[opensuse-edu] willing to beta test
Greetings, My name is Jason Grizzle, and I'm an instructional technology specialist with Jackson County Schools in Georgia (USA). I'm excited about the educational focus for open suse. As a system, we're looking to migrate to SLED in (probably) 2-3 years for our Windows machines. My job function is tech. integration and teacher training, and I'm very interested in beta testing or developing documentation for you. I'm not a programmer, but I can develop web training, documents, and video tutorials. Please let me know how I can help you in your endeavors. Jason Jason Grizzle Instructional Technology West Jackson Middle School 400 Gumsprings Church Rd. Jefferson, GA 30549 (mobile) 706-410-5950 (fax) 706-824-1969 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-edu+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-edu+help@opensuse.org
On Wed, 2007-06-27 at 00:51 -0400, Jason Grizzle wrote:
Greetings,
My name is Jason Grizzle, and I'm an instructional technology specialist with Jackson County Schools in Georgia (USA). I'm excited about the educational focus for open suse. As a system, we're looking to migrate to SLED in (probably) 2-3 years for our Windows machines. My job function is tech. integration and teacher training, and I'm very interested in beta testing or developing documentation for you. I'm not a programmer, but I can develop web training, documents, and video tutorials.
Please let me know how I can help you in your endeavors. Jason
Jason, we are pleased to have you join us. :) welcome to the group. Our current task list is at http://en.opensuse.org/Education_-_To_do , what we would most like is for people like yourself to go through the list here http://en.opensuse.org/Education_Desktop_Applications and generate a description or "About" page like this http://en.opensuse.org/Scribus and "How To" pages with openSUSE specific installation instructions like this http://en.opensuse.org/Installing_MOODLE . I will be available here and in the IRC chat room #opensuse-edu. what you will need to get started is an openSUSE log-in account from here http://en.opensuse.org/How_to_Participate This project is truly driven by what Teachers and technologist ask for, so if you have friends and colleagues using Linux and any of the software we have listed or specialized applications to get the job done, have them do a write up too. -- James Tremblay Director of Technology Newmarket School District Newmarket,NH http://en.opensuse.org/Education "let's make a difference" -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-edu+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-edu+help@opensuse.org
On Tuesday 26 June 2007 23:51, Jason Grizzle wrote:
Greetings,
My name is Jason Grizzle, and I'm an instructional technology specialist with Jackson County Schools in Georgia (USA). I'm excited about the educational focus for open suse. As a system, we're looking to migrate to SLED in (probably) 2-3 years for our Windows machines. My job function is tech. integration and teacher training, and I'm very interested in beta testing or developing documentation for you. I'm not a programmer, but I can develop web training, documents, and video tutorials.
Please let me know how I can help you in your endeavors. Jason
Jason Grizzle Instructional Technology West Jackson Middle School 400 Gumsprings Church Rd. Jefferson, GA 30549 (mobile) 706-410-5950 (fax) 706-824-1969
-- Rod Donovan Systems Support Specialist II Texas A&M University Corpus Christi College of Education Early Childhood Development Center 361-825-3080 rodney.donovan@tamucc.edu -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-edu+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-edu+help@opensuse.org
Hello Jason I work at a university, while also trying to finish up my PhD. My research for this summer is to do a thin client using openSuSE. It has been a real education just working with the GNU/Linux, SuSE, and the openSuSE communities, not to mention open source software (OSS). I too am waiting for the education software to debut with 10.3 cuz my dissertation for the fall is doing a virtual school district using only OSS. That is going to be a blast! For Programmers! One thing that limits OSS is the use of tar.gz. Many are made in general and you have to use configure and make. This is when you find out that you also need to load other libraries, or your distro is not putting files where the downloaded software can find them. I think we need to migrate to distro RPM's. It would surely take the headache out of using this software. Rod Donovan Systems Support Specialist II Texas A&M University Corpus Christi College of Education Early Childhood Development Center 361-825-3080 rodney.donovan@tamucc.edu On Tuesday 26 June 2007 23:51, Jason Grizzle wrote:
Greetings,
My name is Jason Grizzle, and I'm an instructional technology specialist with Jackson County Schools in Georgia (USA). I'm excited about the educational focus for open suse. As a system, we're looking to migrate to SLED in (probably) 2-3 years for our Windows machines. My job function is tech. integration and teacher training, and I'm very interested in beta testing or developing documentation for you. I'm not a programmer, but I can develop web training, documents, and video tutorials.
Please let me know how I can help you in your endeavors. Jason
Jason Grizzle Instructional Technology West Jackson Middle School 400 Gumsprings Church Rd. Jefferson, GA 30549 (mobile) 706-410-5950 (fax) 706-824-1969
-- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-edu+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-edu+help@opensuse.org
Rodney and All, Having spent some twelve years with OSS in general and Linux in particular, your limitation due to tar.gz is well understood. Further, in a previous life I worked for a firm called WICAT in Utah. They started out as a think tank for educators to investigate how computers could help people learn (you might now realize how many years ago that was). They then blossomed into a for-profit company that sold computers, networks, and curriculum to schools. I started a Linux Users Group of Xerox (LUGX) ten years ago and this merry band has loaded and re-loaded countless versions of countless distros. It is not surprising that many users of Linux have found themselves in RPM hell and apt-get prison from time to time. There are several robust tools that would be a Godsend for Linux users all over the place. My opinion largely circles around using Linux as sadly, I am not a programmer (yet). I use SuSE at home and Ubuntu as well. I have a Fedora Core 6 box at work and a pure Debian server for some tools I need. So, I have had to update RPMs and .DEB files as well and I feel I am pretty conversant with each. There does not seem to be a free lunch in this arena either. But, I digress. Package Management is a challenge that has roots it the earliest programs. Yum and apt-get are phenomenally better now than in previous years but they are still not perfect. Here is what I have seen that might make Linux (any type) a lot easier to maintain. There seems to be an absolute lack of hardware discovery/rediscovery tools that are available after a Linux installation. There are a proliferation of tool used during install to find and configure all kinds of hardware, but little that one could use when they replaced a video card for example. The distros that strive to keep their disk set down to one CD are frequently guilty of "dropping things off the back of the cart" to keep it under 700MB. Some have mitigated this risk by making net install ISOs to allow the base to be loaded locally, and then point to the giant repository for the other gigabytes of code. The YUM or apt-get models may be just the thing for educational institutions as it might allow schools by state or district to have an "approved" image from which to install. Then, program upgrades can be done in a controlled and incremental manner at the pace the organization can handle. I have been preaching the OSS gospel here at Xerox for a long time now and we are making progress. The last bastion for proprietary software is in the Production Service Group where Solaris is still used. Believe it or not, the ./configure and make model is designed to let users build exactly the program they need for their application. Unfortunately, the application needs to be in a very specific state before the code can be made whole. It is chicken and egg all the way. Good Luck to all you that are trying to move schools and universities into the free zone of Open Source. School monies are better spent elsewhere when the operating systems and apps are free. Regards, Ralph Rodney Donovan wrote:
Hello Jason
I work at a university, while also trying to finish up my PhD. Myresearch for this summer is to do a thin client using openSuSE. It has been a real education just working with the GNU/Linux, SuSE, and the openSuSE communities, not to mention open source software (OSS). I too am waiting for the education software to debut with 10.3 cuz my dissertation for the fall is doing a virtual school district using only OSS. That is going to be a blast!
For Programmers!
One thing that limits OSS is the use of tar.gz. Many are made in generaland you have to use configure and make. This is when you find out that you also need to load other libraries, or your distro is not putting files where the downloaded software can find them. I think we need to migrate to distro RPM's. It would surely take the headache out of using this software.
Rod Donovan Systems Support Specialist II Texas A&M University Corpus Christi College of Education Early Childhood Development Center 361-825-3080 rodney.donovan@tamucc.edu
On Tuesday 26 June 2007 23:51, Jason Grizzle wrote:
Greetings,
My name is Jason Grizzle, and I'm an instructional technology specialist with Jackson County Schools in Georgia (USA). I'm excited about the educational focus for open suse. As a system, we're looking to migrate to SLED in (probably) 2-3 years for our Windows machines. My job function is tech. integration and teacher training, and I'm very interested in beta testing or developing documentation for you. I'm not a programmer, but I can develop web training, documents, and video tutorials.
Please let me know how I can help you in your endeavors. Jason
Jason Grizzle Instructional Technology West Jackson Middle School 400 Gumsprings Church Rd. Jefferson, GA 30549 (mobile) 706-410-5950 (fax) 706-824-1969
-- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-edu+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-edu+help@opensuse.org
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Jason Grizzle wrote:
Greetings,
My name is Jason Grizzle, and I'm an instructional technology specialist with Jackson County Schools in Georgia (USA). I'm excited about the educational focus for open suse. As a system, we're looking to migrate to SLED in (probably) 2-3 years for our Windows machines. My job function is tech. integration and teacher training, and I'm very interested in beta testing or developing documentation for you. I'm not a programmer, but I can develop web training, documents, and video tutorials.
I'm a Debian Developer, so am somewhat biased, but given that you're 2 or 3 years away from a decision you should at least look at the progress of DebianEdu and Edubuntu (the first being the Debian Educational effort, and the second being the Ubuntu one). http://wiki.debian.org/?DebianEdu http://www.edubuntu.org/ One point that has been raised on this list recently is that Ubuntu has integrated LTSP[1] (the Linux Terminal Server Project) and become the upstream developer of LTSP, whereas there is some question of support for LTSP in SUSE. Having said that, I would be seriously surprised if there was any real difficulty in making LTSP work on future SUSE distros -- it's just that it will require some more effort than just installing SUSE. On the other hand, the way that Ubuntu is now developing LTSP is drawing some criticism, as they've been adding functionality that is considered surplus to requirements by some, at the expense of making boot times slower, and hardware requirements somewhat higher. Cheers, Phil. [1] LTSP is a thin client solution for Linux, that allows you to boot old machines as screens, with the bulk of the software running on central servers, so that the machines that you were probably planing to throw away in 3 years could be reused, and the hardware budget saved to spend on a few central servers, resulting in lower costs, better performance, and less admin effort to maintain. http://www.ltsp.org/ -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFGtu5FYgOKS92bmRARAlVwAJ9YrHqwYRaA0ANqCpIXUvxRZ2TbUgCfT25G TBToUmN9gJGjNvhzt0O95DY= =mGv0 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-edu+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-edu+help@opensuse.org
On Mon, 2007-08-06 at 10:47 +0100, Philip Hands wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
Jason Grizzle wrote:
Greetings,
My name is Jason Grizzle, and I'm an instructional technology specialist with Jackson County Schools in Georgia (USA). I'm excited about the educational focus for open suse. As a system, we're looking to migrate to SLED in (probably) 2-3 years for our Windows machines. My job function is tech. integration and teacher training, and I'm very interested in beta testing or developing documentation for you. I'm not a programmer, but I can develop web training, documents, and video tutorials.
I'm a Debian Developer, so am somewhat biased, but given that you're 2 or 3 years away from a decision you should at least look at the progress of DebianEdu and Edubuntu (the first being the Debian Educational effort, and the second being the Ubuntu one).
http://wiki.debian.org/?DebianEdu
One point that has been raised on this list recently is that Ubuntu has integrated LTSP[1] (the Linux Terminal Server Project) and become the upstream developer of LTSP, whereas there is some question of support for LTSP in SUSE.
Having said that, I would be seriously surprised if there was any real difficulty in making LTSP work on future SUSE distros -- it's just that it will require some more effort than just installing SUSE.
On the other hand, the way that Ubuntu is now developing LTSP is drawing some criticism, as they've been adding functionality that is considered surplus to requirements by some, at the expense of making boot times slower, and hardware requirements somewhat higher.
Cheers, Phil.
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. p.s. Trolling is "off topic" -- James Tremblay Director of Technology Newmarket School District Newmarket,NH http://en.opensuse.org/Education "let's make a difference" -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-edu+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-edu+help@opensuse.org
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=98q... 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
participants (6)
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Ian Lynch -
James Tremblay -
Jason Grizzle -
Philip Hands -
Ralph H. Stoos Jr. -
Rodney Donovan