It's a little late for posting to this topic, but I'll put your request in the next Linux in education report that SEUL/edu writes and we'll see what we get from that.
A graphics class teaching photoshop can't use the linux solution. A business class using MS Project can't use Linux or Mac.
Any class that's teaching keystrokes or mouse clicks rather than concepts is doing a disservice to its students. I wouldn't want my son learning Photoshop, I'd want him learning art. I wouldn't want him learning MS Project, I'd want him learning project management and scheduling. If you're so stuck to specific applications, you'll inevitably be left by the wayside as the environment changes away from those apps (as it always does).
If you're a Linux advocate and you succeed in getting your school to run Linux, then you are. Getting Linux into the schools isn't like going on a date, it's like getting married. You have a responsibility to the people that you've convinced to use Linux to support them and help them. That's why LUGs should adopt a local school or two as long-range, ongoing projects. Besides, they'll be growing new LUG members that way!
blockquote>We would love to start adopting Linux in the classroom, but until it has the application support that MacOS and Windows has, it's not going to happen.
Then you'll never use Linux. I've talked to many educational software vendors about Linux support, and while many are interested and curious, they don't have the resources to do the ports without being guaranteed a market for the ported versions. The edusoft market is not terribly profitable. Many of these small companies are doing it for the love of education as much as to get rich. But the one thing they can't do is take a chance on products that they can't sell. And of course open source is right out.
If you're willing to accept similar functionality, you can generally find Linux equivalents to many of the programs you mention (and more are coming along daily). But if you have to have Linux versions of exactly these titles, don't hold your breath.
What I'd like to know is, if anyone's tried this before, have you run up against the same technophobia? And if so, any suggestions for getting around it?
I've seen exactly this situation. My suggestion is to look for some other school or educational facility to put Linux into. If your public school won't accept it, look for a parochial school. If the parochial school won't accept it, look for a community center. What you want to do is get the first installation in somewhere where it will be accepted and used wholeheartedly. Then you can go back to the other places and point to your initial installation as an illustration of how well it works, how much money it saves, etc.
I'm doing exactly this in my hometown. I approached a local parochial school to convert a number of unused M68K Macintoshes into Debian-based XTerminals running against a PC app server. The school administration was interested, but the parent's group was loud and Windows-biased.
I thanked them for their trouble, agreed to take the Macs off their hands, and went to a community center in town with an offer of a computer lab for very low cost. We're currently in the process of putting that lab together
There's quite a bit of work outside the US on using Linux for educational purposes; it must just be below your radar. In particular, there are thriving efforts in France, Germany, Mexico, and Columbia that I know of. Take a look at the links page and the regular Linux in education reports at SEUL/edu and you'll find out more about them. As for distros, I know of French and German ones targetted specifically at schools.
We need more than access to linux. We need access to good quality educational software and resources to help train the teachers on how to incorporate the stuff into real learning experiences.
We're trying to do both those things at SEUL/edu. We have a listing of over 200 educational programs (I won't vouch for the quality of them all), some of which are included in the K12Linux distro. We also have an on-going effort to create documentation for non-techie educators on how to install, maintain, and use Linux in a classroom setting.
I looked into the SIF when it was first announced months ago. We went over the license on Technocrat, and quickly realized that it wasn't open source at all.
When you look at how MS intends the ZIS to be used, the end-user software that anyone but the techies see isn't intended to write or read data natively in the SIF format. There are agents to translate from the proprietary data formats to/from SIF. After things get through the agents into SIF form they get processed by the ZIS.
So why bother with SIF at all? The agents are clearly where the important work is to be done. If we want to do something similar, why bother with porting some MS code and be limited by their license? We already have an XML spec called EduML that does pretty much the same thing. There are OSS educational programs being written to use EduML as their native data format. If we were to use something like the Casbah Project as the backend, all we'd need to do is write a little glue and agents for whatever non-EduML software we wanted to play with our efforts. And it would all be OSS.
If you're at all interested in this sort of thing, come take a look at SEUL/edu and help us get Linux and OSS more widely accepted and used in education!
If you're interested in Linux in education, take a look at SEUL/edu. We've been working on the problem of getting Linux ised in schools below university level for over a year. We've got a number of apps under development or ready to be deployed, and We have a team working on documentation for teachers on how to install, configure, and maintain Linux systems. We do a weekly report on Linux in education for Linux Weekly News and LinuxToday (although Slashdot hasn't ever mentioned it). And we have a database of existing educational programs for Linux and a list of links to other Linux educational sits around the world. Check us out!
Loki makes agreements with other companies to port their products to Linux. Probably, no one has approached them about "edutainment" games yet. I talked to Scott Draeker last year about this, and he was quite open to the idea. Push your favorite kids game company to contact Loki!
Lots of us were sceptical from the start. I sent email to both Amazon and The Learning Company about both the Fisher-Price program and Treasure Cove, the other title showing Linux compatibility. The results are all there in the Talkbacks. FWIW, I suspect someone at Amazon ticked off the "Java" box on some entry form, which then built the page listing all the Java-capable OSs.
You think he invented BASIC? Kemeney and Kurtz (the true authors)would have a difference of opinion. Bill's implementation of BASIC earned their scorn.
A linguist friend of mine once told me that he thought he understood a broad range of languages with English, French, German, etc., but that when he learned Swahili he came to view all the Indo-European languages he knew as dialects of one another.
Didn't it occur to you that Dad probably won't need as much help with Linux? I know my mom doesn't need nearly as much help with her Linux system as she did with the Windows box it replaced.
What I've wanted for quite a while is a pneumatic dart gun for the front of my car that can fire suction-cup-tipped darts about 20 cm. long with flame-orange flags attached with the word "asshole!" on them. The suction cups would of course be coated with superglue. If enough of us used these, we would have a community-based system of rating driving quality and traffic courteousness.
Now as for the cell-phones, is there any way we can increase the brain-cancer-causing aspects of them?
Linux people to help provide such support. If LUGs around the globe would reach out to their local schools (universities aren't what we're talking about; they can generally support themselves), we'd have much improved chances of getting Linux into the schools. Probably initially as test projects, but that's where it starts.
On SEUL-edu (corrected URL; sorry, Ian) we are discussing this and many other educational issues. If you're interested in this, come and join us. Also, take a look at Bill Ries-Knight's Linux Educational Needs Posting Page.
Slashdot Mirror
Take a look at TINY. It was designed for exactly the use you're asking for.
It's a little late for posting to this topic, but I'll put your request in the next Linux in education report that SEUL/edu writes and we'll see what we get from that.
Any class that's teaching keystrokes or mouse clicks rather than concepts is doing a disservice to its students. I wouldn't want my son learning Photoshop, I'd want him learning art. I wouldn't want him learning MS Project, I'd want him learning project management and scheduling. If you're so stuck to specific applications, you'll inevitably be left by the wayside as the environment changes away from those apps (as it always does).
If you're a Linux advocate and you succeed in getting your school to run Linux, then you are. Getting Linux into the schools isn't like going on a date, it's like getting married. You have a responsibility to the people that you've convinced to use Linux to support them and help them. That's why LUGs should adopt a local school or two as long-range, ongoing projects. Besides, they'll be growing new LUG members that way!
Then you'll never use Linux. I've talked to many educational software vendors about Linux support, and while many are interested and curious, they don't have the resources to do the ports without being guaranteed a market for the ported versions. The edusoft market is not terribly profitable. Many of these small companies are doing it for the love of education as much as to get rich. But the one thing they can't do is take a chance on products that they can't sell. And of course open source is right out.
If you're willing to accept similar functionality, you can generally find Linux equivalents to many of the programs you mention (and more are coming along daily). But if you have to have Linux versions of exactly these titles, don't hold your breath.
I've seen exactly this situation. My suggestion is to look for some other school or educational facility to put Linux into. If your public school won't accept it, look for a parochial school. If the parochial school won't accept it, look for a community center. What you want to do is get the first installation in somewhere where it will be accepted and used wholeheartedly. Then you can go back to the other places and point to your initial installation as an illustration of how well it works, how much money it saves, etc.
I'm doing exactly this in my hometown. I approached a local parochial school to convert a number of unused M68K Macintoshes into Debian-based XTerminals running against a PC app server. The school administration was interested, but the parent's group was loud and Windows-biased.
I thanked them for their trouble, agreed to take the Macs off their hands, and went to a community center in town with an offer of a computer lab for very low cost. We're currently in the process of putting that lab together
There's quite a bit of work outside the US on using Linux for educational purposes; it must just be below your radar. In particular, there are thriving efforts in France, Germany, Mexico, and Columbia that I know of. Take a look at the links page and the regular Linux in education reports at SEUL/edu and you'll find out more about them. As for distros, I know of French and German ones targetted specifically at schools.
We're trying to do both those things at SEUL/edu. We have a listing of over 200 educational programs (I won't vouch for the quality of them all), some of which are included in the K12Linux distro. We also have an on-going effort to create documentation for non-techie educators on how to install, maintain, and use Linux in a classroom setting.
You want to take a look at GNUstep. It's part of the GNU project, and is an effort to recreate the OpenStep environment entirely as free software.
Already thought of:
http://www.dnaco.net/~kragen//sa-beowulf/
I don't know the current status of it, but both Chalice and Simtec were working on it.
I looked into the SIF when it was first announced months ago. We went over the license on Technocrat, and quickly realized that it wasn't open source at all.
When you look at how MS intends the ZIS to be used, the end-user software that anyone but the techies see isn't intended to write or read data natively in the SIF format. There are agents to translate from the proprietary data formats to/from SIF. After things get through the agents into SIF form they get processed by the ZIS.
So why bother with SIF at all? The agents are clearly where the important work is to be done. If we want to do something similar, why bother with porting some MS code and be limited by their license? We already have an XML spec called EduML that does pretty much the same thing. There are OSS educational programs being written to use EduML as their native data format. If we were to use something like the Casbah Project as the backend, all we'd need to do is write a little glue and agents for whatever non-EduML software we wanted to play with our efforts. And it would all be OSS.
If you're at all interested in this sort of thing, come take a look at SEUL/edu and help us get Linux and OSS more widely accepted and used in education!
Doug Loss
If you're interested in Linux in education, take a look at SEUL/edu. We've been working on the problem of getting Linux ised in schools below university level for over a year. We've got a number of apps under development or ready to be deployed, and We have a team working on documentation for teachers on how to install, configure, and maintain Linux systems. We do a weekly report on Linux in education for Linux Weekly News and LinuxToday (although Slashdot hasn't ever mentioned it). And we have a database of existing educational programs for Linux and a list of links to other Linux educational sits around the world. Check us out!
You mean you've never heard of FloMax, the diahrrea medicine?
Doug Loss
Loki makes agreements with other companies to port their products to Linux. Probably, no one has approached them about "edutainment" games yet. I talked to Scott Draeker last year about this, and he was quite open to the idea. Push your favorite kids game company to contact Loki!
Doug Loss
simple visual shells (like Apple's launcher) basicly a bunch of icons on a window where adults can install games for kids
I've found that WindowMaker with its dock is pretty good for this. Nice big buttons along the right side of the screen.
Doug Loss
Lots of us were sceptical from the start. I sent email to both Amazon and The Learning Company about both the Fisher-Price program and Treasure Cove, the other title showing Linux compatibility. The results are all there in the Talkbacks. FWIW, I suspect someone at Amazon ticked off the "Java" box on some entry form, which then built the page listing all the Java-capable OSs.
Doug Loss
You think he invented BASIC? Kemeney and Kurtz (the true authors)would have a difference of opinion. Bill's implementation of BASIC earned their scorn.
Doug Loss
A linguist friend of mine once told me that he thought he understood a broad range of languages with English, French, German, etc., but that when he learned Swahili he came to view all the Indo-European languages he knew as dialects of one another.
Doug Loss
Didn't it occur to you that Dad probably won't need as much help with Linux? I know my mom doesn't need nearly as much help with her Linux system as she did with the Windows box it replaced.
Doug Loss
What do you think _should_ be here? You've just ruled out some important stuff in geekspace.
Doug Loss
What I've wanted for quite a while is a pneumatic dart gun for the front of my car that can fire suction-cup-tipped darts about 20 cm. long with flame-orange flags attached with the word "asshole!" on them. The suction cups would of course be coated with superglue. If enough of us used these, we would have a community-based system of rating driving quality and traffic courteousness.
Now as for the cell-phones, is there any way we can increase the brain-cancer-causing aspects of them?
Doug Loss
Which of course was a badly-done implementation of Kemeney and Kurtz's language spec, done at Dartmouth as I recall.
Doug Loss
Yes, there is. Go here, http://www.corenic.org/, for a list of registrars.
Doug Loss
Linux people to help provide such support. If LUGs around the globe would reach out to their local schools (universities aren't what we're talking about; they can generally support themselves), we'd have much improved chances of getting Linux into the schools. Probably initially as test projects, but that's where it starts.
On SEUL-edu (corrected URL; sorry, Ian) we are discussing this and many other educational issues. If you're interested in this, come and join us. Also, take a look at Bill Ries-Knight's Linux Educational Needs Posting Page.If 13% is about an hour, 100% is about 8 hours, not ten.
Doug Loss