Hey Lars, I hope you had fun, some day I hope to go too! It sounds like you will want to go again too. Lars Vogdt wrote:

Hi @ll

Lets start with a first subjective view about FOSDEM 2009:

Friday/Saturday) First time in Brussels, first time at FOSDEM, first Beer Event, ...

...I found my way back to the Hotel around 02:00 or 03:00 in the morning (~2km/~1mile). Thinking about the people been there for the 4th or 5th time and talking about "lost in Brussels" after their first Beer Event, I'm shure they're telling the truth. Thanks to Google and all the other people for the free Beer!

The booth was very crowded (university catacombs are very small :). openSUSE-Education was present with our own Demo-System from HP. (Thanks to HP and Lowry to make this happen!) and even if the current 11.1 graphic driver for the ATI graphics card was not really stable for the hardware (interesting: the pre-installed SLED on this machine runs without problems), we could show many of our Education Applications to interested people.

Afternoon and night are full with interesting talks with teachers, users, and ambassadors of some Education Initiatives.

Sunday) Too early for me ;-) Our "early morning presentation"[1] has ~15-20 attendees, thanks for joining! We've interesting discussions afterwards about the whole Education area - here are some topics (Andrea, please add what I've missed):

1) A global storage solution for "test results" and "instruction tutorials" is missing.

What is meant by "Test Results"? We have 2-3 Student Information Systems with GradeBooks. openSIS is one, so is ClaSS . The need for Tutorials, seems to be about the documentation provided with each program and an understanding of the Pedagogical and Curricular standards\needs of the teachers lessons, how each software program was designed to perform and what it was designed to provide in relation to these. These are the skills of teachers and the softwares programming team, more than technology specialists like us. My years of working in schools have provided some exposure to teachers implementing and integrating software into the classroom but not any specific training in the subject of curriculum integration.

Instruction tutorials (for teachers) about using a software in their lessons should be placed in the wiki. This way, everyone is able to work on it and the license is clear from the beginning. But we really need a solution to extract the information from the wiki and add it to the packages.

For test results and other stuff, we should think about a generic "Education Daemon" running on a server and receiving/sending configuration data for applications and also storing test results. This way, all Edu-Applications could be configured on a central place and the progress of a child could be stored This work is being looked into by us at OS4Ed (http://www.os4ed.com/openintel.php) and our friends at http://www.openzis.org/ The core idea here is that all software for education should provide an API for transferring demographics data from one central store to each program and then being able to centralize the storage of statistical and analytical data generated by the individual

We would need to gather some teachers, set them up with the software, support and the tools to publish their teaching plans as designed around using the software. Then present those plans as the teachers online help in html format. Such as it is done with the help.opensuse.org link on the standard desktop. programs.

I've already talked with Tim and David from Tux4Kids and Bruno from GCompris about this idea. I hope to get this discussed more widely on the edubuntu-devel mailinglist [2] - let's see what we can do.

I would love to have these teams help us put openSIS into a subversion tree and to begin openly developing an API \ SIF agent for those programs and ours which would provide a framework for further work like, http://en.opensuse.org/Education_ERP, that could be the platform for collecting, analyzing and managing classroom data.

2) A simple frontend for administrating and installing many identical clients. Installation is not the problem as we already have tools like AutoYaST. Keeping a configuration in sync is a "ToDo" - but as tools like the YaST2-WebUI and Pupprt shows us, thinks are already work in progress.

3) Finding really useful packages for Education. We still need people telling us which applications are *really* needed for Education. I'm currently fine with using our Education wishlist[3] as starting point - as these packages are requested by users. But we should reduce the number of "duplicated" packages - means: packages with the same goal like tuxtype & ktouch. Think about the "Popularity Contest" of Debian. We should evaluate, if this can also be used/packaged for openSUSE.

4) Focus on endusers: Start with a simple to use internet filter. Enhance this in the future.

5) Where is the Live-CD?

First: we need more Live-CDs. I'm currently thinking about different CDs containing applications for our defined age-groups. But there could/should be more:

* Think about a Live-CD connecting to a server and automatically creating/using a home-directory on this server.

6) Where is Sugar for openSUSE?

7) Using Remote-Applications ?

Having a server in Stockholm and running your application in your local school.

8) Translation is important.

What openSUSE-Education can do is to provide a translation tool for packages (to get a summary and description in the prefered language).

But we even should work together with upstream developers to get the application translated. Think about the openSUSE-Education team as "connector" between developers and endusers. If people want to translate an applications, we should provide the "HowTo" and the conection to upstream developers, so everyone can benefit from the work.

---------------

Status 11.1:

Our current frozen repository contains RC2 since FOSDEM - including all bugfixes for 11.1. If nobody has a blocker until Friday, 2009-02-20, I think we should declare this RC2 as "Goldmaster" and freeze it. (Means: 1.0 will be done for all openSUSE Distributions!)

With kind regards, Lars

[1]: http://en.opensuse.org/FOSDEM2009#Sunday.2C_February_8th [2]: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/edubuntu-devel [3]: http://en.opensuse.org/Wishlist_Education resp. devzilla

-- James Tremblay openSIS Product Specialist http://www.os4ed.com mail james "AT" os4ed.com CNE 3,4,5 MCSE w2k CLE in training Registered Linux user #440182 http://en.opensuse.org/education -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-edu+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-edu+help@opensuse.org