Mobile IT Education?

SickKiwi asks: "A client, a local polytechnic, has recently asked me to come up with plans for a mobile IT bus to bring technology to rural areas. I would love to find out what other people in the field have come up with in the way of workstation layout, OS choices and Internet connectivity. There doesn't appear to be a huge amount of material available but as the technology gets smaller, mobile classrooms become more and more practical." What vehicles would work best for this kind of application? A converted bus? A mobile home? An 18-wheeler with a heavily customized trailer? What kind of hardware would you put in it?

Comments

OS Choices?

[FortKnox]

OS Choices

Well, if that isn't a loaded question... :-P
Of course 99% of the community will say Linux, but I'll be the guy modded down that says go with Win2K. Don't do anything too hairy with the Win2K boxes (to get it so you don't need to worry about crashes), but MS makes good GUI's. Its easier to understand point-and-click with people that don't know how to use a mouse, than command line execution in a shell window.

Sure, you can spend mucho time getting SuSE (or GNOME) to have nothing but point and click, but I ask one question:
What do you have more of (or, more freedom of)?:
Time to setup the systems, or
Money to buy the systems?

Fire for the prehistoric man?

[doorbot.com]

a mobile IT bus to bring technology to rural areas

Is this like introducing fire to early humans? Or is it like selling freezers to Eskimos? Are those living in rural areas really going to benefit from this?

I think we can all agree that broadband connections in many urban areas are either severely lacking or extremely expensive... so why would they be any cheaper in rural areas? Sure, there could be a community effort to bring broadband to all, but I'm guessing this bus is not going to be visiting those communities anyways. Local telcos are forced to sell rural telephone lines below cost (offset by higher prices in urban areas); however, broadband does not fall under this regulation.

So one day, suddenly the mobile-tech bus drives up and stops next to Billy Bob's house. Billy Bob doesn't know anything about computers and probably is not going to understand the possibilities of them. But if Billy Bob has children, they may be very much interested in the mobile-tech bus and the goodies inside. But how does the mobile-tech bus really do anything for the rural inhabitants? It's like parading around in a Ferrari and saying, "Gee, isn't this cool? You could have this, but you can't afford it... sorry."

So now you've managed to generate some interest in computers and broadband in rural areas, but they still won't be able to make use of it.

I'd like to offer you a solution to the problem, but I cannot. I would recommend that you build your mobile-tech bus while at the same time working with local ISPs or government to promote broadband, etc so hopefully when the bus shows up, you're not trying to sell freezers to Eskimos -- instead, you have a plan for dispersing the technology to those who you're hoping will benefit from it.

What are you trying to teach? What size classes?

[billstewart]

What you need depends a lot on what you're trying to do and what your audience will be. Are you trying to show people how to use popular PC user interfaces? Word processing? Spreadsheets? Web browsing? Accounting? Finding stuff on the Internet? Assembling PCs hardware? Data collection from rainfall/soil-moisture/temperature telemetry widgets? Bidding on futures markets? CAD/CAM programs for building or machinery? At least in the US, farmers are often heavily involved with computers, because farms are businesses, with accounting to run, and because selling farm commodities is a complex processes, especially if you're trying to risk-manage on the futures markets, plus some of them use high-tech field machinery, and everybody uses weather forecasts.

Some of your decisions will be pretty obvious - basic flat-screens have come down in price enough that you're far better off using them than CRTs, because you're trading off the cost of the equipment vs. the cost of a bigger bus and more electricity. But if you're trying to show things to a larger group of people, you'll have to find something that fits your budget but still works, though that may be "display the same slides on N screens at once." And of course you'll want a couple of CD-R-burners for giving away software, as well as stacks of blank CDs and floppies.

Will you be showing off how to build hardware? Letting people know what the basic guts of a PC are like is valuable, so you'll probably want some basic PCs, card tables, and screwdrivers for people to play with, and spare parts to make up for the ones you'll lose or break. But if you're also doing telemetry, you'll need whatever flavors of hardware that uses, whether it's simple RS-232 stuff like X-10 or fancier data bus things, and you'll need a few sample things to telemeter.