Joel Kahn wrote:
Haven't contacted Shuttleworth/Canonical, but worth doing in case he wants to help fund a pilot :-)Two thoughts: 1. Is Mark Shuttleworth in on this at all? 2. I think I saw a brief mention in someone's posting about grabbing web sites and storing them for use offline. If live Net access is really going to be an expensive pain in these poor rural areas for a while, it might be a good option to copy a suitable hunk of the web and simply let the students do their learning from some slightly old data fed to them off the local server. Updates could be provided at whatever intervals fit with the overall economic realities. After all, do students in this situation absolutely require up-to-the-second info feeds? The students can send email to each other over the LAN, even if they can't email people overseas. If a delayed webversion can be done in a much shorter time, at a tiny fraction of the cost, and with a lot fewerhassles than having it all live, it certainly would seem to be worth considering. Joel
Main goal of teacher I'm working with is to expose the students there to the outside world and vice versa. Latter means some kind of active feed, even if very narrowband and intermittent. Plus, for the older students and adults, some kind of active feed could lead to economic development as well as improvements in education. But you're absolutely right, if it just turns out to be too costly to do a live Internet feed, shipments of CDs/DVDs with updated web content would be a way to go. I actually proposed that the seldom-used Georgia Public Broadcasting satellite service be tasked at night with downloading selected web page updates to rural Georgia schools w/o good Internet connectivity, and 3 years ago they started a pilot. Your note reminds me to check up on that idea and see how it went, but I suspect the usefulness evaporated as the state deployed more and more fiber to each school and provided a Gigabit WAN to all schools.
Daniel -- Daniel Howard President and CEO Georgia Open Source Education Foundation