[Squeakland] ideas to promote squeak in telecenters in Brazil

Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas offray.luna at javeriana.edu.co
Mon May 21 10:19:48 PDT 2007


Hi Martha,

(Warning: This will be a long mail... :-))

I'm also working with young people (but not children) and Squeak here in 
my university in Colombia and we have also two XO prototypes of the OLPC 
project here (I'm not the leader of the project for the country, which 
is a friend of mine, but my thinking/doing has been influenced by this 
project). Recently we have a workshop for university teachers about 
using Squeak for the creation of virtual learning objects. Because 
Squeak has been used intensively with children and there is a lot of 
documentation and material for them, I will concentrate more in the 
experience with young people and other teachers. The idea, in both 
experiences, is the creation of learners' networks and communities of 
practice on technologies, education and science. From the theoretical 
point, we work on postvigoskian cognitive and distributed cognition 
theories in which there is a lot of emphasis on how cognition is 
"affected" by the environment, social rules, other people, mediations 
and media. I have added some conceptual framework on Multiagent systems 
to make some models on collective problem solving and put that model in 
talk with the educative correlate of teaching/learning in classroom.

We start with some small introduction to social software (wikis, blikis 
--blog inside wikis) as a way to create organic memory from our learning 
experiences and a share space of reflexion, thinking and talk. Having 
the habit of writing constantly about your learning/design experiences 
as they advance is difficult (the lack of documentation on software is a 
good example of this) but in a more formal settings [1], as we have in 
the classroom this, is solved by the evaluation instruments [4] which 
puts a lot of emphasis on documentation. On informal settings[5] is 
needed to insist with examples, talks, reminders and so on. Informal 
settings compensate discipline with passion ;-). The key here is that 
your architecture and social practices needs to reflect the values that 
you want to create/consolidate in your learners community (for example 
the value of sharing knowledge using the social practice of documentation)

[1] http://www.eduwiki.info
[4] http://www.eduwiki.info/IntroduccionInformatica/Evaluacion/Instrumentos
[5] http://www.el-directorio.org/

The first activity that my students work with, is the creation (and of 
course process documentation) on a interactive book, using the Bookmorph 
of Squeak, on any subject they like (the emotional link with the subject 
is important). The second one is the creation of an eToy (you can see 
examples of my students works on [2][3]), then we go deeper in the 
algorithmic programming concepts, using BotsInc[6] and finally, when 
they have the proper shared culture size (publishing, squeak and 
programming basics) we go to the creation of a collective 
problem/project[7] which is the first consolidation of a micro community 
of problem solvers, and is nice to see that we get a community of 
discourse where people is interacting with respect and getting knowledge 
with the help of others

[2] http://www.eduwiki.info/SergioAndresRivera
[3] http://www.eduwiki.info/JoseRamirez
[6] http://www.eduwiki.info/BotsInc
[7] http://www.eduwiki.info/MazeSquad2
[8] http://www.eduwiki.info/MazeSquad/Foro

For the teachers workshop we go in a more conceptual way first talking 
about virtual learning "objects" and then we try to provide a panoramic 
view of the "Squeak multiverse" (Squeak, Scracth, OpenCroquet). Getting 
the teachers documenting its more difficult because of the lack of time, 
but the experience showed that Scratch interface is easier for them that 
Squeak interface (and for a lot of people too). The focus on interactive 
creations (games and stories) and after school centers of Scratch[9][10] 
could be a better introduction for teenagers that eToys and Booksmorphs 
and would be really nice to have some kind of bridge between Squeak and 
Scratch, for example using Scratch animations/stories on Squeak 
books/projects.

[9] http://www.el-directorio.org/Scratch/Introduccion
[10] 
http://www.el-directorio.org/Scratch?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=ScratchSneakPreview.pdf

Developing computer literacy and fluency with Squeak has been a really 
transforming experience for me and my students, and the Squeak community 
is one of the most friendly communities out there, but there are still 
some issues that we need to work together.

Issues:

* Lack of properly licensed material: This one was of my biggest 
problems last year (and still is). Most of the documentation for Squeak 
its outdated and the one that is current, comprehensive and suited for 
teaching/learning is mostly in English and licensed under restrictive 
copyright terms. I would be willing of creating a Spanish translation of 
the excellent Bots Inc's book (and I have not enough knowledge yet to 
write my own comprehensive book) and even Stephane Ducasse (the author) 
is willing to release the material under a liberal license, but 
convincing the editors could be difficult. May be if one of the sponsors 
of the OLPC or local governments participating in the project could 
cover the cost of freeing/opening the good current materials (instead of 
giving only financial support for the creation of new open content 
material) we could accelerate the "content layer" of the project. You 
can see, for example, some Spanish translation of the Powerful ideas for 
the Classroom book, but if you want the Portuguese version you will need 
to ask permission again and you and your students will not create 
derived material (at least not in the sense understood by 
Free/Open-Source Software).

* Multiple incompatible images (Desktop, OLPC, Squeakland, Small-land, 
BotsInc, 3.8, 3.9, 3.10): This breaks the sense of continuity. Would be 
nice to have some way to create custom images depending of the task, but 
with a minimalist image as a common base (may be this is happening in 
some sense but its opaque to the user and they see the virtual machine 
as the only thing in common). The 3.10 image is working through this 
path but meanwhile you need to choose carefully which image you want, 
because some patches and developments are not compatible (for example 
between Squeakland and Small-land). I suggest to get an image with eToys 
support and trying to go from them to other squeak learning environments 
(for example eToys). If we're thinking in an Squeak learning environment 
which grows with the children, we will need to have, for example, the 
possibility to pass from eToys to Smalltalk (Bots Incs seems a nice 
bridge) and may be we need to impact the scholar system in places where 
is more needed (in Colombia teenagers are more vulnerable to leaving 
their studies that children) and would be nice to have this reflected on 
the OLPC or Telecenters projects. Another problem with incompatible 
images is that the creations on some of them can't be loaded in others 
or doesn't look fine. For example, we tried to create some interactive 
fables of local folklore for XO machines in Desktop ones, and the 
different size and aspect ratio of the screens make the content to look 
really bad on them.

* Variable responsiveness of "the list" and other community places to 
talk/teach/learn. Most of the times you ask and get a nice and quick 
response even with code examples, screenshots and references, but some 
other your mail can sleep inside the castaway's bottle and nobody respond.

Surely I'm forgetting a lot of things and would be nice to share more 
about the creation of learning spaces/experiences in the Squeak 
multiverse, about the important of continuity, interaction, and context, 
but this mail is long enough already. I hope that this helps, will be 
nice to hear about your experiences in Brazil and more 
questions/insights as they appear.

Cheers,

Offray


Marta Voelcker escribió:
> Dear Squeakers,
>
>  As one of the researchers from the University that is running the OLPC pilot project in Porto Alegre, Brazil, I was introduced to squeak, last February, when I could bring an XO home during a weekend.
>
> But now,  my work  is related to promote capacity building to the staff of  organizations that run TELECENTERS.
>
> Telecenters, in Brazil, are rooms with an average of 12 computers(PCs) with access to Internet inside NGOs or grassroots organizations, located in low-income communities in Brazil.
>
> I am the coordinator of a Foundation that promotes capacity building to the staff of these organizations, to implement curses in telecenters. Our methodology has the same line of constructionism...
> We have been working "IT Basic knowledge"  through project-based learning, now we want to start using Squeak.
>
> In Brazil, schools work on shifts. Children go to school in the morning (8:00 to 12:00) or in the afternoon (2:00 to 18:00). If the child goes in the morning, during the afternoon he or she might get a vacancy in an after school program offered by an NGO or grassroots organization, or religious organization. Government helps supporting these organizations to implement this after school programs. Those organizations are frequently receiving refurbished computers and building partnerships to create their telecenter. Than, they come to us, asking for guidance about what to do with the telecenter.
>
> So, we have telecenters as informal educational environment to work with children and teenagers. We don’t need to relate our work to school curriculum, we can promote any kind of curses, workshop, guided playtime... any thing!
>
> We have about 45 of these NGOs equipped with telecenters in Porto Alegre, already working with us (from a total of 150 NGOs partners from other cities). 
>
> Our motivation is strongly related to develop programming skills on children and teenagers. 
>
> We are thinking about to start with a group of age around 10 and another group around 15. We would choose one  telecenter and plan to  work there ( instead of train their staff).
>
> But what would we teach? Should we keep thinking in project-based learning? When we use  other software we frequently start working with  identity construction, and after some exploration of the software, the group starts a project...
>
> But to understand the basis of squeak, the "drive a car " project seems so important!!!
>
> Well, sorry guys to be so long in this Sunday night! Seems that to write to you already made some goals clear to me!
>
> Ideas, experiences and suggestions are welcome!
>
> regards,
>
> Marta Voelcker
>
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> Squeakland at squeakland.org
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>
>   


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