Small hint for Plasma Classroom

[Mario Fux]

Am Dienstag 14 September 2010, 19:53:29 schrieb Aaron J. Seigo:

Morning

> > I'm following the things about Plasma classroom (because of time
> > constraints I don't take a more active role) and as I was reading about
> > the current ideas on the community wiki I wanted to leave a comment and
> > decided to do it here.
> 
> feedback is quite welcome, and preferred on the mailing list for now. i
> find watching the comments section on individual pages a bit slow (or
> maybe it's me that's slow .. either way ;)

I'm the mailinglist kind of guy myself as well (iff this is an english 
sentence ;-).
 
> > About ''Plasma Classroom Network'': A local area network consisting of
> > one leader system and one or more participant systems.
> > 
> > When you begin to implement this system please don't stand with "only one
> > leader system" as a constraint as team teaching gets more and more
> > popular in education (if one can afford it but that's another thing ;-).
> 
> this is actually one reason why i didn't called it the "teacher's system"
> :)
>
> i'm not sure yet how i'd like to handle multiple "driving" systems. options
> include:
> 
> * allowing one leader system to hand the lead off to another leader system,
> causing the participant machines to connect to the other system
> 
> * allow "leader slaves" so that there is the one leader system, but other
> approved systems can be used to drive it

Both sound nice. But what comes to my mind now is: do you have an educational 
scenario?!? I'm not necessarily right but my experience in this field tells me 
that their should first be an educational scenario and then the technology 
that solves the problem in this scenario and not the other way around.

But I don't know about the contact with the brasilian (or other) school and 
education system. Do they have one or more scenarios they want technology for 
to solve it or do they and you (or we ;-) want to invent something nice for 
school.

Ok. I think here were back to the involvement and ideas of teachers as they 
actually teach and know were the problems are and need to be solved. If there 
once is an established plasma system in (a) school it will evolve and grow 
into something really amazing (as plasma is that flexibel).
 
> i'd really like to avoid having multiple leader systems at a time for a
> participant system as that is likely to complicate things quite a bit.
> 
> also note that since the classroom server (the database, really) will be
> separate from the leader system (though they could both be running on the
> same machine), this will make it easy to have multiple teacher computers
> all working on the same dataset.

Sounds nice.

> i'd like to keep the participant systems going through the leader system as
> well as that allows the participant systems to be firewalled (or otherwise
> cut) off from the wide area network while the leader system isn't and can
> still access the classroom data that may be running elsewhere.

So you want all the traffic (web traffic as well, file server, etc.) through 
the leaders system, right?

> a lot of the answers will probably become clearer once the leader system
> GUI starts to come together in a definite form, as we'll then be able to
> decide exactly what features should be shared between multiple teacher
> systems.

I'd like to see prototype schools which try it out and collect experiences. 
Would be a nice research topic. Even a nice diploma theme. Still need one but 
there are so many interesting topics ....

> but sending event data around is easy; sending out commends might be a bit
> more complex (would require a master/slave system for the teacher systems
> if staying with the one-leader-system design) but as long as we can assume
> that the teachers are cooperative and trusted to each other, then it
> becomes easier (we just have to authenticate the other teacher systems to
> the leader system once)
> 
> > BTW: For them who don't know me. I did the schooling as a primary
> > teacher, study now education and computer sciences and thus have some
> > good educational background.
> 
> for those who don't know Mario, he also holds kick ass dev sprints in the
> mountains of Switzerland :)

Thx ;-). The next one is already in preparation...

> > BTW2: You'll use nepomuk for the "usage event information" of the
> > participant plasma desktop?
> 
> for some of the events, nepomuk won't be very useful. one example use case
> (and yes, i need to put more use cases on the page... ):
> 
> Teacher says "Ok class, go to today's Math activity.."
> Students start switching over, teacher watches their screen which shows
> besides each student's name which activity they are in, with a checkmark
> next to each one that is in the right activity.
> Teacher says, "John, you haven't switched yet and we're all waiting for
> you. Can you please stop talking with Sally and do so now?"

Interesting use case ;-). Two thinks:
- I'd dream here of the integration of a system like iTALC [1] or (Free)NX or 
X2go [2].
- Not really an educational scenario but a problem of discipline. But let's 
not discuss about this here.

> other items, such as perhaps file access, may end up in nepomuk, however.

IC.

The whole thing becomes more and more interesting to me. If there weren't the 
problem of too many interesting things and to less time to distribute on them.

Anyway. These were my humble opinions
Mario

[1] http://italc.sf.net
[2] http://www.x2go.org