Ubuntu Open Week - Edubuntu - Wed, Nov 29, 2006

05:05   ogra    soo ... Edubuntu !
05:05   ogra    i'll give a short 10-15min intro and will be available for questions then ...
05:06   ogra    Edubuntu is an ancient african word for "bring that free software education to the people" ....
05:06   ogra    n just kidding ...
05:06   ogra    *no even
05:06   ogra    edubuntu is an ubuntu derivative focusing on educational needs
05:07   ogra    first specced out at the UBZ conference in sydney
05:07   ogra    (by the founder of k12ltsp and the ltsp upstream guys)
05:08   ogra    shortly after that spec was written canonical held an edubuntu summit in london
05:08   ogra    with a buch of educators attending and speccing out the needs of a first edubuntu release
05:09   ogra    there was an initial roadmap we wanted to implement ->
05:09   ogra    1.) conquer the single classroom
05:10   ogra    2.) be able to be run in a complete school environment
05:10   ogra    3.) also be sized for municipalities
05:10   ogra    the first edubuntu release was mostly build by me alone ...
05:11   ogra    since i'm no educator the app selection only reflects what i could get as input from the educators attending the edubuntu conf as well as looking at other distros
05:12   ogra    additionally we never cared which desktop an app belongs to, we try to select the best item for one task and dont care about the desktop environment ...
05:13   ogra    ... which always turned out to be a challenge with the limited CD size we have ....

are the K12LTSP folks working on Edubuntu now or are they still working on K12LTSP?

• eric harrison (funder of k12 is going on to develop k12 but helps out where he can (we are his fallback additionally many devs from the k12 community started working for edubuntu

there are several program frequently used in Engineering Studyies, like Opnet, Autocad, PSpice... is there any alternatives available y ubuntu OS ??

• there are things like qcad etc but indeed not all of them will direclyt work with files of any proprietary solution ...

are there anyways we can help push edubuntu into schools when we don't have kids?

• edubuntu isnt only focused on school usage. there are many libraries and even internet cafes that use it. since the focus was on the single classroom use and edubuntu is also the platform that integrates the new ltsp implementation at the highest possible degree, people tend to use it in other areas as well. with the feisty release some major things will change in edubuntu. we will have another educators conference to spot more and probably better apps for the new release. we'll be able to ship way more apps since we'll be able to have a second CD now and we'll go for network authentication in feisty, which means we can easily grow to school level

What is the age bracket that edubuntu was designed for?

• we decided that for the beginning we'd start with the lower grades and grow over time. the status edubuntu is now i would say its for students from 6-15 years ... but its planned to provide good enough app selections for universities from feisty on

I'm presenting a paper on using Edubuntu at a technology in teacher education conference. The focus is on providing access (and thus social justice) to provide access to teachers and students -- what message(s) would you like to see shared with teacher educators who are potential future users of Edubuntu?

• most important for the current edubuntu team is to get as much feedback as possible on teaching methods and preferred apps at the moment finding the drawbacks in our app selection and improving it ... we also need as much help as we can get on documentation and teaching content ...

[apral] Where does edubuntu stand now in education circles marketwise?

• well, if you look at google trends edubuntu seems to be quite visible to the community. http://www.google.com/trends?q=edubuntu%2C+k12ltsp%2C+skolelinux. but the others are established way longer than edubuntu, so its still some way to go here ... edubuntu has a great acceptance in southamerica (brazil specifically), africa and asia, its not used as much in Europe or the us

Will Ubuntu find a place in enterprise segment

• even though thats an edubuntu session, edubuntu will be the first to completely implement network authentication with single sign on etc as a base for enterprise usage .... ubuntu will be able to pull the good parts from edubuntu

one of the things that this particular teacher education conference is highly interested in are iLife-like tools for digital storytelling like projects. Development of a "suite" of tools along these lines would be helpful.

• we'll see what we can find in that area, thanks for that comment in june this year RichEd joined the edubuntu team and took over the role of the educational programme manager ... he will care for the non technical parts and for more integration with educator needs

There will be an additional cd (2X) shipped via ShipIt, beginning with fiesty ?

• it most likely wont be available via shipit ... but it will have the biggest set of additional apps and language packages we can fit on it ... i hope people will be able to at least buy it through the known channels ... so people with low bandwith will have all they need without being forced to have a network connection

I think you misunderstood maccabeus' question. You answered about what teachers should tell edubuntu instead of what edubuntu advocates should be telling the teachers.

• well, edubuntu advocates should tell the truth, edubuntu is perfect for single classroom use in an environment for younger students, the installation of additional educational apps is very easy, but we rely on feedback ...

  we want to grow into the university and need input for that ... also the documentation side of things could be better ... https://wiki.ubuntu.com/EdubuntuSchoolAdvocacy should give you something in your hand

<devilsadvocate> would'nt high schools be a better place to go to compared to universities?

• in fact we'll target both since they only differ in the teaching software selection. for sure we'll go for highschools first try to grow into the uni market over time

<leetcharmer> Can you add or do you know of any software that would aid in science/math related courses -- such as Physics? I need a method to write down the formulas quickly for notes, and studying.

• we have a MOTU team led by Jordan Mantha that is jst assembling a list of scientific apps for us to include in feisty thats for the university side of things ...

<brian_> Is there (and what is it) a framework for developing Edubuntu apps?

• there is no specific framework, all edubuntu developent is done inside of ubuntu. we're a part of ubuntu and depend on its development, edubuntu itself is just added value packages, different artwork and deep integration of things like LTSP (added value like teaching tools)

<jjtec1> How big is Jordan's team and is there room for help ?

• indeed there is always room for help. we're actively looking for volunteers in development, documentation and education

<brian_> is there a Look-and-Feel standard for Edubuntu?

• sadly no, we tried to establish an artteam for edgy, but that ended up to be a single person. i'm hoping there willbe more in that area for feisty.

<plagerism> Currently my school is looking to migrate to another Distrobution with some sort of Distributed Filesystem( to allow root access to an individual fs per Student). The reason being is that *nix is the class. Is there any software packages that would allow this, and if so Would Edubuntu Support it??

• not out of the box yet .... edubuntu will have a netbooted-diskless-workstation mode i ltsp for feisty though ... with some easy tweaks you can make it use things like AFS or GFS

<devilsadvocate> can anyone tell me if edubuntu is gnome-based?

• the default desktop is gnome, but we ship all KDE libs and a lot of KDE software as well. we try not to think in terms of desktop environments in edubuntu even the desktop is gnome because of the wider support it gets from the canonical side.

<brian_> I've got 2 daughters in H.S. Algebra right now and I see a lot that can be done with an algebra app, but I'd like to have some infrasture code that would allow the user to drag symbols and numbers around

• all i can say is: point me to an open source app that supports this and we'll try to include it in edubuntu, i'm not aware of any drag/drop algebra app yet

<devilsadvocate> I've just seen the advocacy page and it seems most of the apps that give edubuntu the specialization are either DE neutral or are KDE apps - why ship with gnome and then depend on kde apps? I've noticed that things like proxy settings and similar environment variables can get messy in such a situation. Why not just ship with KDE and have a more coherent interface?

• thats simply because the dektop team and support for gnome is bigger in ubuntu and edubuntu simply relies on the base desktop ... implementations of new stuff should be desktop independent. i.e. the newly implemented ltsp manager will have gtk as well as qt frontends

<jjtec1> So in fiesty, the aim of the first CD is still 6-15 year olds?

• thats a good question we'll have to discuss with out educational manager during the development process, there is no final decision about any apps yet but likely it will add support for the older students as well

<brian_> That brings me back to my infrastructure question, education applications all need similair capabilities, wouldn't it be nice to have a toolkit around that we all could use?

• totally, but nobody stepped up to do such an effort yet ... edubuntu would majorly benefit from it ... especially if it would be desktop independent like freedesktop org implements things. so i see there are no more questions ... i'd like to point everyone intrested in edubuntu and its development to the #edubuntu irc channel and the edubuntu-devel and edubuntu-users mailing lists

  [SimonAnibal] (both #ubuntu-education and the ubuntu-education mailing list)

<davmor2> How much compatiblity is their between edubuntu and proprietary solutions

• well, there is as much as the proprietary solutions allow us its them that set the limit

<brian_> Desktop independence, is that really a goal? If so why? You are your own distro, you can declare your own standard.

• well, indeed we can do that, but if you want to deeply integrate things like user management changes etc its helpful to have a big team in your back. edubuntus desktop is standing on the sholders of giants like dholbach and seb128

<devilsadvocate> A mjor problem with selling edubuntu to a school is that the core use of computers is in teching programming languages - specifically Basic, C, in that age group. Is there anything that will help the transition from the windows environment to linux? Read as IDEs, compilers like QBasic. Also, are there attempts at making apps to familiarize young children with the linux environment itself?

• there are a bunch of programming enviroments and IDEs in edubuntu you can easily install via add/remove and indeed we have all freely avalilable compilers you can imagine ...

<gumpa> are support contracts available for edubuntu?

• indeed they are, go and buy them

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