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[Wayan Vota]

Xconomy has a great article about Sugar Beyond the XO Laptop: Walter Bender on OLPC, Sucrose 0.84, and “Sugar on a Stick”:

Perhaps the biggest piece of news from Sugar Labs is that Sugar is going portable: the community has created a version of the Linux-Sugar stack that can be copied to a so-called “Live USB” thumb drive, which can then be used to boot virtually any laptop or desktop PC into the Sugar environment. Bender calls it “Sugar on a Stick,” and he’s in discussions with USB drive manufacturers to create a branded version that would be available for sale from the Sugar Labs website (though you can also create your own version for free). The implications are big: separating Sugar from the XO means that any child or teacher, in Minneapolis or Mumbai, could take advantage of Sugar’s educational tools without having to wait for OLPC to find funding to get XO laptops into their schools.

And next month, Sugar itself is getting an upgrade, in the form of the next major release, called “Sucrose 0.84.” Bender says he and the Sugar community have built some major improvements into the new release, including a better system for storing and accessing saved work (the Sugar environment is built around an automatic diary called the Journal rather than old-fashioned files and folders); easier ways for users to edit the Python source code underlying Sugar activities; and a portfolio presentation tool designed to make it easier for students and teachers to engage in periodic critiques. As Bender explains, critiques of open-ended problem-solving work—as opposed to standardized testing of students’ performance on closed-form problems like arithmetic or vocabulary questions—are a big element in the constructionist educational philosophy from which Sugar grew.

[eden]

Thank you.  I needed some good news!

[mavrothal]

This is certainly good news in the right direction.
If I must have an objection (!?...:-) is the temporary (?) abandonment of mess networking (newer joyrides do not have it)

When you stick in the Live USB, you’ve got Sugar and you’ve got collaboration. You might not be doing the collaboration through peer-to-peer networking; you might be doing it through Jabber [an open-source instant messaging platform]. But the mesh-networking is not necessary to make Sugar work. It’s a nice-to-have. And one issue with a lot of schools is that they don’t want kids using the Internet—-they want to keep the kids containerized. With Live USB, you could run a classroom environment over a local Jabber server and have the kids collaborate without ever going out onto the net

and the “learning-centric design”

We’re trying to keep things relatively simple. But there are two schools of thought. One is that the world is complex and we should make tools to reduce the complexity and bring everything within the reach of people. That is called human-centric design. The other school says that the world is complex and we want people to reach for that complexity, because that is the interesting stuff. That is called learning-centric design. Sugar is about learning-centric design. We have simple tools, but we want people to use those tools to reach for more complexity. It’s like when you’re buying wine. You’re looking for wine that has complexity.

These mean that the additional infrastructure is mandatory and collaboration “under a tree” or away from school is not and option, and that real Activity development and educational content will remain within a minute circle of python expert continuing the current crawl.
Hopefully I’m wrong
PS: Quotes are from the original interview.