Re: Teacher Package

[Doug Loss <dloss@csrlink.net>]

On Sun, 24 Jan 1999 22:42:18 -0600, Bradley Burnside <bradley@voyager.net> wrote:
>
>     This might be a little outrageous but has anybody thought of creating your own
> Linux distro?  Not from scratch, but similiar to the Linux-Mandrake project.

Take a look at Project Independence (part of the SEUL Project) at:

<http://www.independence.seul.org/>

Their goal is to create an easy-to-use distro for home users.  Once they have that under their belt (and since we're nowhere ready to start this sort of thing), we can consider approaching them for help in creating an education-oriented extended distro.  Note that I've just created a new term, "extended distro," to mean a distro that isn't created from scratch but that takes an existing distro and adds packages to tailor it to specific needs.  If done properly there could be slightly different versions that would allow the base distro to be RedHat, Slackware, SuSE, TurboLinux, or whatevr you like.  Heck, if everyone eventually plays by the LSB you may not even need that.

If this is our eventual goal (and I agree that it is an appealing possibility), we need to identify what should be included in such an extension, and then work on assembling, modifying, and creating the necessary elements.  I think Bruno's work on EDUML is a solid starting point for a middle-level data exchange format that all our programs ought to be able to talk to.  I recommend that all of our gradebooks, lesson planners, quiz programs, etc. should be able to read and write to EDUML, if not as their preferred data format at least as an option.

And let's not forget that there is another aspect of educational software, that of home education.  Frankly, that's what drove me to push for the creation of this project in the first place.  As Barret said, reading programs and the like may not be all that necessary in a scholastic environment.  However, for a home user with young children, they can be quite important.  Developing some of these is something we need to always keep in mind as an eventual necessary project.  Their availability will do a lot to make Linux more appealing to the home user.

Doug Loss            Democracy substitutes election by the
dloss@csrlink.net    incompetent many for appointment by
(717) 326-3987       the corrupt few.
                        George Bernard Shaw