When I think of Open Source, I generally think of adults who contribute to communities to build and modify software that anyone can use. It has never really triggered the thought of kids, classrooms or education, though… until now.
Sugar Labs, a company founded by the former software president of the One Laptop Per Child project, has released a product called Sugar on a Stick. It’s a "Linux-based learning environment" that boots from a USB drive and is designed for children’s ease of use. All a child has to do is plug in the USB drive to any computer, boot it, and they’ll be working in the same computing environment they’re used to with all their own files.
What does this mean? It means that a child can go to school, work on classwork, homework, notes, etc, with the ability to complete those same exact tasks in any location. It meants that parents will no longer be tasked with buying expensive software. It means that school systems can use older, slower computer systems and can upgrade less, which frees up money for other initiatives. It means that same student could come to the library and work in the computing environment that they’re used to. It means that libraries like Howard County, who are partners in education with the local school systems, could potentially further integrate and provide seamless interaction from school to the library.
It means that more resources will be available to more children.
Learn more about the role free and open source software will play in educational institutions, including libraries and schools, for years to come by reading about Sugar-on-a-Stick
Sounds delicious, no?
July 4th, 2009 at 8:06 pm
Wow! We’re pretty psyched to see librarians blogging about Sugar. As a little girl (I’m 23 now) I would pretty much spend all my free time in the library because it was the place where I could actually explore and suck up extra knowledge – an intellectual haven I could run around in, instead of the limited lock-step of classes I wasn’t necessarily interested in. I maxed out my book limit every single day trying to take a little part of that home with me, snuck library books into classes and read them under my desk so I could do some real learning at school… and if my family had had a computer at the time, I think I would have loved to be able to bring a computing environment back and forth with me as well. (I actually wonder if that would have gotten me to interact more with librarians, too – I was a shy kid and scared of approaching grown-ups, but interesting computer stuff may have been a good excuse to do so.)
If you’re interested in trying Sugar-on-a-Stick (SoaS) at HCL, we’d love to help. Most of the pilots so far have either been within schools or completely independently (gatherings of interested parents and kids) – it would be great to see what kids would do with it in a library. Because a library is already this playground for learning in (you don’t have to worry about teaching them how to pass standardized tests and such) it might actually be even easier to do the kind of exploration Sugar was designed for.