Re: [seul-edu] Young Linuxers in school

[Rakis <rakis@wt.net>]

On Mon, 20 Mar 2000, you wrote:
> >From time to time, I have answered the occasional question via email from
> these kids (and others), and I have been to their Friday event (I need to
> visit them again soon).
> 
> Some electronic mentoring would probably be useful.  Perhaps a
> (moderated?) discussion list for interested students and us "old folks" to
> respond to questions.

	From personal experience, I've found people learn at a much faster rate
when they figure things out for themselves. In addition to a moderated group
(which would probably be necessary) I think it would be important for there to
be a group where anyone could respond. Having students answer questions for
their peers has a number of advantages. First, it forces them to remember the
problems they've had in the past. Right here you get the repitition required
for effective learning without the boredom of listening to a teacher repeat
themselves two dozen times. Second, it de-mystifies computers. If all the
messages are answered by "the old gurus", students are more likely to get
frustrated with the thought "I'll never be able to learn all that"  (trust me
on this one, I've been there ;-)  By seeing their peers reply to messages, this
problem diminishes. Third, it allows the students to make mistakes and recover
from them. Many of us in the technicle field forget that running into walls and
having to figure out exactly why something doesn't work is often much more
important than doing it right the first time. Fourth, it fosters the growth of
problem-solving skills. Fifth, by conversing back and forth via an electronic
medium, communication skills are forced to improve. Learning how to accurately
and concicely describe problems and solutions will prove invaluable in the
comming years. Sixth.... well. I think that's enough for now.

> 
> > This may be a good impetus for us to work on developing some of the
> > configuration guides we're planning.  They might make it easier for these
> > students to convince their schools to let them set up Linux systems overtly
> > ("Oh, there's a manual on how to do this?  Well then, go ahead; just follow
> > the instructions.").
> 
> Unoffical student-run linux servers setup on a school network are likely
> (unfortunately) to become a security concern, 

	And rightly so. It is distressingly easy to open up security holes on
unix systems. Any network administrator that fails to realize this should be
fired on the spot.

> especially if the school
> network is on the internet without a firewall (which most are). 

	Ah, but here we see the full glory of Linux. Find an old machine, two
network cards, and a linux boot disk and you have an instant firewall. I set
one of these up at my old high school and sucessfully prevented the network
admins from freaking out. So it isn't as pretty as the $15,000 firewall they
use for some of their other machines, it does everything needed and more to
protect a linux based network.


> Configuration guides: Yes! -- this is definately the sort of thing needed
> (IMHO) to help push linux into education.  As your Freshmeat article
> stated so well, Linux is totally ready for a backroom role as a server at
> the very least.  While there are lots of information around these days on
> how to setup linux or a Samba server, I don't see much of it that is
> written in a way to engage educators.

	What is needed here is a configuration tool that makes this easy.
Configuration of Linux based programs and services does not _have_ to be
difficult. The problem is that we are lacking a unified tool and approach for
configuring *nix systems. I have some ideas on this subject and will be putting
together a (hopefully) thourough proposal to generate some discussion and get
a solid design hammered out. 

	Rakis