Re: How should we evaluate user applications?
Hi,
just a few more thoughts from my point of view:
On Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 10:06:49PM +0200, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:
> [Andreas B. Mundt]
> > The "Gymnasium" in Germany takes at least 12 years and pupils start
> > school at about 6 years age. There are many pupils which are up to 18
> > or even 19 years old.
>
> It is similar in Norway now. While I believe it would be fine to
> extend our target group downwards from 7 to 6 years, I believe it is a
> mistake to extend it upwards. Not because I would not love to be able
> to cater for the needs of all schools teaching 16-19-year olds, but
> because I believe we are simply not able to do so at this time.
> As the pupils grow older, their needs on the computer side become more
> and more specialized, and it is unlikely that we will be able to
> provide all the tools needed by that the schools for 16-18 age group.
The problem I see with this argument is that at least in Germany we
can divide the pupils' life in school in two parts:
Some sort of primary school, age in the range of 6-12 years, and after
that in probably all cases, a "secondary" school (in a different
building, with a different computersystem) from range 10 to up to say
18 years old pupils.
So if you cut the applications at 16, you will loose all schools with
older pupils, because they will not start to set up an extra system
for these missing two years, they will go for a system that covers all
their needs.
> This is the reason why we have always focused on the age group up to
> 16, and not tried to spread our resources thinner. :)
I do not see the mass of applications that go in or out with or
without the cut at 16 or 18, respectively. I think we agree that very
specialized stuff is not needed on the DVD and can be installed by the
teachers, which in that case will know what they need anyway. Perhaps
we should prepare a list of "fringe" applications.
[...]
> The DVD is overfull, and options increase congintive strain for those
> that need to select which tool to use and confuse those that want to
> to use Debian Edu. Not making a choice is doing our users a
> disservice.
To save some space I suggest to also think about devel-stuff that has
been installed by us developers because we were annoyed of installing
it after every test installation by hand (which is pretty sensible I
guess when you run several test installations a day). Some of these
tools will in very rare cases be used by teachers or pupils and we
could/should remove them after the development phase. As example look
at the LDAP GUI editors: Someone in school that needs these tools
will be able to install one. If not, I guess it's better he has none
at hand by default. There is probably more around.
I see some discrepancy between removing "edge applications for the
16-18 years old" but keep "hard core developer tools" around.
> > Usually pupils can choose a special subject within their career at
> > school. In this subject, the stuff they learn and work on is quite
> > some sort of 'advanced'. With respect to our project this would
> > mean either learning the basics of system administration,
> > programming/simulating or I could also imagine something like 3D
> > modelling (blender). Do we want to provide some of the stuff needed
> > to do these things out of the box too? A pupil not interested in
> > computers will probably never need them.
>
> Well, we do already include a 3D modeller (blender), and I suspect we
> should continue to do so. But every package included come at a cost,
> in DVD space, menu space, congintive strain, user confusion and disk
> space. So we should evaluate each package and choose if it make sense
> to include it in the default installation or not.
I personally would love to have Blender installed, and I guess a nice
project combining arts with computing is perhaps possible at school.
But on the other hand it is exactly one of these programs that I can
hardly imagine to use in a pupils' standard school career. Especially
up to the age of 16. When I need several tutorials and have to sit
down a day before starting to get a glimpse of how it works, I think a
pupil will have problems too. (Perhaps I am already in the age where
people are (get?) a bit slow on computer stuff ...).
> > If there is a good application, but missing some translations, we
> > should try to add the missing translation. It would be a pity to
> > remove great software only because some translation is missing.
>
> I agree. But if we have several similar packages, I believe we should
> go with the one with translations and drpo the ones without.
Probably there are always several pros and cons around that we need to
trade off against.
Best Regards,
Andi
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