Re: [seul-edu] Young Linuxers - Too hard? No way!

[Karl <jackal@raptor.slc.edu>]

Rakis,

This past friday, at the YHSLUG meeting in Virginia (yhslug.tux.org), we
watched a small presentation, from a sophmore at Yorktown HS, on how to
set up and use KICKSTART to set up workstations and networks, quickly, and
easily. This *is* the K12 arena, and the presentation was designed in
Star Office by the student. This student, as well as his eight+ other
peers and faculty mentors, stayed late, until 9pm on a Friday night, to
work with open source, and share it with others, out of their own
interest.

YHSLUG weilds, as many other HS's, a group of determined linux-using
students who work hard at getting open source into their schools.

The foundation for advocating linux to the US government and Boards of
Ed is paved by these students, and other people like them, involved in
similar groups of action. 

These 'case-studies' alone, (even just 5 or 10 surveys from students
around the US who are involved in setting up the YHSLUG linux-lab, and
others like it) would prove to be invaluable presentation materials in
pushing linux-solutions to other K12 schools. Along with student essays on
how linux has helped their education (etc) their teachers/metnors can
submit results of how open source has enhanced their learning curve, or
taught them to work well with others, taught the research skills, job
skills, etc etc etc.

You are right, Rakis: conceptually, setting up a linux lab is simple.

But I disagree with you that it is 'too hard to set up' a linux lab in
practice.  There are thousands of students and a few special schools doing
it.

This also means that there is a lot of work to be done, at least from my
point of view. It means that those of us who are interested, and have the
time/initiative/energy to help gather these results/case-studies need to
come together, and post our findings, and collections of opinons and
proven case-studies.

I hope that anyone who wants to work together on this, or knows of a group
already working on this education-advocacy-how-to (similar to Doug Loss'
commercial-port-advocacy-how-to), gets in touch with me.



Thanks for your feedback,

  --Karl

raptor.slc.edu/~jackal
NOVALUG
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Sarah Lawrence College '99
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On Tue, 21 Mar 2000, Rakis wrote:

> Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2000 21:36:58 -0600
> From: Rakis <rakis@wt.net>
> Reply-To: seul-edu@seul.org
> To: seul-edu@seul.org
> Subject: Re: [seul-edu] Young Linuxers in school
> 
> 	I've looked at every configuration tool I've been able to find
> including Linuxconf and Webmin. Out of all the tools I've seen, those two (and
> yast) are about the best. The problem is that they still require far too much
> work and knowledge to use.
> 	Conceptually, setting up a lab for a school network is pretty simple.
> You want to use a dynamic IP address, some kind of graphical login, a file
> server for all the home directories, usernames/passwords to be stored on one
> machine, ect. Currently, all this must be configured by hand (or close enough).
> There is no reason why an intelligent configuration tool cannot be created to
> deal with most of the details automatically. As it stands, Linux will not make
> much of an entry into the k12 community. It's just too hard to set up.
> 
> 	Rakis
> 
> On Mon, 20 Mar 2000, you wrote:
> > You might want to take a look at Linuxconf and Webmin if you haven't
> > already.  They are both very powerful configuration tools.  They are
> > both linked off of freshmeat.net.
> > 
> > --------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > Jim Wildman                         Senior Consultant, 3X Corporation
> > jawildman@cfanet.com                jim.wildman@3x.com  www.3x.com
> > http://www.cfanet.com/jawildman     (513)587-3647
> > 
> > On Mon, 20 Mar 2000, Rakis wrote:
> > > 	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
> > >
>