[dot] aKademy 2007: Education Day

[Dot Stories]

URL: http://dot.kde.org/1183817727/

From: Danny Allen and Wendy van Craen <>
Dept: currents-and-futures-of-education
Date: Saturday 07/Jul/2007, @07:15

aKademy 2007: Education Day
===========================

   The long-anticipated Education Day at aKademy 2007
[http://akademy2007.kde.org/codingmarathon/schoolday.php] opened at 9 am
on Monday, 3rd July with an introduction by Anne-Marie Mahfouf,
maintainer of the KDE-Edu suite of educational applications. The main
aim of the day was to unite the many different diverse consumers of the
award-winning assortment of software, such as teachers, system
integrators, and students, and to share ideas, success stories and best
practice. With such a concentration of interested parties, the
organisers were strongly optimistic that the event could be provide a
useful discussion venue for the coming year of educational developments.
Read on for a report of the day.

     The day was primarily organised by Anne-Marie Mahfouf and Inge
Wallin, both of KDE [http://kde.org/], and sponsored by the
Netherlands-based organisation, CodeYard
[http://www.codeyard.net/index.php?lang=en]. Sebastian Kugler of
CodeYard explained their interest in the event: "Our goal is to create a
community around Free Software in education and thereby convey the
ideas, workflows and principles of Free Software development to
education, with a long-term vision of raising awareness of Free Software
in education and breeding a new wave of Free Software people".


  I. KDE at SCHOOL (USING FREENX)

     Mario Fux introduced his area of expertise, integrating FreeNX
[http://nomachine.com/] (used for thin-client systems) in Swiss schools.
The focus of the talk was Mario's experience in one school, the
Ried-Brig school in southern Switzerland. The full lifecyle of the
project was considered, starting with the proposal, following on to the
implementation, and then an evaluation of both the technical performance
and user acceptance of the system.

     The case study presented consists of 8 classes situated in a
relatively conservative region of Switzerland. The school has limited
resources, which means that they must manage a long technology cycle,
with the same computers many years old and becoming dated. This
presented an opening of opportunity for Mario. Mario proposed to use
FreeNX on a Linux platform - with the proposal readily accepted, Mario
performed the installation free of charge. The cost for an application
server was only 1000 euro, and came with 2GB ram running on Debian
3.2.2.

     Naturally, such a "radical" departure from de facto technology
procurement standard imposed some rigourous conditions. Aside from
regular concerns, the system needed to fully interoperate with existing
web applications, printers, and provide for their word processing and
other office needs. After a small period of adjustment, teachers rapidly
became comfortable with the system, particularly valuing it for its
stability over previous products. The project gathered a lot of
feedback, which has played a significant role in the further development
of the system, with many teachers lending their participation to the
research project.

     The project is still fairly new (now in the school for 2 years). In
2006, they bought 2 new servers (more than doubling the capacity of the
system). Mario is looking forward to the prospect of installing KDE 4
system-wide, and the associated benefits this will bring to the project.
As part of the evaluation stage, questionnaires were distributed to
classes: an interesting discovery was the extreme popularity of the
"Potato Guy" software, which produced stacks of output on the colour
laser printer until it was replaced by a monochrome model.


 II. INTEL CLASSMATE PC

     Helio Chissini de Castro introduced the Classmate PC
[http://www.intel.com/intel/worldahead/classmatepc/] from
micro-processor producer Intel. The Classmate PC is a small, rugged
computer in a laptop-style form factor. Designed for beginning computer
users in developing countries, the Classmate has 256 mb of RAM, and has
a choice of 3 'distributions' - one based on Windows, the other two
exclusively featuring a KDE-based desktop.

     The discovery of an OLPC XO [http://www.laptop.org/] computer in
the room prompted an short (yet unscheduled) comparison session, where
differences in the two competing projects were noted. Intel doesn't
believe that the "one laptop per child" model is appropriate for its
target markets (middle stage developing countries), since many homes
already have a standard, family computer. OLPC also takes a more
holistic, system-oriented approach, building both the hardware and
software, whereas Intel is less concerned with the software side,
leaving this to established software vendors such as Mandriva
[http://www.mandriva.com/], where Helio is employed to work on such
integration tasks. A general consensus was that the Intel platform was
more "open", and could possibly allow a greater variety of tasks to be
performed, important if the device is to be a companion throughout the
educational stages of a student.

     The case study presented by Helio covered his experience in North
Brazil, where Classmate PC's with Mandriva, KDE 3.5.4 and OpenOffice are
currently engaged in trials. A question was raised regarding whether
children with no computer at home will be able to understand this new
technology? The response was that children learn very quickly, and that
they already are used to working with different user interfaces, like
those found on games consoles and mobile phones.


III. MEDUXA IS IN CANARY ISLANDS SCHOOLS... WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

     After lunch, Agustín Benito Bethencourt covered the recent work of
the mEDUXa
[http://www.grupocpd.com/archivos_documentos/info_meduxa/meduxa_project_released/]
project in the Canary Islands, Spain. mEDUXa is a large-scale,
government-sponsored initiative to provide a technology-enhanced
education to students. So far, over 35,000 computers have been
distributed to 1,100 schools, with a potential userbase of 325,000
users. Furthermore, Agustín expects these numbers to double by 2009.

     The mEDUXa project started in 2005 with a choice between GNOME and
KDE. KDE was chosen as the best solution in the evaluation stage, partly
due to the lower resource requirements and the excellent KIOSK
framework, which allows administrators to effectively lock down
computers to prevent their misuse and reduce maintenance needs. The
system is based on the KDE-derivative of Ubuntu, Kubuntu. The project
has 4 main elements: the network, desktop clients, school servers and
central servers, which aid administration and system upgrades.

     Simplicity is a primary goal of the project, with simplified
desktop profiles provided to different student strata, including the
important 6-12 age group. A large advantage is that the KDE-based
desktop can be comfortably provided in several different languages,
which greatly aides language teaching and immigrant students (English,
French, German and Arabic), and distinguishes the system from
proprietary competitors.

     Agustín announces that a wiki containing project documentation can
be found at hexperides.org [http://www.hexperides.org/], and many of the
custom system modifications can be found on Launchpad.
 [https://launchpad.net/~hexperides/]

 IV. SKOLELINUX AS A PLATFORM FOR FREE SOFTWARE IN SCHOOLS

     Knut Yrvin proceeded to talk about the Skolelinux
[http://www.skolelinux.no/en/] distribution and its implementation in
schools in Europe. More than 450 schools are currently using Skolelinux,
which started in 2001 and is most concentrated in the Scandinavian
region. Only 5% of users are native English speakers, which means that
95% of students in these schools cannot easily use computers which are
lingually-inflexible.

     Whilst all students are trained in office productivity
applications, this misses out the huge potential of students to
creatively express themselves. Currently, students are treated like
consumers, whilst they should learn the basis of technology, and how it
can be used to create the future.

     Skolelinux focuses on the most important requirements schools have
of any system: cost, existing hardware, and language. With the Windows
platform, many schools found that the cost of software licensing was
preventing them from procuring new hardware. With only basic
administrative systems in place, one technician was required to
physically visit a computer for many common administrative tasks. The
solution was to use graphical clients with a more centralised
implementation to allow for upgrades and software installation. Using
Skolelinux, schools have been able to achieve cost savings of up to 40%
over traditional rollouts, with a greatly reduced technical burden: a
single technician in a school of 4,000 students can perform all
necessary tasks in 2-4 hours a week.


  V. GCOMPRIS (PRESENTATION AND OLPC INTEGRATION)

     Bruno Coudoin presented GCompris [http://gcompris.net/-en-], the
award-winning activities environment with a specialised interface for
young children. GCompris is currently translated into 60 languages
(including audio voice samples in many cases), and has recently seen a
revamped and easier to use menu layout adopted after consultation with
users.

     Highlights of GCompris include a basic word processing application,
a drawing and animation creation suite, and a locked down local chat
application for the classroom, where children can practise communication
and typing skills towards the same end. Sound is an essential element in
GCompris, and the audience universally accepted that audio interaction
and notifications need to be much more thoroughly integrated in existing
and future applications. A new direction of development is adding
administrative functionality directly in GCompris, where classes of
users can be set up, with tailored activities to suit their current
stage of academic development.

     Bruno was the bearer of an OLPC XO machine, and discussed the
current issues regarding the inclusion of GCompris on the machine. One
of the main issues was the size of GCompris, which through the extensive
use of graphics and audio has bloomed up to 100 mb - a hefty payload for
a machine with extremely limited memory resources. The other significant
problem is the integration in the Sugar interface paradigm. Sugar
[http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Category:Sugar], which is the
natively-developed GUI for the OLPC, uses the concept of a "task frame"
for each "activity" (these activities are generally applications in the
traditional sense). For GCompris to be fully integrated, its activities
would also need to inhabit this area. However, this does not suit the
concept of GCompris as a standalone environment, and in any case,
GCompris has far too many activities to fit into this task frame, which
appears to be visually restricted to a maximum of around 15 icon
buttons.


 VI. LIGHTNING TALKS

     After a short break, lightning talks covering two applications
which have seen rapid development over the past year were given. These
applications were Marble [http://edu.kde.org/marble/], and KAlgebra.

     Torsten Rahn started the session, presenting the concept and wide
promise of Marble, the desktop globe application, before eagerly moving
into a live demonstration of Marble.

     Torsten describes the various areas geographic displays have been
historically used in KDE, from KWorldWatch to time zone selection in
KControl. Now, Torsten would like to greatly scale up this use of
geo-integration, in places like KAddressbook and other KDE-PIM
applications, and many other areas throughout KDE. With a quick
masterclass in creating a trivial, 5 minute application in Qt Designer
using the Marble widget, the audience immediately more attentive. The
ease displayed in the creation of this demo brought Torsten's ideas from
theoretical and distant to tangible and excitably close.

     Torsten described the support for emerging de facto standards such
as Google Earth's KML placemark format, and his expectation of great
results from the three Summer of Code projects assigned to Marble,
implementing GPS support
[http://code.google.com/soc/2007/kde/appinfo.html?csaid=58AE7448FBEEEAE0]
(with the student working on this project making an important
breakthrough programming through the intervals in the talks!) and a 2
dimensional projection
[http://code.google.com/soc/2007/kde/appinfo.html?csaid=DCE4DBD4A0509DC7]
to complement the existing 3d model, which will aid integration into
other applications with easier manipulation needs.

     Next, Aleix Pol Gonzales introduced KAlgebra, a MathML-based
calculator and plotter (2d and 3d) for algebraic functions. KAlgebra
provides a simple calculator for advanced calculations so that students
can calculate and script common functions (such as calculating the
perimeter of an object) in a console, with support for saving popular
functions into a dictionary for speedy regular usage.


VII. PANEL DISCUSSION

     With all in attendence interested in varying capacity in education,
a quick poll was conducted to gauge the background of the crowd. Around
twelve people were developers of educational software, four were system
integrators, and one was a teacher.

     Inge Wallin opened the panel discussion with the question "What
educational needs are we not meeting today?" As a question familiar to
many attendees, Inge stated his own priorities of teacher control over
the content and operation of computers in their class, and the pressing
need for data, especially geographically and lingually localised data
sets, and an infrastructure for uploading and downloading this data.

     Mario Fux echoed earlier discussions by asking for wider and more
appropriate usage of sound, with Phonon [http://phonon.kde.org/] being
an ideal technology for KDE 4 applications to integrate these
interaction elements. Mario also stated the need for a better dialogue
between developers of educational applications and their users, who are
a mix of teachers, system integrators and students.

     Anne Østergaard (a board member of the GNOME Foundation) was
interested in Marketing, and suggested an educational software portal
online, and a promotion of links with the media, in particular
documentary makers and producers of teaching training videos. Knut Yrvin
would like to see a simplified desktop interface developed, similar to
the Sugar effort of the OLPC, and a continued emphasis on lower resource
requirements, possible through the use of WebKit as a web rendering
component over the more heavyweight Gecko engine used by Firefox, and
the substitution of OpenOffice.org with KOffice.
 [http://www.koffice.org/]
     The day ended at around 5:35 pm with attendees having a better
understanding of both the current state of the Free education offering
and the real-world needs of our users.