[seul-edu] Some ideas re: LinuxCanada2000

["Pete St. Onge" <pete@seul.org>]

Hi All,
     Just a few quick ideas to follow up on yesterday's chat session
with Doug about the upcoming seul-edu appearance at LinuxCanada2000

SEUL-edu has come a long way in the last year and some, and I think it
would be a shame to miss the opportunity to present what you've done.

If I were organizing this (and please don't construe this as an offer :)
I would approach this in two ways, both a general overview talk, and a
booth presence.

OVERVIEW TALK

Goal: 90 minute talk explaining SEUL-EDU, talking about our software,
specific motivations and challenges.

Introduction of speaker
Title
Overview of talk
  Why Linux for education, how can Linux be used in an educational
    context?
  Intro CPAH - 'room to grow' for commercial software houses

Intro Individual projects
  Each project should provide a 5 minute presentation that someone
  can present at the conference. This should contain the 

    - problem statement (why is your project a good idea)
    - brief mention of where and how the software is being used
    - brief overview of the software (how it works, screenshots)
    - 30 seconds: TODO / where is the project going

  I think this is a particularly important step in the presentation,
  because it is SEUL-EDU's best chance to reach potential users and
  especially educators! (Folks can be refered to the booth if they
  want more info about the software)

  Of course, I think that folks attending should present their own
  software at this point :)

Wrap Up
  Overall TODO - where is SEUL-EDU going?
  How to get involved (new projects, help with existing projects)

Panel Discussion
  All attending SEUL-EDU members could then get together and take the
  last 20 minutes of the talk or so for questions from the audience.


BOOTH

Lots of stuff can be done here.

A lot of people have talked about how great Linux should be for
education. Linux isn't about talk or vapourware. It's about real apps,
real solutions. Until they see it for real, few people will bite. Well,
time to show it. 

The goal would be to demonstrate two things at once, namely:

  - existing SEUL-EDU-supported software 
  - how schools can leverage existing hardware via Xterminals

This shouldn't be much work, as everyone has tried the software already,
RIGHT? :)  486's are easy to come by, save for the boot roms for the
nics. The case of the 486 could be left off so that folks could see the
innards, namely the mb, nic, ram, and power supply. The server could be
placed elsewhere, hidden maybe.

I have some numbers for a business case for Xterminals versus new
hardware, and I can provide these for the cause. (Doug: I may write this
up into an advocacy article between now and the conference)

My feeling here is that unless we can actually show how well this can
work, few people will consider using Xterms. Connecting via a hub means
that someone could actually build a couple of extra Xterms at the booth,
and put them online as folks watch.


That's pretty much what I had in mind. Hope it's useful for you.

Cheers,

Pete

P.S.: Sorry, Doug. :)

"Never give a 7-yr.-old a whoopee cushion." -- Doug Loss

-- 
Pete St. Onge
pete@seul.org