Re: Personal ideas
Dear Alan,
welcome to this list - and thank you for contributing ;)
Am Dienstag, 1. März 2005 13:59 schrieb Alan E. Davis:
> I subscribed to this list because i am an educator, and I have been
> using GNU/Linux exclusively for well over 10 years, and Debian for at
> least 10. I am not a developer; if I had time, I'd want to be, but
> as a biologist and a teacher, I find it about all I can do to keep a
> system running. Perhaps I can contribute something, at least some
> light banter for the amusement of members of this list. I'm not
> going to, ever, build a distribution or write a package for
> educational use.
Okay, so this is still a wide range of things you could help us with.
Can you give us a hint about the kind of school you are teaching at,
and your personal role in administration computers there?
>
> I don't really understand what skole linux is. I subscribed to
> another list, seul educational list, which I also could never figure
> out what it was about. I throw up my hands in despair and say, "must
> be something for running a school network, or running a school
> administrative setup," leaving it at that.
Hehe, so you are mainly a mailing list dude? In case you do use web
browsers, you could try http://www.skolelinux.org as a start. As a
summary: yes, Skolelinux/Debian-Edu is a Linux distro for schools, all
on one CD providing 4 different setup profiles: Main server (incl. ldap
user base), LTSP, workstation, laptop/stand alone (local login).
>
> My needs have been different, however. Perhaps important: I don't
> teach computer science. Probably I could and probably I should. I
> built a 4-machine setup for a classroom, funded by a local technology
> grant, at my former school; it has been ruined since I transfered to
> another school, by trashing the setups and installing Windows.
Sad but this is how it goes sometimes.
>
> I used these for students. At one point, I was teaching AP Biology,
> had about 10-14 students, and the four computers, connected at first
> through a single phone line, via a masquerade/firewall dialup setup,
> even at that primitive level of connectivity, was useful to the
> students, for browsing textbook chapters on line, and especially web
> browsing. I had some issues with plugins, and had to use that wine
> plugin setup, proprietary (I've forgotten the name), against my
> better inclinations. It was one of the most useful things, for both
> me and students.
If you can fund a terminal server, you don't even have to install the
clients one by one but can scale up your working places easily.
>
> The user, even somewhat sophisticated, as I feel I am, must make a
> number of concessions to have a completely free system. It is
Must he? He must reject some "evil" things like flash, maybe.
> important than to get to the point, as "we" rapidly are, where
> users---and from an educational point of view, I have to point to
> science and probably math teachers in particular---who are
> constrained to Windows can access those sites on the internet that
> are so helpful to us. Any "school linux" distribution from my point
Are those particular sites? What are the constraints? Java? Flash?
> of view would probably have to make some concessions, and lean WAY
> over towards the teachers. I hope some readers understand. Try to
> read a catalog of a scientific supplier, access a Shock Wave Flash
> demo of molecules or photosynthesis, transparently access the
> molecule of the week demo, use a QX-Whatever Mattel/Intel microscope
> (now doable), access a scrounged Poloroid Sprint Scan transparency
> scanner, use the CD from a textbook, access the web sites for
> textbooks of major publishers' textbook (in particular, I have had
> trouble with Pearson sites, but the modelling of sites to Internet
> Explorer, Windows, or maybe Macs, within the educational arena is
> ubiquitious.
Yes, there are many stones on the way out to freedom ;) For this reason
I reckon it important to let the users know _why_ this is the right
way, and show the benefits in usability which are there as well with
Linux (gg: search for instance). And we should keep asking editors of
school software to have a Linux version, too!
>
> Perhaps that is part of what SkoleLinux and this list are about, and
> seul, and if so, I DEFINITELY applaud that. I don't think so,
> though: looks to me like record keeping has gotten some attention,
> but I had trouble with ggradebook.
Pardon? Anyway: _This_ Skolelinux list aims rather at developers - there
are other lists addressed to users as you can see from the above
mentioned web page.
>
> We are at the point where schools are being fed lines of S*$T and
> buying into expensive software packages, which I hope won't include
> grade-submission required packages (although many of my colleagues
> still assume that "computer" is a synonym of "Micro$oft"). One
> begins to look like a commie pinko socialist, or maybe NOT. Learning
> and using Windows is so painful that people don't want to hear about
> another system that might require another learning curve. Even if
> it's free, and especially when the school district is going to buy
> into Bill Gates's "it takes money" approach, and buy what he is
> selling. (Is anyone else left with a sense of betrayal when
Money is not the only thing - but in most cases the most convincing. You
should have a look at the Statskonsult report from Norway that not only
looks at the costs of licenses, but also the TOC (namely:
maintainance).
> educators are led down the primrose path by a marketing genius with
> skills even beyond P. T. Barnum?)
>
> A look at the History of American (at least) Education will reveal
> that big money was always behind remodellings of the educational
> system (Rockefellar, Carnegie) and that the system they programmed
> for the willing peoples of the day were designed to produce obedient
> factory workers, and NOT (did I say NOT?) to educate in the sense of
> enlighten. If I am correct, and I think I am, the entire American
> public has just been duped (again) by that bad man.
At least, in the U.S. you can have the feeling of supporting a local
company by buying micro$oft :/
>
>
> If it has been extremely frustrating to stay completely away from
> Windows, it has not been without abundant rewards, however.
> When I wasn't able to get a good editor to digitize my database of
> animal names in Micronesia, the Free Software Foundation provided
> emacs for MS-DOG, and a number of unix-like utilities for
> manipulating text, which became essential for my study. Later on, I
> was able to install GNU/Linux, and to use LaTeX/TeX to typeset the
> work.
>
> I was teaching at the time, and I envisioned the use of computers in
> various ways. I started graphing tides, because NOAA/Sea Grant had
> send tide calendars that didn't work.
>
> No matter how I look at it (Free Beer or Freedom), it was cost that
> initially drove me to free software, but freedom considerations are
> not less strong in my mind and heart, because of it.
If you consider the technologies, that are involved in developing
software, as kind of knowledge or wisdom, they simply have to be free
to be evolved further on in a way that is of common interest. This has
always been the way, universities worked...
>
> So what I have wanted from Computers, as far as my students, my
> teaching, and my programs were concerned, was scientific expertise
> that could be cheaply transferred to the school setting.
... and be used on for free by pupils at home (without compromises).
>
> I think the availability of OpenOffice is helpful, as well as
> Gnumeric. Still, from my limited, somewhat narrow perspective, the
> replacement of the Microsoft desktop with a clone that is free is not
> the most desireable outcome. That is one of my problems with KDE,
> and some of the distributions (of which I was particularly disgusted
> by Mandrake, in an earlier version, and I have avoided Mandrake
> since).
>
> But the ice seems to be closing around us: Bill Gates tells us we
> need lots of money to make our schools better. (What do you think he
> will suggest we spend the money on? Do you, like me, smell a rat?)
> And on a more personal level, I am surrounded by a technology
> infrastructure that is not working, a school network that is so
> poorly administered and so bug-ridden that I have to LITERALLY go
> home to my dial up machine, most of the time, to even read email!)
> Maybe school linux, etc., are targetting this problem. Every teacher
> at my school will receive a laptop next week. We have a T1 that is
> not working. Hell, all the while, we are told to buy our own paper
> to xerox.
Such things must be made public - and then it should be our task to show
why a Free system like Skolelinux can do better... M$ invests quite a
lot on "charity" to boost their image. In reality this is comparable to
chemical companies that give away some hybride seeds knowing they will
sell the fertilizer for much money, later (roughly spoken).
>
> We have a distance education facility, and here, again, tens of
> thousands were spent on the infrastructure, all proprietary. We are
> being led to our ruin.
And how about old machines (PCs) that can't run recent M$ products? Are
they dumped? Skolelinux could save a lot of waste there, too.
>
> On the subject of those things I have found useful---cluster knoppix
> worked, sortof. I was able to get students to use my machines, and
> they figured out lots of tweaks, but the machines, in two or three
> years, were never brought down in spite of apt-get dist-upgrades
> every six months, unattended. Well, there were a few minor issues.
> Students liked the games, and they could be easily taught to edit
> using abiword. Chat is possible, and students could figure out how:
> when I informed a student of our acceptable use policy, that chatting
> is unacceptable, he retorted he was corresponding with a student
> elsewhere about observations of each on some migratory birds. Email.
> Of course. I used a "students" account, except for students who
> were regulars, who got accounts. The more recent distributions have
> made mounting floppies easier, but it's still the first thing I have
> to stop and explain. Printing is a bit of a horror.
Is it? Why.
>
> I hope these remarks are useful to someone. I apologize that they
> are somewhat undisciplined.
Of course, such longer mails are not very common here. Thank you,
however for sharing your experience. In between the lines I feel
sometimes a grain of pessimism. I believe, however, we can look forward
to the future as for GNU/Linux. This is not saying that Redmond's days
are counted - but in 8 or 10 years their place will be comparable to
that of some Fastfood chain within a setting of really good
restaurants :)
>
> Alan Davis
> Kagman High School
> Saipan, N. Mariana Islands
Is this where you live? Micronesia? At loney planet I read:
Full country name: Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands
Area: 185 sq km
Population: 80,006
Capital City: Saipan
People: Filipino (34%), Chamorro (30%), Chinese (12%), Micronesian
(8%), Carolinian (5%)
Language: English, Japanese, Korean, Chamorro
Does Redmond support these languages? In Norway, languages have been the
seed of Skolelinux!
Welcome to Skolelinux
Regards
Ralf.
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