etoys-dev October 2009

etoys-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org

29 participants
76 discussions

Re: [squeakland] Re: the reasons for ranking
by Karl Ramberg 09 Jun '10

09 Jun '10

On 2009-09-30 17:20, Kim Rose wrote: > Hey, John, > > Nice to see you are still around and interested -- hope you are doing > well. Thanks for the comments. > > As for me and Viewpoints -- there is one reason only for ranking and > that is filtering in an attempt to bring the best educational examples > and those illustrative of etoys' strengths to the attention of the > community. So, I, for one, am hoping that those "voting" are not > voting for any particular child, author or person, but for the example > itself -- I hope those voting/ranking are asking "is this a fine > exemplar to help teach a concept, principle, or powerful idea?". The > more the example answers back with a "yes" the higher the rank. Also, > the more complete an example the higher the rank. How disclosing of > what the Etoy is meant to do is in the example? Does it have an > explanation of what it is? If it is a game does it have instruction > on how to play and the goal of the game? A googlish way of ranking is to use links/ references to a projects. If teachers/users could make a group or curriculum of projects on the site, we could rank from the refs to projects. I tried to rank a few project, but it's quite hard to do. There are to many things to consider. I'm not a teacher, so for me to rank appropriateness of a project for a classroom situation is not really realistic Karl > > I hope that teachers who encourage their students to upload projects > will *only* allow sharing if their student provides an "About" flap, > or some intro/explanation of the Etoy and some instruction on where to > start, the aim of the project, etc. The most beautiful simulation of > something will fall completely flat with someone if they have no real > idea of what they are looking at or what the script they are playing > with is meant to do. Etoys are intended to teach and help us learn; > learning cannot occur without context. No author should assume their > project will be self disclosing; it will not. Our users have a > variety of levels of expertise in both Etoys and subject matter areas; > providing more context can only help. > > If there is no "ranking" in place and everything is posted the > offerings soon get overwhelming and most difficult to navigate. We > found this years ago when we had an active "super-swiki". Projects > that were no more than a single sketch with no script at all were > posted and only "muddied the waters" for those wading in an attempt to > find something with some meaningful content. > > I hope the community will bear this in mind when "ranking" what gets > uploaded and understand that not everyone can be represented in a > featured showcase. > -- Kim > > > On Sep 30, 2009, at 7:58 AM, voiklis wrote: > >> Hello all, >> >> I apologize for joining this conversation so late; I am a longtime, >> though recently quiet, member of the community. >> >> I understand that the ranking system is an attempt to enable people >> to judge the quality of a contribution (or contributor) based on some >> directly observable measure of reputation. On first sight, one could >> argue that such a system overcomes the problem that in the >> face-to-face world reputation is not directly observable. In order to >> get an honest assessment of a person's reputation, one has to invest >> a lot of time building trust with the people familiar with that >> person. Even then, a trustworthy assessment requires direct >> observation of the person's actions. >> >> A ranking system would appear to reduce that effort by half; knowing >> the person's reputation among his/her peers, one only needs to assess >> the work. >> >> The problem with that reasoning is that electronic ranking systems >> are highly susceptible to manipulation. Building reputation becomes >> the goal of the activity for many people and they use all sorts of >> seemingly harmless social and technological means to inflate their >> numbers. Our lab has been studying this phenomenon through both >> observational studies of online communities and laboratory >> experiments. The two papers below report on the phenomenon as it >> presents itself in Digg, the news aggregation site. >> >> The first paper demonstrates that a tit-for-tat game of reciprocity >> inflates the reputation of contributors and their contributions >> without reflecting anything substantive about their contributions. >> The second paper really brings out the negative consequences of this >> phenomenon. The paper reports on an experiment where people judged >> how interesting they found the contribution. The ranking values of >> the articles were set by the investigator; sometime the rank of the >> article was set high, at other times low. Experimental subjects rated >> higher-ranked contributions as more interesting than lower ranked >> contributions. The same article was rated as highly interesting when >> its rank was set high and uninteresting when ranked low. Duncan Watts >> (of small-world networks fame) observed the same phenomenon with >> music rating. >> >> What this means in the present discussion is that people will likely >> ignore low ranking contributions. Worse still, when they do actually >> look at those contributions they are likely to see what the ranking >> value led them to expect rather than the qualities of the >> contribution itself. >> >> Unless we can find scientific research that demonstrates any benefits >> to ranking, I think we should be wary of using such systems. >> >> All best, >> >> John >> >> Sadlon, E., Sakamoto, Y., Dever, H. J., & Nickerson, J. V. (2008). >> The karma of Digg: Reciprocity in online social networks. In R. Gopal >> and R. Ramesh (Eds.), Proceedings of the 18th Annual Workshop on >> Information Technologies and Systems. >> http://cog.mgnt.stevens-tech.edu/~yasu/papers/reciprocity.pdf >> >> Sakamoto, Y., Ma, J., & Nickerson, J. V. (2009). 2377 people like >> this article: The influence of others' decisions on yours. In N. >> Taatgen, H. van Rijn, L. Schomaker, and J. Nerbonne (Eds.), >> Proceedings of the 31st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science >> Society.http://cog.mgnt.stevens-tech.edu/~yasu/papers/cogscidigg1.pdf >> >> Salganik, M. J., Dodds, P. S., and Watts, D. J. (2006). Experimental >> study of inequality and unpredictability in an artificial cultural >> market. Science, 311(5762):854-856. >> http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1121066[/url] >> >> >> >> >> -------------------- m2f -------------------- >> >> (from forum) >> http://squeakland.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=11554#11554 >> >> -------------------- m2f -------------------- >> _______________________________________________ >> squeakland mailing list >> squeakland(a)squeakland.org >> http://lists.squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/squeakland > > > Viewpoints Research is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to > improving "powerful ideas education" for the world's children and > advancing the state of systems research and personal computing. Please > visit us online at www.vpri.org > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Squeakland mailing list > Squeakland(a)squeakland.org > http://lists.squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/squeakland >

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etoys-dev meet today at 19:00 GMT on #etoys
by Timothy Falconer 09 Jun '10

09 Jun '10

Hi everyone, As before, we'll be having a software meet on the IRC freenode channel #etoys at 19:00 GMT (3pm ET, 12 PT). You can also attend by clicking "chat" on squeakland.org. It might be helpful to watch the two preview videos here: http://squeakland.org/resources/audioVisual/ Also, have a look at the current Etoys 4 roadmap: http://tracker.squeakland.org/browse/SQ?report=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.sy… Take care, Tim

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popups in project-info
by Scott Wallace 31 May '10

31 May '10

Hi, Tim, and all, Attached is a fileout providing changes to the project-info dialog as requested for the benefit of the "showcase" on Squeakland.org. Basically, the "project info" dialog now contains three "enumerated" items, "Subject", "Age", and "Region". These three are all governed by pop-ups (in local language) rather than by type-ins. The results are included in the project manifest. Important notes: (1) It is essential that this be filed in to an image updated at least through update 2246PolygonFix-kfr. If filed in to an earlier image, subsequently loading updates will clobber some of the changes provided here. (2) Yoshiki is also modifying code in the EToyProjectDetailsMorph area in this same time-frame, so integration is likely to be necessary before our two fileouts are published. (3) There are a few obvious rough edges which someone may wish to tweak, though I don't know of any show-stoppers. For example, this has always been an English-only dialog, but now that the field names are localized, there may be layout issues in some languages (once translations are available.) Also, for the pop-up fields, if they've never been set they show as blank, whereas once they've been set to "(none)" (equivalent to blank) they show the text "(none)". Probably we should always show "(none)" when values for these three popups have not been supplied. Also, since some of the fields are now type-in and some are pop-ups, perhaps some UI convention (slight color difference?) should be used to hint at whether a field functions as a type-in or a pop-up. (4) This turned out to involve quite a bit of code, most of it written with a fever and at very late hours. So there's the distinct possibility of errors. I did test it briefly and it seemed to work as I expected. HOWEVER: it really needs verification by someone else. (5) The Preamble (please read if planning to test or use): -=------ Change Set: projectInfoPopUps-sw Date: 8 August 2009 Author: Scott Wallace Changes to the project-info dialog, in support of new data desired for the 'showcase' on squeakland.org: - 'Sub-Category' removed. - Subject, Age, and Region are added as pop-ups. - Choices for Subject, Age, Region popups, and corresponding codes, obtainable from web-site. - Project manifest now includes Age, Subject (category,) and Region info. The codes are strings of numbers, e.g. '554' as a Subject code means 'Language Arts' (look in #defaultAgeTriplets, #defaultSubjectTriplets, #defaultRegionTriplets on class-side of EToyProjectDetailsMorph.) - Names of fields are presented to the user in localized form. - Choices for values of pop-up fields are presented to the user in localized form. Notes: - There is support provided for obtaining up-to-date lists of the subject, age, and region alternatives from the web site (see EToyProjectDetailsMorph class updateTripletsFromWebSite) but it is not actually called at this point, out of concern for potential for long delay if connection to web site is slow. - The *region* codes are at present *not* obtained from the web-site (even when the user explicitly calls #updateTripletsFromWebSite,) but rather a 'fake' set of regions, basically the continents, is provided. This is probably temporary. We have no reasonable way to confront the user with a pop-up showing 250 choices. However, as per Tim's request, I have made it a point to include Antarctica in the region list. (Tim: look at method #defaultRegionTriplets for the current point of departure, if you want to adopt that, temporarily at least, on the web site. And/or of course change any defaults as needed. ----------- Cheers, -- Scott

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Re: [JIRA] Commented: (SQ-154) Make it simple to show and hide the toolbar
by Scott Wallace 20 Dec '09

20 Dec '09

On Jul 16, 2009, at 9:25 PM, jira(a)immuexa.com wrote: > [ http://tracker.immuexa.com/browse/SQ-154?page=comments#action_35752 > ] > > Milan Zimmerman commented on SQ-154: > ------------------------------------ > > This makes sense. I am out of time now, but will test tomorrow or > early weekend. Thank you, Milan! By mutual agreement among Bert, Yoshiki, and me, we decided to push the latest fixes embodied in SQ-88, SQ-154, and SQ-257 to the etoys4.0 update stream today. This will make it easier for more people to test, and we still have time before squeakfest/brasil to fix any issues that may arise. Cheers, -- Scott

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The Squeakland Tally Contest (win an RC plane with video)
by Timothy Falconer 08 Dec '09

08 Dec '09

Hi everyone, As we prepare for our two month Etoys publicity drive (starting November 1st), I'd like to make things a little more interesting. Let's have a contest. The winner gets a brand-new HobbyZone Super Cub LP with a lightweight Fly Cam One attachable video camera, shipped anywhere (that's legal) in the world. I'm personally donating both. The plane is very fun, and very easy to fly. Also, if you win, you'll be able to do this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiNxzXixlOc Here are the rules: 1. you must be 18 years or older to enter the contest, or have the signature of a guardian or parent. Proof will be required upon winning. 2. you must guess three tally totals as they will appear at midnight, New Year's Eve, as the Times Square ball drops in New York City. The tally totals are: a. Squeakers (number of people that have signed the squeaker list) b. Accounts (number of people that have signed up for a showcase account) c. Projects (number of publicly visible projects on the Showcase) see: http://squeakland.org/tally 3. Lowest score wins. To determine it, subtract your guesses from the corresponding new year's value for each total, then add the absolute value of the each difference. Example: squeakers ... joe's guess (5000) ... new year's value (4500) ... abs diff (500) accounts ... joe's guess (3000) ... new year's value (3500) ... abs diff (500) projects ... joes guess (1000) ... new year's value (7000) ... abs diff (6000) score = 7000 4. These bonuses will apply: a. subtract 500 from your score if you're the last publicly visible project in 2009 b. subtract 300 from your score if you're from the top NON-USA country in the list at new year's b. subtract 200 from your score if you're at the PURPLE level at new year's d. subtract 100 from your score if you're at the BLUE level at new year's see: http://squeakland.org/showcase/ranking.jsp 5. Initial guesses need to be emailed to me before November 1st starts (midnight) in New York. 6. You'll be allowed three "mulligans" before December 1st where you can change any one of your guesses (one per mulligan). 7. Each mulligan will enact a 100 point penalty, which will be added to your final score. 8. Any obvious attempts at cheating will disqualify you. (Adding Squeakers or accounts yourself, reposting duplicate projects, etc.) 9. Disputes will be decided by me. I'll try to be as fair as possible, though I suspect some will see things differently. My plane, my call. 10. The winner will hopefully agree to send some fly-by video of a "Squeak if you love Etoys" sign, that we'll send, which we'll later use on the Squeakland website. Anyway, I hope this remains friendly and fun. The trick, of course, is making good guesses. A few hints . . . * we currently average about 300 web visitors a day, some new, some returning. We've peaked at 6000 web visitors in a single day. * the peak was because of a magazine article. We *will* be seeking multiple magazine articles and other forms of publicity during this time. * the addition of multiple languages on the website will greatly increase our possible audience * we will have "tell a friend" functionality to allow for some social networking, including facebook, twitter, and blog buttons for individual projects * schools will create multiple accounts, usually in one shot (I just now saw 14 accounts from the same school create accounts). So ask yourself . . . How many people do you think like Etoys in the world? How many can we reach before the end of the year? How many new people will we reach before the end of the year? How many will create accounts, or share projects? I've already made my three guesses (though I can't win), which will remain private like everyone else's. All will be revealed on New Year's Day. Have fun! Tim -- Timothy Falconer Squeakland Foundation http://squeakland.org 610-797-3100 -- "Intelligence is what you use when you don't know what to do." ... piaget

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What prevent latest Etoys working with latest Sugar release ?
by Hilaire Fernandes 11 Nov '09

11 Nov '09

Hello all, A few weeks ago I read Etoys4 was not shipped for latest Sugar release. Indeed after updating XO to latest stable Sugar, I can see no newer Etoys version is proposed. What is the technical problem behind? Hilaire -- http://blog.ofset.org/hilaire

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Etoys in Arab, is it possible ?
by Hilaire Fernandes 09 Nov '09

09 Nov '09

Hi, Someone just contacted me in French to ask if Arab is possible under Etoys. The person is an educator in Alegria but can't speak English. The two major changes with Arab writing are the direction and the change of the shape depending on the letter in the context. Hilaire -- http://blog.ofset.org/hilaire

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Re: [etoys-dev] Re: What are the supported protocol to upload projet
by Hilaire Fernandes 09 Nov '09

09 Nov '09

As I wrote previously a recent fix allows to view FTP server to load project (not tested but can see the ftp contents). Now to write to the FTP server code need to be changed aswell For example changing ServerDirecotry>>isProjectSwiki to return true Otherwise it make the FTP server not visible in the Save project dialog. However, not sure it is the acceptable way to change it. Is swiki code still relevant? Hilaire 2009/10/24 Ted Kaehler <Ted(a)vpri.org>: > Hilaire, > We do support FTP. That code is very ancient. Can you find another > part of Squeak that does speak to your server. How about a standard > FileList looking at a known FTP server? > > --Ted. > > > At 3:25 PM +0200 10/24/09, Hilaire Fernandes wrote: >> >> I figure out it is possible to add FTP server from the small icon in >> the Load project dialog of Etoys. >> >> It is asked to fill and execute the code below. >> Next when I add my own FTP server, I got an "unknow error" or a >> "TelnetProtocolError: 501 Invalid number of arguments" >> >> Hilaire >> >> "Please fill in the following info, then select all text and choose DoIt." >> >> | aa | >> self flag: #ViolateNonReferenceToOtherClasses. >> aa _ ServerDirectory new. >> aa server: 'st.cs.uiuc.edu'. "host" >> aa user: 'anonymous'. >> aa password: 'yourEmail(a)school.edu'. >> aa directory: '/Smalltalk/Squeak/Goodies'. >> aa url: ''. "<- this is optional. Only used when *writing* >> update files." >> ServerDirectory addServer: aa named: 'UIUCArchive'. "<- known by >> this name in Squeak" >> >> > _______________________________________________ > etoys-dev mailing list > etoys-dev(a)squeakland.org > http://lists.squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/etoys-dev > -- http://blog.ofset.org/hilaire

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Sugar vs legacy OS
by Bert Freudenberg 05 Nov '09

05 Nov '09

Begin forwarded message: > From: Bert Freudenberg <bert(a)freudenbergs.de> > Date: 29. Oktober 2009 08:39:11 GMT-04:00 > To: Hilaire Fernandes <hilaire.fernandes(a)edu.ge.ch> > Cc: OLPC Devel <devel(a)laptop.org> > Subject: Re: Sharing files among several XO > > > On 29.10.2009, at 02:47, Hilaire Fernandes wrote: > >> Under Etoys, If I keep down the mouse button and choose "Save under >> another name" (I am not sure about the exact message), and save the >> project with another name, then in the journal the previous instance >> of the project is replaced with this new one. I will check again >> tonight. >> >> Note: Pay attention I am not just using the Keep button > > Why?! > > Simply stop Etoys to save to the Journal, overwriting the previous > entry. > > Simply click the Keep button to create a new entry in the Journal. > > Simply edit the name in the Etoys toolbar to rename. Or rename in the > Journal. > > The hidden save menu options let you save to a file or upload to the > Squeakland website. They do not save to the Journal. They are hidden > for a reason. > > - Bert - If anybody has ideas on how to avoid misconceptions like above, let's hear them. - Bert -

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DrGeo4Sugar download
by Hilaire Fernandes 01 Nov '09

01 Nov '09

One month ago Stephane pointed me DrGeo was downloaded more than 60'000 times. I did not noticed that. Now it has been for more than 90'000. Any idea from where it come from? http://gforge.inria.fr/frs/?group_id=1308&release_id=3188 Hilaire -- http://blog.ofset.org/hilaire

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etoys-dev October 2009