On Mon, 2007-08-06 at 06:13 -0400, James Tremblay wrote:
Phil, by all means feel free to help make the worlds best distro contain the worlds best version of LTSP , join us on IRC at #opensuse-kiwi.
Edubuntu has nothing to offer Education customers beyond LTSP . I don't see any reason for someone to consider it as a viable "vertical" solution to the education market.
I'd say a vertical solution for education would comprise of the curriculum learning content and associated qualifications as well as the technology providing the delivery. In that sense no distro provides a viable vertical solution for education - yet. Indeed its arguable that Windows only achieves this in a very fragmented way. Take a look at http://moodle.theingots.org/course/view.php?id=4&edit=on&sesskey=98qPvAtIiF This supports accreditation with government recognised qualifications. Ok, its still a work in progress but in essence we need support for teachers to do their jobs and to get the students qualified. Hopefully if I seed a core of such courses in Moodle teachers can take the work and improve it in open source style. This way we have community support from infrastructure to getting qualified that makes maximum use of open source freedom principles but also supports a financially sustainable business model. Of course any distro can contribute to Moodle resources to support learning. However, to get a "vertical" educational solution requires coherence for learning progression, not a lot of unconnected learning activities in different bits of software or isolated lessons. I approached Novel about this and got nowhere, I approached Mark Shuttleworth, and we now have a funded project in South Africa as well as my own work here in the UK and two Europe wide projects in planning. So I'd have to say in terms of understanding education needs rather than technological push, Ubuntu seems better placed. Ok, perhaps one personal anecdote from my point of view and in any case what I'm doing is really distro neutral in that the qualifications can be achieved with any technology.Point is that the guy at the top of Canonical is committed to education to the extent of committing his time to find out what is needed and money to investment in sustainable learning resources that lead to recognised school friendly qualifications. I don't have any evidence that Suse, Redhat or Mandriva have any real idea about learning needs. (I used to use Suse and Mandriva myself). Linspire were the only other ones to respond positively. Mind I also had negative support from the OpenOffice.org community manager after putting time into that project as education lead and indeed some money, so there is no accounting for politics :-) Ian -- New QCA Accredited IT Qualifications www.theINGOTs.org You have received this email from the following company: The Learning Machine Limited, Reg Office, 36 Ashby Road, Tamworth, Staffordshire, B79 8AQ. Reg No: 05560797, Registered in England and Wales. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-edu+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-edu+help@opensuse.org