[kde-edu]: Centralised Data Storage

[Inge Wallin]

On Saturday 17 March 2007 23.40, Peter Murdoch wrote:
> A discussion with Inge Wallin on IRC led me to create this proposition
> for the GSoC, but since I'm unable to participate I thought that we
> should try to implement this anyway. Here's an excerpt:
>
>The KDE Edutainment project has significant potential to act as a
> catalyst for the promotion of not just KDE, but also open-source
> software in general when it comes to schools. >However, I feel that many
> schools are reluctant to adopt software from the KDE Edutainment project
> as it would simply cause them hassle in terms of both time and space:
> these >applications are primarily aimed at an individual working at a
> standalone workstation, and do not offer much flexibility in terms of
> large-scale deployment.
>
>Take KGeography as a prime example: if a Geography teacher wished his
> students to view a particular area that required downloading an
> additional map, then each individual >pupil would have to download and
> install the map which would take up a lot of time and redundant hard
> drive space; not to mention that not all pupils will know how to install
> a >map. Also, what if a teacher wants to hand out homework? They would
> have to create the test and place it in each individual student's home
> directory, then afterwards they would >need to go through each
> individual directory and manually copy their answers back into their own
> directory in order to retrieve them; this means that a lot more of the
> teacher's >time is taken up than is necessary.

Hmm, you might have taken my meaning a bit more negative than it was intended.  
The schools are not reluctant to use KGeography or the other kdeedu programs. 
My point was just that it would be so much better if we could help the 
schools to administer their data better and let the teachers or sysadmins 
download and install data centrally. This is especially important for 
programs where the user can download more data after the installation of the 
program, e.g. through the GetHotNewStuff feature.

>Therefore my proposal is that KDE-Edu should have features specifically
> aimed at centralised data storage and large-scale deployment, which will
> not only make live >exponentially easier for the system administrator,
> but it will also give schools an incentive to adopt open-source
> educational software such as KDE-Edu by dramatically >increasing the
> productivity of KDE's wide selection of education applications.
>
> What's everyone else's thoughts on this? If there was a generic module
> focusing on central storage in libkdeedu which individual apps could
> harness, wouldn't it greatly increase kdeedu's productivity?

	-Inge

-- 
Inge Wallin               | Thus spake the master programmer:               |
                          |      "After three days without programming,     |
inge at lysator.liu.se       |       life becomes meaningless."                |
                          | Geoffrey James: The Tao of Programming.         |