[A2k] Teleread.org: Sugar on a Stick: What it means for e-books and education

[Sean DALY]

http://www.teleread.org/2009/12/07/sugar-on-a-stick-what-it-means-for-e-boo=
ks-and-education/

by Walter Bender, executive director of Sugar Labs and former
president of One Laptop per Child

In 1980, I was part of a team that was developing electronic books at
MIT. Our principle test bed was a repair manual for an automatic
transmission.

While primitive by any measure relative to today=92s technology, it was
a compelling demonstration. I can still recall the look of surprise on
visitor=92s faces when they saw animated illustrations on the page. We
had so thoroughly convinced them that they were reading a book, that
they were not expecting to see a moving image, even though the book
was being displayed on a television set.

In 1985, my colleague Nicholas Negroponte predicted the convergence of
print and publishing, television and broadcast, and computing.

In the mid-1990s, electronic ink=97the underlying technology of the
Kindle display=97was invented by some of my colleagues in an electronic
publishing consortium I was directing. The E-book was suddenly free
from the desktop=97indeed, seemingly free from any constraint on form
factor. Electronic paper had become a reality.

A decade later, we undoubtedly have turned the corner on E-books.
Prices for dedicated hardware readers are dropping all the time
(although still out of reach for many), and the quantity and variety
of titles for sale online is growing seemingly without bound. These
devices are a tangible realization of what Negroponte called =93being
digital.=94

Today we are also seeing a new convergence, better characterized by
=93being open.=94 Open communication, open knowledge, and open media are
all converging due to the Free Software movement. With Free Software
and any computer that can run GNU/Linux=97i.e, any computer, control and
knowledge creation are shifting to the end user, enabling new
opportunities, particularly around content consumption and creation.

One example is Sugar, a Free Software learning platform used by more
than one-million children around the world. Sugar includes a number of
activities geared towards consumption of electronic media. Sugar also
complements reading with writing, based on the pedagogy of writing to
read developed in the 1980s.

Just as E-book readers take a fresh approach to the user interface for
reading, Sugar brings a new approach to learning. We don=92t talk about
applications, but Activities=97things children do, alone, in parallel
with others, or together with others. There are more than 200 Sugar
Activities available today from the Sugar Activity portal and new ones
being developed all the time; of these, many are e-book related. A
sampling:

=93Read=94 is an ebook reader based on Evince. It can display most common
E-book formats, including EPUB and PDF. Read includes the facility to
write margin notes and share them with other users.

=93Read ETexts=94 lets you read all the free e-texts from Project
Gutenberg, or use a text-to-speech engine to have them read to you.
The built-in offline catalog search lets you browse through and
download over 24,000 great titles.

=93Browse =94 is a web browser built on top of the same engine used by
Firefox; it can be used to access virtually any web content, including
Flash content (we use the =93libre=94 Gnash viewer). Browse also allows
for offline storage and access of content.

=93Get Internet Archive Books=94 is a front end to the Internet Archive
website=92s advanced search. It enables you to search the archive for
books and download them. There is an accompanying Internet Archive
Bookserver project as well.

=93InfoSlicer=94 is an open source tool to enable teachers to quickly and
easily select web-based content to edit, package, and distribute as
teaching materials.

=93Etoys=94 and =91Scratch=94 are media authoring environment with graphica=
l
scripting for children of all ages.

=93Story Builder=94 is a graphical story constructor with a variety of
characters and backgrounds and simple word-processing capabilities.

=93Turtle Art=94 is yet another multi-media authoring tool. Think
=93PowerPoint=94, but programmable by 8-year-olds.

=93Write=94 is a general-purpose word-processor that is fully integrated
into the Sugar environment; including automatic saving. Write enables
peer-to-peer collaborative editing even without an Internet
connection.

=93OOo4Kids=94 or Open Office for Children brings the power of
word-processing, spreadsheets, and presentation tools to the Sugar
learner.

With all of the Activities, Sugar users can share their work, locally
in a classroom or globally, from Bangkok to Bogot=E1 to Berlin.

A new version of Sugar has just been released: Sugar on a Stick v2
Blueberry. Available for download, Sugar on a Stick can be loaded onto
any ordinary 1Gb or greater flash drive to reboot any PC, netbook or
recent Mac directly into the child-friendly Sugar environment without
touching the existing installation. Sugar is also available for
GNU/Linux distributions, runs under virtualization on Windows and
Apple OS X, and features built-in classroom collaboration and
automatic backup to a Journal.

Sugar on a Stick is a great way to access e-books. They are not only
for the well-to-do, but freely available as part of the open-access to
knowledge movement to help children everywhere develop critical
learning skills and to bridge the digital divide wherever it exists.

Of course, we have yet to match the color, texture, size, compactness,
ease of use=97and pleasure=97of a printed book. That said, Sugar=92s
Activities offer other ways for young readers to enjoy reading: for
those who want to write and illustrate their own books; for those who
have limited access to printed books, or books in their native tongue;
for those with vision difficulties; and for those who wish to share
books they like with their friends. To this generation of children,
the E-book=97coupled with Free Software and open content=97represents
their path to a lifetime of learning.