Re: RFC: Debian an die Schule
On Fri, Feb 11, 2000 at 09:24:43PM +0100, Gregor Hoffleit wrote:
> As you could imagine, this is mainly targetted to German maintainers and
> users. The German Telekom recently announced a project to sponsor a free
> ISDN internet connection for all 44000 German schools. Partly due to high
> phone fees, only a fraction of schools currently have an internet
> connection (cf. http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/jk-11.02.00-003/).
I am a German student and I'm partly responsible for the computers in our
school. In Bremen (near Hamburg) all schools can get unlimited internet
access already for a fee of 100DM per month. About (50$ / 50 EURO). But
this is like the Telekom offer only a dial-up connection. So if we can't
have an own web, e-mail, etc. Server. Our school is trying to get a
permanent connection, but I think this would make sense for all schools.
The Telekom offer is a step into that direction.
> I could imagine that Microsoft et al. will now jump in and provide schools
> with cheap or free licenses of their software for running these T-Online
> connections.
Yes. That's the problem ;-)
> Now I wonder if there are people interested in running a campaign for
> "Debian an die Schule". Debian has all that's necessary to run a ISDN
> router. Debian already has quite a lot of educational stuff, and more
> interesting things are available or are coming up in the SEUL project.
As somebody said already in de-debian-user I think that this wouldn't be
successful. A lot teacher know Windows, few teachers know Linux and only
a minor part of teacher know Debian. They would say that they don't want
that.
> I could imagine that it's quite a fun project to come up with a Debian
> GNU/Schulinux derivative that's tailored for use in schools. A first step
> would be to build a plug'n'play configuration for a T-Online ISDN
> router/firewall on a cheap machine.
Nice idea. But wouldn't something like "task-germanschools" be better?
> A next step would be to come up with
> a decent configuration for Debian school workstations, that provide all
> kinds of free educational software--a big gain over Windows based systems
> where the schools would have to order and pay for most programs.
This excatly is the problem. The teachers want a lot of education software
for training voculary or spelling. If they want such software they don't go
to freshmeat or something like that, but they take offers from firms
distributing such software. They don't even get the idea that something like
this could be free. And in fact I think there is much more commercial than
free software in that field.
Greetings, Roland
--
Roland Bauerschmidt -- Freiberger Str. 17, 28215 Bremen, Germany
phone: +49 421 3762382, e-mail: roland@copyleft.de, http://roland.inbremen.net
Debian GNU / Linux -- the choice of a GNU generation
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