More questions
by Greg DeKoenigsberg
OK, let me ask another question, O my mailing list friends:
What do you do for a living?
Specifically, I'm looking for people who make a living serving schools.
What are the biggest pains in your collective asses?
--g
--
Greg DeKoenigsberg
Community Development Manager
Red Hat, Inc. :: 1-919-754-4255
"To whomsoever much hath been given...
...from him much shall be asked"
17 years
Thanks for answering the roll call. And now, a question.
by Greg DeKoenigsberg
OK, so that's a tidy handful of smart and knowledgeable people. Thanks
for answering the call. :)
I wanted to talk about my recent experiences in education-land. This is a
fairly lengthy email, so apologies in advance -- but I think that the
people here are the perfect folks to read it.
The question, for those who want to skip to the end:
What should Red Hat be doing in the education space?
===
Last month, I went to visit Mike Huffman in Indianapolis. He's in charge
of technology in schools for the state of Indiana. He said he was going
to take me out to show me how Linux worked in his schools.
I'd seen a bunch of cool Linux labs elsewhere. Good example: I visited
Jeff Elkner at Yorktown High School (Arlington, VA) a few years ago and
toured his K12LTSP lab. It was essentially a lab for teaching computer
skills, in the wealthiest high school in a wealthy school district, with a
highly motivated teacher. Impressive stuff, but not what I would call a
broadly replicable success.
So on my visit with Mike, he took me to a school in Greensburg, Indiana.
This was not a wealthy school; in fact, it was in an economically
depressed area. A lot of parents lost their jobs in the past few years
when the local plant shut down. Fairly typical story nowadays, it seems.
As we drove out to Greensburg, Mike told me the story of how he came to
believe that open source in general was *the* solution to the "computers
in education" problems in his state. He told me about how Microsoft was
squeezing him at every turn, and yet how the computers he had were sorely
underutilized. He really explained to me, for the first time, the ideas
around one-to-one computing -- and why open source is ideally positioned
to make one-to-one a reality in his state.
===
I was expecting Mike to take me to a computer lab. Instead, he took me to
an English class.
The kids filtered in, chitchatting like kids do. When the bell rang, the
teacher directed their attention to the URL she'd written on the board.
The kids turned on the monitors mounted underneath their
plexiglass-covered desks, fired up their web browsers, and got to work.
The URL was a Moodle quiz. Something about "The Red Badge of Courage" or
something, I don't remember. (As so often in my school days, I wasn't
paying attention to that bit.) But the kids were done with the quiz in,
oh, five minutes. When they were all done, the teacher started to teach
her class. The kids would occasionally Google something. The teacher had
a supernatural instinct about which kids were working on class-related
stuff and which kids were fooling around, and kept the class pretty well
in line.
I talked to her after class. "Moodle and Criterion have saved my life,"
she said. "I used to spend hours grading papers and quizzes. Now, Moodle
takes care of the quizzes, and Criterion grades the papers for spelling
and grammar so I can focus on the content. This software saves me 10
hours a week -- which I spend building the actual curriculum."
When I asked her about how she created the content, she said "oh, I get
help from the other English teachers; we build the lesson plans together."
Whereupon Mike Huffman broke in and told me that this was one of the first
lessons he'd learned: the absolute necessity of collaboration. When Mike
put *one* lab into a school, that lab failed. The teacher was intimidated
by the technology, wouldn't ask for help, and the computers would sit
unused. But when he put *three* labs into a school, the labs prospered;
the teachers compared notes, learned from each other, and ultimately took
fierce ownership of these fantastic new tools they'd been given.
The next day, I went to the symposium for the teachers in the state of
Indiana, and heard similarly breathless stories. I heard from a teacher
of *twenty-five years* who said that her one-to-one lab changed her mind
about taking early retirement. "I can focus on actual teaching now," she
said.
The common wisdom that old teachers can't adopt technology is clearly
wrong. If you give smart teachers the tools to do their jobs, they will
use those tools. In fact, the veteran teachers will be *more* effective
than the younger teachers, because they've got the classroom management
skills to make it work. I've seen the proof.
===
All of this tells me that a lot of folks have been selling the whole
"computers in schools" concept completely wrong. In Indiana, they are
not, not, *not teaching computers*. They are teaching *kids*, and they
are *using* computers to do it. It seems like an arbitrary distinction,
but it is in fact a *fundamental* distinction -- and it's a distinction
that so many people seem to miss. Until very recently, myself included.
Sometimes you have to see these things firsthand to understand the impact.
So why don't teachers embrace technology? The common "wisdom" goes
something like this:
"How can you expect a teacher to learn all this computer stuff when
they've got all this other work to do, like grading papers?"
When the success stories go more like this:
"How can you expect a teacher *not* to learn all this computer stuff so
they stop wasting their time on grunt work, like grading papers?"
===
So now that I've been converted, I ask myself: "what role should Red Hat
play here?"
This is the hard question. Lately, it's the question that has been
keeping me up nights.
I know that Red Hat has one hell of a commitment to education, because
I've seen it. I've seen it in the late-night IRC logs of the OLPC
developers who work crazy hours on a project that, two years ago, was
widely regarded to be complete crackrock.
But OLPC isn't enough. For one thing, it's designed to solve problems
that kids in the developed world don't have, and thus may be regarded by
many in the developed world as an expensive toy -- especially when a
desktop system can be had for $300 or less. (This is true even in some of
OLPC's target markets; you wouldn't believe the resentment I heard from
some Brazilians at being considered "too poor for real computers".) For
another, it may not work in the classroom nearly as well as we think; if
even one or two kids leave their laptops at home, suddenly you don't have
a one-to-one classroom anymore. Most of all, though, it's just unwise to
put all of your eggs in one basket -- and that is precisely what Red Hat
has been doing in the worldwide K12 space with OLPC.
Meanwhile, there's this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity unfolding before
our very eyes. Microsoft is leaving the door wide open by delivering a
product that people don't want to buy. One-to-one computing is picking up
steam. Open source applications like Moodle are changing the classroom
workflow -- really, changing what is *possible* in the classroom.
Where is Red Hat? And where *should* we be?
===
We are very fortunate here at Red Hat. We have the best support brand in
the open source business -- in fact, one of the best brands in the whole
software business. The old saying used to go, "nobody ever got fired for
buying IBM." In the new world of open source, it's becoming increasingly
true that "nobody ever got fired for buying Red Hat."
The Shadowman logo opens doors for us -- and for open source -- in
whatever market we choose to enter.
That's why it is so deeply frustrating to me that, for years now, Red Hat
has watched from the sidelines as the K12 open source community has
labored. Not to say we haven't made some efforts, because we have. We've
hosted a mailing list here, an RHN channel there. We put together an open
lab for North Carolina schools, with mixed success. One time, we printed
up some *awesome* T-shirts. We helped Eric Harrison package up K12LTSP
way back in the day -- what has it been, Eric, six years now? -- but
instead of capitalizing on our relationship with him and taking the
opportunity to build something more meaningful, we sat back and watched.
And watched. And watched.
And still we watch.
===
So let me throw this question out to you all.
What *should* Red Hat be doing in the educational space? Something that
makes us *just enough* money to justify a business case, but helps Linux
advocates make a *real* difference in schools -- the kind that Mike
Huffman is making in Indiana? Because I'm tired of us doing nothing, and
I'm looking for any good advice that I can get.
Thanks for reading this far.
--g
--
Greg DeKoenigsberg
Community Development Manager
Red Hat, Inc. :: 1-919-754-4255
"To whomsoever much hath been given...
...from him much shall be asked"
17 years
Re: Fedora and LTSP Development
by Jef Spaleta
Richard June previously wrote:
> Do you have more information on what eharrison needs to have done? I'm
> somewhat familiar with LTSP and have more than a passing familiarity with
> fedora too.
Hey Richard,
So i was in attendance at Fudcon when Warren sort of spoke about the need for
some fedora community involvement to get ltsp integrated. Thanks to a
change in personal
circumstances I can commit some time in moving the integration effort
forward. I've already talked to warren a little bit in irc, but it
really comes down to what specific technical things need to be done,
and a plan of attack towards integration.
Richard have you gotten anywhere with getting a list of specific task
items? Have you had a discussion with eharrison yet?
Is the discussion outlined in http://wiki.ltsp.org/twiki/bin/view/Ltsp/MueKow
and
http://wiki.ltsp.org/twiki/bin/view/Ltsp/IntegratingLtsp
still the state of the art for the ltsp5 vision?
Do we have a repository of scripts/bits/voodoo that eharrison has been
working on as a starting point? Do we have to modify some existing
packaging for necessary software pieces? Do we need to submit and
maintain some additional packages?
I'm looking at step 2 of
http://wiki.ltsp.org/twiki/bin/view/Ltsp/IntegratingLtsp and I see
some hangups.
* ltspfsd (no project space known, for more info see bottom of this
wiki article)
if we are going to be integrating ltspfsd we really need to have an
established upstream development defined
lp_server (not available, due to licensing)
?????? Are we going to run into a licensing full-stop?
Also are there any blockers in the list at
http://wiki.ltsp.org/twiki/bin/view/Ltsp/Ltsp5MinimumRequirements ?
While we wait for eharrison to point us in the right direction, it
probably wouldn't hurt for the rest of us to take a real hard look at
debian's or ubuntu's ltsp-server-standalone package to see where the
particularly magical incantations are in setting up the ltsp
thinclient environment.
Oh and kids... go checkout koolu.com, looks like they are planning to
offer OPLC-grade hardware repackaged as ltsp thinclients.
-jef
17 years
Roll call
by Greg DeKoenigsberg
So.
Who's on this list?
If you're reading this, drop a line. I've got some ideas I want to talk
about, but I don't even know who's listening here.
--g
--
Greg DeKoenigsberg
Community Development Manager
Red Hat, Inc. :: 1-919-754-4255
"To whomsoever much hath been given...
...from him much shall be asked"
17 years
Re: What should Red Hat be doing...
by Bryant Patten
On Apr 17, 2007, at 7:15 AM, fedora-education-list-request(a)redhat.com
wrote:
> So let me throw this question out to you all.
>
> What *should* Red Hat be doing in the educational space?
Greg -
FIrst off, it is exciting that you are asking this question. The
main obstacle I find getting people to consider Open Source solutions
for schools is, as you know, the 'who am I going to call?' issue.
Any initiative from Red Hat should help along this line.
Here are a few of quick thoughts I wanted to share with you:
First, one place within Red Hat you may want to look is at the Red
Hat Academy. I think that is a hugely under-used resource in the
K-12 space. The pricing is problematic for small high schools but
the potential is amazing. Think about applying that model to K12LTSP
and you might solve two problems at once. First, if Red Hat
developed a similar packaged solution and created a K12LTSP
certification program, that might deal with the legitimacy issue.
Furthermore, if such a program were then designed with high school
students in mind, the school could grow its own support staff. I
think schools would be very interested in such a 21st century, flat-
world, digital vocational program. I am in discussions with our
local schools about this kind of a program, pointing out that this
would be a career track for kids that aren't going to a 4 year
college but want to stay in town and make a decent living. However, I
haven't had much luck getting support from the RH Academy team
(thought they have been very polite) because small, rural high
schools are not their target market.
Computer skills training relates a bit to my second point regarding
another issue you discussed:
> All of this tells me that a lot of folks have been selling the whole
> "computers in schools" concept completely wrong. In Indiana, they are
> not, not, *not teaching computers*. They are teaching *kids*, and
> they
> are *using* computers to do it. It seems like an arbitrary
> distinction,
> but it is in fact a *fundamental* distinction -- and it's a
> distinction
> that so many people seem to miss. Until very recently, myself
> included.
> Sometimes you have to see these things firsthand to understand the
> impact.
If I read this correctly, this is often stated as 'computers should
be fully integrated into the curriculum and not taught as a special
subject'. Maybe it is just a pet peeve but I think the pendulum
needs to swing back into the middle on this topic. It shouldn't be
an either/or situation. Computers should be seemlessly integrated
into the curriculum AND we should also make sure, in some way, we
teach ABOUT computers. Computers should be used transparently in
math, social studies, english, etc AND there should be a computer
course offered that talks about website creation, media literacy,
programming, cybersafety, databases, spamming, phishing, and a
variety of other subjects that are not in the domain of math, history
or english teachers. In some of the schools I am working with, they
don't want 'any computer training just integrated curriculum.' Given
the pervasive nature of computers in society, the general student
body should have some brief exposure to core concepts (pardon the
pun). And like art, music, chemistry, and politics, there are some
students who will find this is an area that really lights them up and
it is the school's responsibility to provide that opportunity to this
subset of students. Red Hat could use it considerable creative
talent to make these materials world class.
Another idea I have been pursuing is a road show for schools. I can
talk forever about the value of FOSS software but when people sit
down and use it for 10 minutes their eyes light up. Red Hat might
consider helping with sponsorship of such a road show, both with
hardware purchases but perhaps more importantly with the production
of leave-behind materials.
So how does Red Hat make money in the education space?
-Charge for a RHA-like K12LTSP certification program, partner with
Dell as Jim K. suggests and charge for a K12LTSP turn-key product
that is installed and maintained by your certified technicians -
which ideally would be students in that very high school. If these
kids can earn a money with their certification, they will pay you
$100/yr to keep it current.
-Charge a nominal fee for a cutting edge computer curriculum that
could be taught by a savvy tech coordinator. These material could
have 'sponsored by' logo attribution. Ultimately, schools will not
be huge revenue source but as MS, Apple and VISA knows, getting mind
share in high school pays off in college and as they move into the
work force. If they are only exposed to the Shadowman in college or
as they enter the workforce, it may be too late.
- Design a RHEL licensing program that as more flexibility for
contractors working with schools. I originally paid for RHEL for
some of my school clients but ended up switching to Fedora because I
couldn't make the licensing work for one-off installs. And the money
wasn't the problem! I would have paid more because of the legitimacy
that the RH logo provided.
Once again, this is great that you are asking the question.
Bryant Patten
White Nitro, LLC
Vermont, USA
17 years
Re: Thanks for answering the roll call. And now, a question.
by Steve Hargadon
On 4/17/07, Greg Dekoenigsberg <gdk(a)redhat.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 17 Apr 2007, Steve Hargadon wrote:
>
> >
> > They are also experiencing some difficulties with Ardence. They were
> > bought by Citrix, which is owned by Microsoft. I've been in contact
> > with Mike from fl_TeacherTool, as he has visited a site in Canada that
> > is running thick-client streaming full FLOSS. Seems like this might
> > be a good option for them as well.
>
Sorry. Mike Huffman on the brain.
It's Robert Arkiletian in Canada who is the fl_teachertool guy. Great guy, btw.
Steve
--
Steve Hargadon
steve(a)hargadon.com
www.SteveHargadon.com
916-899-1400
17 years
Re: Thanks for answering the roll call. And now, a question.
by Indranil Das Gupta
Hi,
Just joined the list after reading gdk's mail on the roll-call followup. Adding to what Paul (Nelson) wrote about calling the sales reps directly, that an experience I share as well.
About 3 years back, I was consulting with a client (an University) that wanted to set up a 100 node, multi-media enabled ltsp-based system. This was a brand new setup and hence we didn't have any old h/w laying around for re-deployment. We tried to get Celeron based systems, but none of the MNC vendors were ready to ship systems without HDDs or optical drives. Local brands/vendors/assemblers didn't just didn't have a clue. Even local Intel couldn't help us here in sourcing.
The scenario on the ground hasn't changed much even today... Fedora Core/RHEL/SLES/Ubuntu they all know how to do a regular install... but *LTSP? Forget it... and that from local system integrators doing an annual business over USD 10 million. FWIW, even today in Kolkata/Calcutta, there are only 2 such vendors who know how to setup *LTSP, despite the fact that it mostly-just-works (tm) these days.
The only way we could get LTSP terminal hardware as per our spec (no HDD/CDROM/FDD) together was by buying up 100 old systems (mostly Dell and IBM) that were being imported and sold by local vendors as refurbished systems. IBM xSeries boxes served as the servers. Even after 2.5 years of deployments, the systems are running as stable as ever, with almost zero admin costs. The servers of course had gone from FC3 to FC4 and then to FC6.
cheers
-indra
--
Indranil Das Gupta
Chief Technology Architect
L2C2 Technologies
E-Mail : indradg(a)l2c2.co.in
Phone : +91-98300-20971
WWW : http://www.l2c2.co.in
17 years
Re: Roll Call
by Bryant Patten
On Apr 12, 2007, at 4:12 PM, fedora-education-list-request(a)redhat.com
wrote:
> Who's on this list?
Here
Bryant Patten
White Nitro, LLC
VT, USA
17 years
