Posting from the Sugar Browser

TurtleArt Flower: nested repeats of a square.

Tony Forster regularly blogs about work he has done using Sugar. He shares that work at http://tonyforster.blogspot.com. His work includes screen shots from Sugar. I wonder whether I am able to do similar work with my current install of Sugar (a Trisquel Virtual Machine running in VirtualBox). So, I am using this entry to test. I am able to add text and Blogger keeps my work.

Then, I tried to upload an image from the Sugar Journal. The browser let me select an image and previewed it. But, when I tried to submit the image to my Blogger picture-base, it threw me out of the Browser Activity and back into the Journal. I needed to sign in again and found that Blogger kept my text but did not add the image.

Now, I see that I have multiple tabs in the Sugar Browser and that I can return to editing my post before indicating that I am "Done." Blogger was able to successfully upload the image and integrate it into my post. Will have to learn what combination steps is required to reliably reproduce this process.

MTA Capstone Video: 11 Pilot Project Abstracts

I finished editing and adding the jazz audio track to the eleven students' presentations for the Capstone Assembly in May. These brief presentations were intended to help students understand the scope of Capstone projects and help them to choose which two of the sessions they wanted to see for the full presentations the following week.

I uploaded it to a personal account at Vimeo. Once things work well, I'll establish an institutional account so that school personnel can manage in the future.

MTA Capstone 2011 Pilot Projects from Stephen Spaeth on Vimeo.

Charter Schools in Maine

After many years resisting the development of charter schools, the Maine Legislature has passed Charter School Legislation and Governor LePage has signed LD 1553 into law. Two features of the legislation are particularly interesting:

7. Teachers – All full-time teachers in charter schools must either hold an appropriate teaching certificate or become certified within three years of the date they are hired, excepting those with an advanced degree, professional certification, or unique expertise and/or experience in the curricular area they teach. ...
...
9. Virtual Chartered Schools – LD 1553 adopts the language of the national model bill that defines and allows virtual chartered schools.

I'm interested to see how these develop.

Stowe's Brunswick and Bowdoin

The Stowe Society's "Stowe at 200" Conference included a walking tour of sites in Brunswick associated with Stowe. Polly Kaufman lead the tour starting at the Pjepscot Historical Society building. Fifty or more people participated with a small number from the Stowe Society, a few more from the conference and most from the general public in the area.

Dr. Kaufman carried photocopies of some notes and images of interest. I found the following image from collections at the New York Public Library via Wikimedia Commons that shows sites more as Stowe experienced them.

By Lane & Scott, FitzHugh Lane [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

The most easily identified buildings in the lithograph from the left are: First Parrish Church, Massachusetts Hall, Winthrop Hall, Maine Hall, Bowdoin Chapel, and Appleton Hall. Dr. Kaufman related the story of Harriet Beecher Stowe using her husband's office in Massachusetts Hall to write parts of Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Note a confusion in local informal history. The Bowdoin publication "Academic Spotlight" in an article "Tracing Lasting, Local Footprints of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin'" relates the story of a student tour guide who incorrectly identifies the site of Calvin Stowe's office as Appleton Hall.

As a student tour guide for Bowdoin's Office of Admissions, Tom Brickler '10 had led dozens of prospective students past Appleton Hall.

Stopping, he would say: "It was here, where Harriet Beecher Stowe sometimes worked on the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin." For full dramatic effect, he might add the words: "writing late into the stormy winter night."

The author of the Spotlight article suggests:

Though it is campus legend, no one knows for sure if Stowe—the wife of a Bowdoin professor—actually worked there during the years that she wrote the novel in Brunswick. But it hardly matters: The compulsion to imagine and re-imagine the daily existence of luminaries connected to Bowdoin—including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Joshua Chamberlain, and Nathaniel Hawthorne—is part of the ambience of being at such a historically significant college.

While it may "hardly matter" to casual visitors and some reporters, it clearly matters to Stowe enthusiasts and scholars. If these kinds of historical resources were more easily accessible, then perhaps we can increase the number of people who care about the historical details.

Tracing Lasting, Local Footprints of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin'

Tracing Lasting, Local Footprints of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin', Academic Spotlight (Bowdoin)

Bowdoin's Academic Spotlight on Tess Chakkalakal's course on using place-based resources to connect with 21st Century reading of Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Includes a brief video clip of a class held in the First Parrish Church:

Can we build digital resources to support asynchronous access to experiences similar to this.