Technology & Learning - April 2009 - (Page 16) news trends FIVE WAYS TO USE PHONES IN CLASS The XO Is Dead! Long Live the XO! Part II Walter Bender on OLPC and Sugar Many people wouldn’t touch coffee or cereal without sugar. And the XO laptop would be useless without Sugar— the standard, Linux-based graphical interface for the little green laptop. Despite the acrimonious divorce last year between OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte (see Part I in T&L’s March issue) and the foundation’s former president of software, Sugar creator Walter Bender, the hardware and the software remain intertwined. Wade Roush, chief correspondent for the business and technology Web site Xconomy.com, interviewed Bender on what’s next. 1 LITERATURE: Manybooks.net (www. manybooks.net; free) boasts more than 23,000 book titles. New aspiring “Kindle killers,” like Shortcovers (www.shortcovers.com; $10 to $20 per book), offer free apps for iPhone, Blackberry, and Google phones. ART: Students can paint their 2 ©MIKE LEE adventure in a creative digital light using text messaging, voice recorders, and camera and movie phones. Two weeks before announcing his departure from OLPC, Walter Bender is pictured here trying out a community-designed camera viewfinder attachment on the XO-1 laptop. Wade Roush: What’s the word with Sugar? Walter Bender: [holding up a USB thumb drive] This is where we are. Live USB is going to be a really big part of Sugar in the next year or two, because it’s an easy way in the door. Sugar on a Stick means we can hand this to a teacher or a student and they don’t have to have any impact on the existing infrastructure at all. Roush: If constructionism is about learning through doing, don’t you really want kids out in the real world? Bender: I think that more arts and crafts, more getting out into the woods and collecting specimens: we need all of that. But one of the reasons why OLPC built a laptop is because a laptop can go out into the woods with you. You can take photos of the specimens, and plug in sensors and measure things. While Sugar will run anywhere, a laptop will always be the preferred environment, because a laptop is in vivo. What we’re trying to do with Sugar is not replace interaction with the physical world by any means. What we’re trying to do is say that whenever you are doing something with a computer, put the opportunity in play so that the learner can actually be expressive and make things. Nicholas has often accused me of being an open-source fundamentalist, and indeed, there are two areas where I do think open source is fundamental. One of them is voting machines [meaning the code running inside these machines— long the subject of debate in election-policy circles]. And the other is education. People should be free to appropriate ideas and express them and free to critique them. That is so fundamental in education, and it’s also fundamental to the culture of open source, so it’s a really powerful synergy. What open source has to offer education is not just sharing software, but also sharing this culture of critique. As we fire all the art teachers in elementary schools, we are losing that. Hopefully, Sugar will be a way to retain it. SCIENCE & MATH: Thanks to their camera, internal GPS, and accelerometer, the iPhone and iPod Touch are poised to replace the dozens of science kits cluttering your storeroom. 3 SOCIAL STUDIES: Social-media platforms like Twitter bring the global perspective into your classroom, enliven current-events class, and show historic debates still raging online. TinyTwitter (www.tinytwitter.com; free) works on any Java-enabled cell phone. 4 FOREIGN LANGUAGES: The Langtolang Dictionary app (www.langtolang.com; free) offers Google Android users access to more than 2,000 bilingual dictionaries. Quickdictionary (www.quickoffice. com; $18) can be downloaded on a variety of cell-phone formats. —Ron S. Doyle 5 16 | TECH & LEARNING http://www.Manybooks.net http://www.manybooks.net http://www.manybooks.net http://www.shortcovers.com http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/newbay/tl_200903/index.php?startid=12 http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/newbay/tl_200903/index.php?startid=12 http://www.Xconomy.com http://www.tinytwitter.com http://www.langtolang.com http://www.quickoffice.com http://www.quickoffice.com
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