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

[Aleix Pol]

On Thu, Dec 23, 2010 at 6:06 PM, Martijn van Duren <martijn987 at gmail.com>wrote:

> Thank you for your answer.
> This is exactly the kind of answer I was hoping for.
>
> I will forward your respond to the people I've spoken to and hope that
> they are willing to put in the effort to make a proper formulation of
> their needs and wishes, so that it can be picked up from here.
>
> Just out of interest, has there ever been an attempt like this in the
> past by the kde edu project?
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Martijn
>
> Aleix Pol schreef op do 23-12-2010 om 17:51 [+0100]:
> >
> >
> > ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> > From: Aleix Pol <aleixpol at kde.org>
> > Date: Thu, Dec 23, 2010 at 5:51 PM
> > Subject: Re: [kde-edu]: KDE edu in schools
> > To: kde-edu at kde.org
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > 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         using outdated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
> >
> >         _______________________________________________
> >         kde-edu mailing list
> >         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
> >
>

:)
Regarding using KDE Edu on schools, as Nuno said, it's being already used in
schools all over the world, mainly in Brazil and Portugal thanks to his and
some colleagues efforts.  We still need to figure out how to turn this usage
into feedback for KDE Edu.

I don't know about any initiative regarding school books and KDE Edu
together, it would be something interesting because we would be able to
document and create tools targeting specific needs. That would have other
problems, like which ones to target and so on, but I think it's something we
could take advantage in the end, if done properly.

KDE Edu is mostly about treating big-ish amounts of data that's relevant to
students. If we get to use (and create) more data, we improve and
educational free software improves together with us. I think it's something
worth looking into, but still has to be done.

Aleix
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