Guiding Principals

Douglas, Paco and I have been discussing the need to lay out the guiding principals of the Juan Chacon Free Software Project in order to more effectively communicate what we are hoping to do.

Using the guiding principals of an educational conference of which I am very fond as a starting point, we arrived at the following:

Guiding Principals of the Juan Chacon Free Software Project

1. Education should be inquiry-driven, thoughtful and empowering for all members of the educational community.
2. Education must be about co-creating the 21st century citizen, prepared to play a participatory and protagonistic role in a democratic society.
3. Technology must serve pedagogy, not the other way around.
4. Technology must enable students to research, create, communicate and collaborate.
5. Learning can - and must - be networked, and educational software and digital resources must be free.

Translated into Spanish, this reads:

Directrices del Proyecto Juan Chacón de Software Libre

1. La educación debería ser impulsada por la investigación, reflexiva y de empoderamiento para todos los miembros de la comunidad educativa.
2. La educación debe ser sobre co-crear el ciudadano del siglo 21, dispuesto a desempeñar un papel participativo y protagónico en una sociedad democrática.
3. La tecnología debe servir a la pedagogía, no a la inversa.
4. La tecnología debe permitir a los estudiantes investigar, crear, comunicarse y colaborar.
5. El aprendizaje puede - y debe - ser conectados en red y el software educativo y los recursos digitales deben ser libres.

I hope this statement of guiding principals will help us locate the kindred spirits in El Salvador with whom we can build the community we seek.

Getting Ready for eduJAM!

I'm still processing everything I learned in my annual pilgrimage to Pycon.  If time allows I'll make a separate post listing some of the highlights, but the coolest part of all was finding out that SchoolTool developer and Juan Chacon Free Software Project co-coordinator Douglas Cerna is heading to Uruguay for eduJAM!.

eduJAM! 2011 is an educational free software community "summit" that will take place in Uruguay from May 5th to 7th.  So sum up why this is so darn cool:

1. It is an example of the leadership role that the Sugar and OLPC communities are playing within the educational free software community.
2. With Mr. Cerna going, it will provide an opportunity to continue to build relationships between the Sugar and SchoolTool communities, that already exist in the OLE Nepal project and in Sugar Labs, DC.
3. For Sugar Labs, DC, it provides added impetus to move on our School Server project, as Douglas requested that we develop documentation on setting up a School Server with SchoolTool installed (from the Nepal rpms) before he makes the trip to Uruguay.

We have already started setting up our redhatdev server so we can begin contributing to the process.

Setting Up a New LTSP Server

Spring is coming, which is my favorite time of the school year.  Between now and late May is when most of the work gets done.  Students have spent the year thus far acquiring the skills they need to do exciting projects, and they haven't yet hit the "it's Summer" mode that kicks in around mid May and ends most productive learning.  So now is the time to make things happen.

The first thing I want to do is get our infrastructure improved so we have the hardware and networking tools we need to support our projects.   This week there are two main goals:

1. Getting a ticketing system in place.
2. Setting up a new LTSP server to free up the machine on which it is currently running to use as a KVM server.

Our new sys admin, Devin Kuhn, is working on the ticketing system.  He plans to use RT, and I'll let him blog about that project.

I'm setting up the LTSP server using these instructions.  I ran into a problem with the install, where it asked me to insert the same CD I was using for the install in the middle of the installation.  The problem, and the solution - burning the image onto a DVD instead of a CD - is documented here.

Installation proceeded without incident until the Building Thin Client System step, where it failed, and I got the evil looking red screen with error message.  I hit cancel and proceeded with the next step, installing grub, and the installation finished without any additional errors.

Since we want fat clients, not thin clients anyway.  The failure to build the thin client system may not be a problem.  I plan to look at this documentation to install the fat client system, and will report on my progress in a later post.

New Need for XMPP Server

On Friday I promised my Advanced Placement Computer Science students that I would setup eclipse for them.  When Kevin Cole and I got together this morning for our weekly web application development study session, he told me about a plug-in for eclipse called Saros that supports collaborative editing on eclipse.

It would be a great help to our aspiring Java programmers to have this capability, and since it uses XMPP for communication, it provides us with an additional use case, besides Sugar, for our ejabberd server.

Looks like it's time to raise the priority level of the the ejabberd server project....

Sugar Labs DC Plan for 2011

At the monthly meeting of the OLPC Learning Club DC on Saturday, January 22nd, we had the chance to discuss goals for Sugar Labs DC for the coming year.  After considering available resources and our desire to build on work from last year, we decided on the following goals:

1. Update the TurtleArt for Gnome package in time for the 11.04 ("Natty") release of Ubuntu and port it to Fedora.
2. Port the physics activity  to gnome and get it into Debian and Fedora repositories.
3. Create a social networking site for sharing physics worlds, using the same technology we used last year to create the TurtleArt site.
4. Use Pyjamas to create a browser version of Guido van Robot.
5. Setup, test, and document a CentOS based "School Server" with the
   following features:
   
   • an rpm for a working ejabberd server
   • turtleartsite and physicssite installation

We decided to migrate our lab from Ubuntu to Fedora.  The Ubuntu Sugar Remix (USR) project is being abandoned for the time being, so sugar won't run on the next Ubuntu release.  We lack the resources to support USR ourselves, and since educational software is our focus, the move to Fedora makes sense for us.

The Power of a Great Teacher

Next April will mark two years since Proyecto Juan Chacon's 27 XOs first arrived in El Salvador. We learned a very important lesson in the first year that they were in La Cooperativa Juan Chacon: a successful XO / Sugar educational project requires a great teacher. Progress was slow going during the first year. The XOs sat unused far more often then not, since the community really didn't know what to do with them.

That all changed about six months ago when the following occurred:

• The Juan Chacon Free Software Project formally became part of the non-profit organization, PEACE International.
• We hired a teacher, Erick Rosales, to go to the community once a week and develop an educational program using free software and Internet access.

Erick is an excellent teacher, and the community project in Chaletanango, El Salvador in moving forward at a wonderful pace, as the young student in this video can attest:



There are some in the Sugar community who believe that putting XOs in the hands of young folks is enough for them to begin learning on their own. Our experience in Los Chilamates suggests that while Sugar is an excellent learning tool, it requires a great teacher to make it come alive.

Ejabberd Now Works with USR

Matt Gallagher is on a roll!  At 2 pm today (EST) he and Douglas used the Chat activity on Ubuntu Sugar Remix (USR) to communicate between Arlington, Virginia, USA and San Salvador, El Salvador.  This required Matt to patch ejabberd to support Sugar's requirements, which in turn required him to learn enough Erlang to accomplish that.

Wonderful work, Mr. Gallagher!