Hey Everyone, I am not sure if it is just my bent in life but I would be concerned about giving teachers and administrators too much choice. If they are faced with 2-3 applications that do similar things, how will they choose which application to use. As I look at the ISO project page at http://www.seul.org/edu/iso.html. It looks like that in phase 1 and 2 we try to weed out the applications that are not ready or useful. How are we doing that? Has it been successful in bringing down the number of applications that would be included in the CD? And then what kind of setup do we have to help teachers and administrators choose between the similar applications we do include on the CD? There has to be a way for the teacher to look at two similar applications and know which one has the best possibility of doing what they need it to do. And in response to what Bill said about getting CDs for LinuxWorld. Not to bash a good idea for exposure in a Linux community event but as the Linux in education community we need to be looking at offer CDs and other material to the teachers and educational professionals in their events. How many school IT professionals attend LinuxWorld? How many teachers attend? It is the state, regional, and national teacher and administrator's conferences we need to have our sights on. Those are the venues that will provide exposure for how Linux can be used in education to the people that need to know the most. -Jonathan Hughes Linux In Education Portal http://www.linuxineducation.org On Wed, 2003-03-12 at 09:49, Doug Loss wrote: > I'm going to do a recap of where we are on the various phases of the ISO > project. I'll include in that requests (pleas!) for people to take a > hand in helping move forward on this project. > > Phase 1 > > We've had some nice efforts in reviewing the websites of applications > listed in our Index, but we need more work to be done. As I mentioned > last week, there are some categories that no one's looked at yet, and > some categories that have only had some subset of the applications > examined. I'm working with some teacher friends where I live to have > them do some of these, but we _really_ need more people to do them! > These evals aren't difficult; please take the time to look over some > area of the App Index that you have an interest in and knowledge of, and > give us the benefit of your opinions? > > Phase 2 > > Some of the people who have done Phase 1 evals for us have taken it upon > themselves to install and test the apps they're working on, which means > their results become Phase 2 evals. This is very gratifying. However, > we have a number of apps listed as having passed Phase 1 and waiting for > Phase 2 (http://www.seul.org/edu/Phase1.txt). If you have the > opportunity to install and test some of these that would be a very great > contribution to the effort! I hope to do so with some subset of the > listed apps in the next few weeks and have my teacher friends work with > them, but the more the better. > > Phase 3 > > Darryl Palmer has done us a tremendous favor in beginning to package > some of the apps that have passed Phase 2 > (http://www.seul.org/edu/Phase2.txt). I'd like to see more people work > on this aspect of the project, but not to the neglect of the first two > phases. Darryl, if others step forward to help with the packaging, > would you be willing to coordinate the efforts? > > Phase 4 > > We haven't actually done anything about Phase 4 yet, but I think it's > about time we discussed how we want to proceed with it. I've been > pushing this project in a couple of directions which we should probably > examine to see if those are the proper ways to go. First, I've been > saying we need to package everything as DEBs, RPMs, and TGZs, so as to > be as widely applicable as possible. That was also so distro > manufacturers could take our work and bundle it with versions of their > distros to make education-oriented versions. Since there already was a > DebianEdu, I thought we should join with them to make the DEB package > for each app the reference package and develop the RPM and TGZ packages > from that. This brings up a few questions. > > First, are the two plans for our ISO (to create an easily installable > compendium of educational software for end users to download, and to > have that compendium easily bundlable with standard distros) actually > compatible? If they are, will the effort to do both add more work to > the project than we can reasonably expect to accomplish? > > Second, if we are working through DebianEdu to develop the DEB versions > of our apps, does it make sense for us to put the DEBs on our ISO? > After all, they'll be part of Debian and should be installable over the > internet using standard Debian tools and methods, right? > > Third, what sort of installation wrapper application should we use? > There are numerous programs that we might use: > > http://freshmeat.net/browse/147/?topic_id=147 > http://freshmeat.net/browse/865/?topic_id=865 > > along with some that don't show up on these lists like Synaptic. I have > been pushing Synaptic, but if we don't include the DEBs much of the > benefit of Synaptic over other methods goes away. Also, there are > programs like Autopackage that try to provide a distro-neutral packaging > system--should we think about using something like this and foregoing > the idea of having our work easily bundlable with existing distros? > > Fourth, how should we organize our software for installation? By > category, as in the existing App Index? By age appropriateness? By > utility and fit to various national curriculums? By some combination of > all those ideas and/or more? > > Phase 5 > > We don't have to worry about this yet, given all the work that remains > on the first 4 phases. I'm sure you all find that to be a relief! > > I'd like to get some committments from people here to do some of the > Phase 1 and 2 evals. I'd also like to have some people step up and help > Darryl with Phase 3 packaging. And right now I'd like to get some good > discussion on the questions I've posed under the Phase 4 section of this > (overly long) message. -- Jonathan Hughes <declaretruth@yahoo.com> Message digitally signed for security. Signature.asc is the digital signature. Use PGP software to prove the authenticity of this message.
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