Aproveitando que Walter Bender, ex-OLPC, lança a comunidade Sugarlabs.org, aqui vão alguns de seus pensamentos sobre o aprendizado um-para-um, construcionismo e o ambiente Sugar:

One-to-one computing in support of learning

1. Background

The past two-to-three years has seen the advent of a number of efforts to bring about a global transformation of education through the provision of connected "ultra-low-cost" laptop computers, most notably the OLPC XO-1 laptop; the Intel Classmate; the ASUS EEE; the One2OneMate StudentMate; and, most recently, the HP Mini-Note and Elonex ONE.

These efforts, by both for-profit and not-for-profit organizations, are about giving children who don't have the opportunity for learning
that opportunity: it's about access; it's about equity; and it's about giving the next generation of children in the developing world a
bright and open future.

These efforts are predicated on the fact that children lack opportunity, not capability:

1. High-quality education for every child is essential to provide anequitable and viable society;
2. A connected laptop computer is the most powerful tool forknowledge creation;
3. Access on a sufficient scale provides real benefits for learning because critical mass is necessary to establish a sustainable community.

A connected laptop is not in itself a cure to the problems of poverty and ignorance, but it is an agency through which children, their
teachers, their families, and their communities can manufacture a cure. Computers are tools with which to think, sufficiently
inexpensive to be used for work and play, drawing, writing, measuring, composing, editing, mathematical thinking, programming, communication, and economic development.

How big an opportunity is this? In just its first six months of mass production, One Laptop per Child Association shipped 0.5 million
laptops. Other vendors are claiming sales at a similar volume. Unequivocally, a market for an ultra-low-cost laptop computer is only
just emerging and with it comes an opportunity to impact learning. The challenge now is to engage more people in participating in this global learning initiative.

2. Learning learning

The great task is to construct a personal epistemology, ontology, and ethics, not as a formal system, but as behavior, even brain structure. Epistemology is the construction of personal standards for telling fact from fancy, truth from fiction, and certainty from doubt. Ontology is the construction of theories of what exists. Ethical constructions remind us of what we think we should do even if we don't want to, and why. Everybody has them, and normally no two of us agree on them. The epistemology of Prussian-style education is, the King and his ministers are always right, and even if they weren't you would have no business questioning them. Or, at the classroom level, "It's true because I said so, now shut up and sit down!" The same attitude is common, even usual, in ontology and ethics as well. It's real because I said so, You have to because I said so.

—Seymour Papert

Papert paints a grim picture. While the theoretical layer of didactic methods has advanced, unfortunately, in much of the world's formal education systems, there has been little progress. The computer serves as a power tool for getting new pedagogical approaches into the system. While getting computers into the hands of more children is undoubtedly of benefit, the question remains, "how does one maximize the learning that occurs?" The question arises whether a "teacher-centric" approach  versus "child-centric" approach is best. This dichotomy is a false one; While we should not be proscriptive, we should be striving for a "learning-centric" approach, where teachers mentor students as they engage with powerful ideas.

While we want to give children access to knowledge—through media such as electronic books, the world-wide web, and multimedia—we also should try to skew the odds toward children and teachers appropriating this knowledge by putting it to use and engaging in critical dialog. That is not just going to happen by itself; we have to try to make it happen by giving them tools that put them in the roles of consumer, critic, and creator within the context of a learning community. Learning is not a service — it a process of active appropriation.

One of the forces being unleashed by the one-to-one computing initiatives — where children have access to computing "anytime" and "anywhere" — is the change in the way software developers and computer-makers think about the education industry. A  combination of strong and capable leadership—by technologists and epistemologists — and cross-community collaboration is necessary to ensure that the ideals of freedom, sharing, open critique, and transparency will be part of the interface to learning that touches children in the world's classrooms.

These ideas are embodied in the culture of free software, which is a powerful culture for learning. It is possible to instill in the
education industry some of the culture, technology, and morals of the open source movement. Such a transfer of culture could greatly enhance the education industry and its ability to engage teachers and students: empowering them with both the freedom to act and the freedom to be critical. Criticism of ideas is a powerful force in learning and in fostering economic development; unleashing that is an important part of the mission.

3. What is Sugar?

Information is about nouns; learning is about verbs. The Sugar interface, in its departure from the desktop metaphor for computing,
is the first serious attempt to create a user interface that is based on both cognitive and social constructivism: learners should engage in authentic exploration and collaboration. It is based on three very simple principles about what makes us human:

1. everyone is a teacher and a learner;
2. humans by their nature are social beings; and
3. humans by their nature are expressive. These are the pillars of a user experience for learning.

Sugar also considers two aphorisms:

1. you learn through doing, so if you want more learning you want more doing; and
2. love is a better master than duty — you want people to engage in things that are authentic to them, things that they love.

The presence of other people is always present in the Sugar interface: collaboration is a first-order experience. Students and teachers engage in a dialog with each other, support each other,  critique each other, and share ideas.

Sugar is also discoverable: it can accommodate a wide variety of users, with different levels of skill in terms of reading, language,
and different levels of experience with computing. It is easy to approach and yet it doesn't put an upper bound on personal expression; one can peel away layers and go deeper and deeper, with no restrictions.

Sugar is based on Python, an interpreted language, allowing the direct appropriation of ideas: in whatever realm the learner is
exploring — music, browsing, reading, writing, programming, graphics, etc. — they are able to drill deeper; they are not going to hit a wall, since they can, at every level, engage in debugging both their personal expression and the very tools that they use for that
expression.

4. Sugar Labs: a software-development association

The Sugar development platform is available under the open-source GNU General Public License (GPL) to anyone who wants to extend it. "Sugar Labs", a (soon to be established) non-profit foundation will serve as a support base and gathering place for the community of educators and software developers who want to extend the platform and who have been creating Sugar-compatible applications.

Sugar supports the notions that learners should "share by default" and be able to "explore, express, debug, and critique." Thus Sugar puts an emphasis on "activities" rather than "applications." The foundation will focus on solving the challenges that are relevant to these aspects of the interface, namely:

A goal is to make it "simple" to share Sugar activities. This will require an architecture that allows discovery of activities.

A second goal is to create versions of Sugar that run on multiple operating systems and on multiple hardware platforms. It should be "simple" to install Sugar everywhere. Specifically, it means packaging for every distribution and every virtual machine—removing
hardware-related dependencies wherever possible.

A third goal is to make it  "simple" to write Sugar activities. This necessitates stable APIs and   example code that uses these APIs.

A fourth goal is to make Sugar activities even more secure. Our principal user community is comprised of children; they must be
protected from malware, phishing, botnets, etc.

In order for Sugar to be successful, it needs the participation of a large number of people who share a common goal while maintaining independence, so that each participant has the ability to act independently. For these reasons, Sugar Labs subscribes to these principles (from http://flors.wordpress.com/2008/05/04/the-paradigm-of-the-open-organization/):

Identity

• Clear mission – Full disclosed objectives.
• Declared commitments – Affinities and aversions explained.
• Explicit connections outside – Relationships with other organizations listed.

Structure

• Horizontal organization – Teams and facilitators work on responsibilities and agreements.
• Identified contributors – Who is who, people are reachable.
• Clear responsibilities – Who is in charge of what.
• Activities described – All the ongoing work is acknowledged.

Operation

• Open participation – Anybody can access the information and get a first responsibility.
• Meritocracy – Responsibilities are acquired (or lost) based on own skills and contributors' support.
• Voluntary (non-)engagement – Nobody is forced to be involved or to keep responsibilities.

Information

• Regular reports – Reported activities and future plans allow monitoring and participation.
• Information accessible – Even internal operational information is available by default.
• Explicit confidentiality – It is explained what areas are confidential, why and who can access them.

Goods

• Economic model – Feasibility and sustainability plans are exposed.
• Resources – Inventory of items detailing who contributed what and why.
• Public accounts – It's clear where the money comes from and where it goes.

5. The Learning Learning Consortium: support and training for deployment

In addition to sustaining the Sugar development platform, it is critical that a number of redundant support organizations be fostered.
The Learning Learning Consortium is a (soon to be established) global consortium of universities whose purpose is to advocate
constructionism (and other learning models), make educational content available, providing learning software built on top of the Sugar platform, support one-to-one computer deployments, observe, evaluate, and share the lessons arising from them.

When a community chooses to do a "one laptop per child" deployment, the Learning Learning Consortium will engage the local universities and help to establish locally "owned" service organization—steering resources into local capacity building.

The consortium will be device-agnostic, focusing entirely on the learning ecosystem, from deployment to content to Sugar. Support is fundamentally a social problem; engaging local universities is a great point of departure.

While there are many models of engaging university students in research and community service, one particularly effective program is the MIT Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP). Students are paid a small stipend and course credit to work with faculty on authentic research problems (as opposed to academic exercises). A program modeled after UROP that gives students an opportunity to do field work in association with deployments is being put into place in Peru; it can serve as a model for others.

6. The Sugar Franchise: local-capacity development

There is an opportunity to establish commercial (for-profit) organizations within the context of one-to-one computing in support of
learning as well. In a model that takes its inspiration from the world of micro-finance, capital can be provided to small for-profit support organizations around the world to establish Sugar "development and support" franchises in local markets. These could be as "local" as teenagers supporting a single school to regional or national programs for service and repair, localization, customization, content generation, etc.

Thus we are helping spur investment locally and also sending a message that investment in the local software and content industries is both necessary and viable.

regards.

-walter