[kde-edu]: KDE-Edu and edubuntu

[Mario Đanić]

On 9/30/06, Anne-Marie Mahfouf <annemarie.mahfouf at free.fr> wrote:
> Hi,
Hello Anne-Marie,
>
> I am Anne-Marie, the KDE-Edu module coordinator (and founder). I am glad
> Edubuntu uses our programs and I would like to work more closely with you all
> in order to get feedback from teachers, schools and parents to
> 1) improve our current applications
> 2) develop new programs according to your wishes.
Nice that you want to cooperate with us.
>
> A polemic is starting regarding Kalzium as it seems the Edubuntu team is
> developing a Kalzium-like for Gnome (Gallium). I find this a bit strange and
> I would like to ask you your intentions for the future. Are you going to
> duplicate our work (you perfectly have the right to do so) or are we going to
> work together in order to offer more educational programs to teachers?
I'm not of what you probably would could call competent enough to
answer this question in it's full, but I believe new educational
applications development will continue even in the future from our
side. That said those apps will probably be
new applications (read: probably not KDE-Edu apps clones on top of
Gnome). Ideas will be collected from feedbacks we can get from
teachers & students & pupils already using Edubuntu and it's set of
educational applications. Ofcourse,
feedbacks should also come from people who don't yet use Edubuntu.
I'll give you an example of this later in this mail.
> The kdelibs and qt on which the KDE-Edu programs depend are not big
> dependencies. GCompris for example is also quite big (if I quote his author,
If I am correct, I would say that the size of kdelibs and qt itself is
not such a problem. I rather see a problem in shipping the KDE
language packs, which are really large.
> he said to me GCompris is bigger than Gnome itself). It's already difficult
> to have developers doing educational work as most are young and have no
> children and prefer working on multimedia for example. Duplicating the
> current work would be a waste of time.
Shouldn't multimedia experience be part of educational applications? :)
Anyway, perhaps there is really a lack of "educational developers" but I think
I can name a few who are willing to do such kind of development. One is me,
and I don't see a problem in that.
>
Few days ago I was called by a head-master of a technical school. They
heard about Edubuntu because one of the best high schools in region
has implemented it. (that said, only two schools in Croatia run on
Linux). Now the problem comes what exactly to offer. Current set of
educational applications, to be honest, is good but is not sufficient
and doesn't cover range of pupils & students that it should.
For example, can we offer a "game" where you'd have to connect powers
circles correctly in order to make the light-ball go on? This was just
an example.
There is still a lot of misunderstanding about open source in
education, and we still have a long way to go before we reach the
point where everyone will be at least aware of an alternative, a
better alternative.

> I hope you can clarify all that so we (KDE-Edu and Edubuntu) can begin a
> partnership if you are interested.
Hopefully I helped at least a bit. If you have any questions, please shoot.
Also, If I miswritted something or you think is unclear (might be that I
wrote it down wrong) please ask me to clarify.
>
> Thanks for your attention,
No, thank you for writing.
>
Kind regards,
> Anne-Marie
Mario

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