Editor’s note: Welcome to our latest contributor, Walter Bender, executive director of Sugar Labs and former president of One Laptop per Child. Below he tells what Sugar—which is far, far more than just e-book software alone—means for education. Why not try out the just-released Sugar on a Stick v2 Blueberry for netbooks, PCs and recent Macs and share your impressions? Yes, via the Read Activity shown here, it supports ePub. – D.R.
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’s technology, it was a compelling demonstration. I can still recall the look of surprise on visitor’s 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—the underlying technology of the Kindle display—was invented by some of my colleagues in an electronic publishing consortium I was directing. The e-book was suddenly free from the desktop—indeed, 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 “being digital.”
Today we are also seeing a new convergence, better characterized by “being open.” 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—i.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’t talk about applications, but Activities—things 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:
“Read” is an e-book 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.
“Read ETexts” 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.
“Browse ” 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 “libre” Gnash viewer). Browse also allows for offline storage and access of content.
“Get Internet Archive Books” is a front end to the Internet Archive website’s advanced search. It enables you to search the archive for books and download them. There is an accompanying Internet Archive Bookserver project as well.
“InfoSlicer is an open source tool to enable teachers to quickly and easily select web-based content to edit, package, and distribute as teaching materials.
“Etoys” and ‘Scratch” are media authoring environment with graphical scripting for children of all ages.
“Story Builder” is a graphical story constructor with a variety of characters and backgrounds and simple word-processing capabilities .
“Turtle Art ” is yet another multi-media authoring tool. Think “Power Point”, but programmable by 8-year-olds.
“Write” 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.
“Ooo4Kids” 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 Bogotá 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—and pleasure—of a printed book. That said, Sugar’s Activities offer other ways for young readers to enjoy reading: for those who want to write and illustrate their own b
ooks; 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—coupled with Free Software and open content—represents their path to a lifetime of learning.
Well, I’m writing this from inside Sugar, and it’s impressive. A very interesting interface, and it really worked out of the box for me.Thanks for pointing it out to me.
Hmm. I managed to install Sugar on a Stick, after some tinkering, on an MMC card in a USB reader, and wasn’t too impressed. I couldn’t figure out how to get “Read” to browse for the EPUB e-book files I had put elsewhere on the same card!