[kde-edu]: Re: KDE edu in schools

[Aleix Pol]

On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 7:37 PM, Martijn van Duren <martijn987 at gmail.com>wrote:

> Dear people of KDE edu,
>
> I've posted a message on the kde forum, but they suggested for me to ask
> the question through the mailing list.
>
> My original post was as follow:
>
> I'm not a genuine KDE user, but I do use Linux and am a firm supporter
> of open source and standards.
>
> I recently came into contact with some people running different primary
> schools. When I talked with these people I found out that a lot of
> schools these days (at least here in the Netherlands) are using outdated
> software (including software written for windows 3.0). Talking to these
> people I came to the conclusion that at the very least a fair percentage
> is willing to look into what other (opener) software has to offer, but
> aren't able to find a decent replacements or are stuck but contracts
> with the book-suppliers.
>
> Through these talks I came to the KDE edu suite. Since I can't afford to
> look deeply into the entire documentation to find these answers and also
> because I want to get some insight from and to get some discussion with
> the people directly related to this project I post my questions here:
>      * How scalable is the project?
>        - How is the central maintenance of progress and grades for
>        students?
>        - How easily can the content (and possibly the front-end) be
>        altered to suit the specific needs of a teaching methodology?
>        - How closely is the (client side) back-end integrated into the
>        kde/Qt project?
>
>      * How closely is the project related to publishers of schoolbooks?
>      * How actively are school approached about the existence of this
>        project
>
> I hope someone can give me some information concerning these questions
> and hopefully get some discussion going about how to make open source
> and open standards more common on schools.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Martijn van Duren
>
> _______________________________________________
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> kde-edu at mail.kde.org
> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-edu
>

KDE Edu is a suite built using many different projects, it's quite hard to
answer your questions generally. I can say that the biggest problem we're
having right now is that it's not easy to get teachers to collaborate by
saying what do they need.

In general we try to make programs to use the most standard formats the
possible, but as you will understand, this is not always easy to achieve
because there's not that much of an effort to make standards in these
specific areas we're dealing with.

Regarding the applications, they are tied to the KDE project and there's no
intention to go away from it. This means that KDE Edu works everywhere KDE
works (X11 like linux and *bsd, windows, macos, etc.).

On schoolbooks collaboration it's quite hard from our side. In one hand
those are usually very restrictive in the licensing and when they are not
they are written in formats that are not that easy to compute (usually they
are oriented to printing), but I think that KDE Edu as a community is
interested in getting in touch with open education in any flavor, so if
there's anything we can do, it can be discussed here.

I'd like to see more school+kde edu conversations being made and basically I
think that its feedback would be very beneficial for the project. For now we
know that KDE Edu is being used in schools, but probably the communication
has to improve for the moment.

I'm not sure I answered what you wanted to know, if you need anything else
please keep asking :).

Aleix
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