

5. Michael Perscheid from the University of Potsdam has been using Etoys as a game development platform with his students. Check out their work.

Tech Talk

6. The “github” experiment has been going well. Daniel Narvaez has been leading a team of reviewers through the reasonably efficient process of using pull requests and we have been able to clear up at least some of the backlog of features. But we still need more reviewers!

The basics for submitting a patch for review are:
1. Fork the repo on the web UI
2. Clone your fork
3. Push the patches to your fork
4. Make a pull request from the web UI

7. Daniel has also been leading a discussion of how to move forward on both the integration of Javascript and HTML5 into Sugar and the migration of Sugar onto a more web-centric platform, e.g. chrome. Follow along on the devel list (numerous threads).

Sugar Labs
Visit our planet for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments.

Cumpleaños Feliz

2013-04-08T19:10:59+00:00

A nuestro dedicado miembro voluntario Ignacio Rodríguez quien contribuye desde Canelones-Uruguay, es miembro honorario del equipo Hexoquinasa al haber contribuído con su tiempo como tester, diseñador y desarrollador: le deseamos un muy feliz cumpleaños n°14 y que sean muchos más.

En nombre del equipo SomosAzúcar :O)

Teaching free/open source to high school students

2013-04-03T22:16:21+00:00

A few weeks ago I taught a class on Open Source: Contributing to free culture (catalog entry) for Spark, a one-day program put on by the student-run MIT Educational Studies Program. I was fortunate to have two helpful co-teachers, Tyler Hallada and Jacob Hurwitz, who assisted with the lesson plan and the in class lecture.

We ended up teaching 3 sessions of the 1hr 50min class that Saturday, with about 10 students in each session.

I was pretty impressed by the quality of the students; a number of them had used GNU/Linux before, but even those who hadn't were able to gain something from the experience. The class was broken up into three segments:

Lecture on a brief history of open source and the free software movement
Small research project on an open source project
Lab where students could work through OpenHatch's training missions

The point was to mix up what could otherwise be a very boring lecture.

I think we might have missed the mark on the last bit, as I get the feeling that we didn't end up giving the students good actionables. While the quality of OpenHatch is high and the organization's campus outreach programs are amazing, skills practice only goes so far without clear direction to apply said skills. I'll be following up with the class participants to see how they're progressing on their own open source contributor journey, and will post updates if I have any.

While not an OpenHatch event, if this sort of thing interests you, OpenHatch runs a series of events like this one and has a mailing list for discussing planning and sharing best practices. Subscribe and say hi!

The presentation is enclosed below, and of course is licensed under CreativeCommons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0. [PDF]

An Interview with Computing Pioneer Alan Kay | TIME.com

2013-04-03T16:21:20+00:00

An amazing interview with Alan Kay. He continues to articulate the sorts of goals we have at with our FargoXO project and the kinds of goals digital humanists can be working towards.

The main point was for it to be able to qualitatively extend the notions of “reading, writing, sharing, publishing, etc. of ideas” literacy to include the “computer reading, writing, sharing, publishing of ideas” that is the computer’s special province.

For all media, the original intent was “symmetric authoring and consuming”.

Isn’t it crystal clear that this last and most important service is quite lacking in today’s computing for the general public? Apple with the iPad and iPhone goes even further and does not allow children to download an Etoy made by another child somewhere in the world. This could not be farther from the original intentions of the entire ARPA-IPTO/PARC community in the ’60s and ’70s.

via An Interview with Computing Pioneer Alan Kay | TIME.com.

Android on the OLPC XO-4 touch

2013-04-01T07:06:47+00:00

It took up all of Spring break, but it’s done. I give you Android on the OLPC XO-4 touch!

This week in Haiti

2013-03-26T21:36:49+00:00

I had the idea to do a laptop tear-down in front of the 5th-6th grade class. One of the laptops got a broken screen on the airplane, and another had a misfit touchpad. Junior and I each took a laptop so we could put the good parts together. Photos by Tony!

Tony, George, and Adam left. So Junior and I are OLPC Haiti for the next 10 days! A few days before they left, a 1st grader stopped by to talk about the laptop, and I got this photo:

I used my extra responsibility to set up a clearer schedule and run some new after-school activities. I tried out some new lessons with audiobooks, typing, and sensors. Here are a couple of photos:

School starts in Haiti

2013-03-26T21:29:35+00:00

School has officially begun in Haiti! From day 1, we started laptop training with an after-school program. Click below for photos from that first class:

Then today, we brought laptops to the 3rd/4th grade class and held an after-school program for the 5th/6th grade. Both were our first 1:1 class with each kid getting a laptop. Click below for photos of that class.

Naomi teaches the camera to her class

Our first lessons were the camera and the Physics activity.

In the after-school lesson, kids wanted to get into more interactive activities such as Maze and my new Haitian version of the Geoquiz activity.

MOOCs Challenge to Higher Education

2013-03-24T01:08:43+00:00

Nature’s science writer and editor M. Mitchell Waldrop recently contributed a MOOCs article to the Scientific American [1]. There are many intriguing aspects, lurking uncertainties, and heatedly debated controversies about the MOOCs phenomenon. What I care about here and now is the parallel that Chris Dede, Harvard professor, draws in that article between the “university business” and “learning business” in higher ed.

The university business is about solving the affordability problem, with a primary concern about increasing financial pressure to reduce tuition and other costs at times when student debt is sky rocketing. The learning business is about solving the accountability problem, with a primary concern about the quality of education, meaning qualified and talented teachers and an increasingly complex learning environment with many social, and situational, and time constraints.

To provide high quality while reducing costs (more with less, so to speak) is a productivity question. The university business answer to it is to adopt MOOCs and other online technologies “to do things more cheaply”, within “existing structures and practices.” The earlier innovations of personal computing, Internet, and course management systems show the exact limit in materializing real gains in productivity, that is, quality education at reduced costs. Dede’s claim is that we won’t see real gains in productivity and effectiveness of learning, or a thriving learning business, until “universities radically reshape [their existing] structures and practices to take full advantage of the technology.”

How do we do it is the sticky question. Since we’ve seen MOOCs in action, do we know more about the changes we need to make? Stanford’s take on this challenge is to “embed digital learning into the fabric of the entire University”. Ambitious, abstract statement. Here there are some concrete pointers.

Blend it!

A private summit held on March 4, 2013 in Cambridge and sponsored by MIT and Harvard apparently arrived at a “strong consensus that [a] blended model combining online lectures with a teacher led classroom experience [would be] the ideal” [2]. Waldrop concludes his article with a similarly compelling argument for the importance of direct human interaction. Ironically, MOOCs’ innovation with flipping the classroom is testimony that “online technology’s most profound effect on education may be to make human interaction more important than ever.”

Student mentoring? Mean it!

As it stands, student participation in MOOCs lacks diversity [3]. Undergraduate computing education is predominantly white or Asian and male, and percentages of women has been on a steady decline from 30% in 1991 to 17% in 2010. Mark Guzdial points to the demographic survey results of the first Coursera MOOC from Georgia Tech, which show that MOOC completers (enrollees who finish the course) were 88.6% white or Asian and 91% male. The results suggest, says Guzdial, that “MOOC-based computing education would be even more exclusive than what we currently have.” His research on broadening participation in computing and other findings suggest that “one-on-one encouragement is the most effective way of engaging and retaining students from underrepresented groups.”

Full circle competencies

Cognitive skills (reasoning, memory, and problem solving) is one of the three competency categories that compose deeper learning – process through which we become capable of taking what’s learned in one situation and transferring or applying to new situations and problems [4]. The other two categories are:

intra-personal skills by which we manage our behavior and emotions to achieve our goals (including learning goals), such as work ethic, metacognition, appreciation for diversity, flexibility, self-direction, self-monitoring, and responsibility.
inter-personal skills by which we express ideas and interpret and respond to others ideas, such as teamwork, collaboration, and leadership.

In disciplines with stronger communal endeavors as science, says Dede, “education is more than knowledge.” It is about “abilities like leadership and collaboration and traits like tenacity”, which are best learned face to face. David Krakauer, a biologist who directs the Institute for Discovery at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, makes the same point when he agrees that very large lecture halls can be replaced by lectures watched on iPads. At the same time, he points out, “there is no substitute for a conversation.”

Ultimate goal of a college degree is to educate graduates to achieve success in the workplace, further education, and other areas of adult responsibility and life, e.g., civic engagement and personal fulfillment, health, and relationships. And it takes the cultivation of both cognitive and noncognitive skills to learn on the job or transfer what we learn across jobs.

References
[1] Waldrop, M. Mitchell 2013. Massive Open Online Courses, aka MOOCs, Transform Higher Education and Science. Scientific American (March 13, 2013). Available at http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=massive-open-online-courses-transform-higher-education-and-science.

[2] Friedman, Thomas L. 2013. The Professor’s Big Stage. New York Times, March 5, 2013. Available at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/06/opinion/friedman-the-professors-big-stage.html?ref=thomaslfriedman&_r=1&.

[3] Guzdial, Mark. 2013. Research Questions About MOOCs. Communications of the ACM, Blog@CACM (February 20, 3013). Available at http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/161153-research-questions-about-moocs/fulltext.

[4] National Research Council. 2013. Education for Life and Work: Developing Transferable Knowledge and Skills in the 21st Century. Committee on Defining Deeper Learning and 21st Century Skills. Pellegrino, J.W. and Hilton, M.L. (Eds.). Board on Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

Filed under: education, teaching and learning

Video (subtitled!) and transcript for 2013 PyCon talk, “EduPsych Theory for Python Hackers”

2013-03-23T13:20:24+00:00

The video for my 2013 PyCon talk, “EduPsych Theory for Python Hackers,” is up. It’s 27 minutes and 56 seconds long, and you can view the subtitled version

on Universal Subtitles or
on YouTube (embedded below, no subtitles). The transcript alone is available on github.

(Disclaimer: I’m transcribing my own talk about a week after having given it, but I am deaf, so I’m typing this out through a combination of residual hearing, remembering what I said last Thursday, lipreading myself in the video, and reading slide content. It’s probably 98% accurate; patches welcome on Universal Subtitles.)