By not supporting medium-sized deployments of, say 30 to 5000 laptops (a typical order from a school or a county-level authority) the OLPC Foundation betrays an instinct for paternalism. We have too much paternalism in education already, and the technologies in Sugar were designed to give children democratic access to education.
I am delighted that the fantastic Sugar project is available to countries that don't have the top-down education system that is necessary to buy the XO.
(1) Learning practice and theory need to evolve as technology evolves; we are discussing constructionist (and other learning theories) research and practice;
(2) We are engaging in an open dialog between the overlapping communities of software developers and educators;
(3) We are guiding Sugar software development, as it serves as a tangible structural underpinning for the application of 1 and 2 above; and
(4) We are examining and discussing Sugar's educational importance.
Sugar reinvents how computers can be used for education. It promotes sharing and collaborative learning and gives children the opportunity to use their laptops on their own terms.
iStoa is a learning environment with emphasis on interactive activities through artifacts, recording of student activities for further analysis, curriculum modeling with oriented graphs and learner modeling.
The Birmingham City Council in March approved spending almost $3.5 million to buy 15,000 laptops for schoolchildren and to upgrade technology at city schools. The computer program is being piloted at Glen Iris, which has almost 800 students but received about 1,000 laptops, Principal Mike Wilson said.