Hello all!

I have a two interests and I would like to make a career out of both of them. First is education. I have just finished a M.A. in Educational Psychology where I studied how learners learn. I am also ramping up my addiction to Open Source. My current goal is to have enough knowledge to be a network/computer admin for a school using Debian based systems. I want to provide ways of using technology that many traditional teachers have not thought of, like an icecast server for morning announcements etc.

How would you bridge the two? I'm not looking for a carer right now. What I want is to extend my roots and network and talk with people who have ideas about education-open source or who are working in this field. Who or what do you know?


My lack of output is due to lack of input. I asked this question on a teachers' forum and got trolled. LQ has the greatest amount of open, unconventional and out-of-the-box thinkers in the 'net. I like to consider myself the same.

Thank you for responding to my post, and the posts before this one.

As I gain knowledge and skills, I hope to repay insight with insight

Mohtech

Hi Mohtech,
I think the whole of idea of using linux and foss in education is a great one. I work in a university and it is an issue I always encounter. My personal experience has been that those who do high-performance computing and computational modelling in science have often completely embraced linux as their platform and become convinced by the utility of open-source. Some, but certainly not all, of the IT people who run departmental servers and so on, are advocates of linux and open-source. However, most students, teaching staff and professors are for various reasons, but primarily force of habit, think that their choices are limited to windows vs mac, and that if they want any good software they have to be prepared to spend large sums of money. People are always reluctant to change, it seems.

In case you hadn't heard about it, there is a project called edubuntu: http://www.edubuntu.org/
It is ubuntu designed for schools. From what I know of it, it is aimed at children's schools, rather than colleges.

-mark

Mark,

Thank you for your reply.

Edubuntu is on my list. I have it installed on my testing server at home and after I read Thomson Linux +, I will start cracking on building a terminal server.

I would love to build a tricked out computer lab. From automating the lights with Mr.House to showing a proof-of-concept robot to the students, children should see everything that they could do with technology. I want them to have the tools to become curious and inspired by the tools at hand.

Freedom is having enough knowledge that you think beyond the tool, and then recreate the world through your mind's eye. Our (USA) schools do not teach that yet.

I think that you are right about sticking to old habits. For the most part, the teachers are old enough to be stuck with the MS vs Windows mentality. Children learn from what they are exposed to.

Writing this post makes me think that it's time to act. I will do a modding class...build your own tricked out computer and install Linux on it. You can do that with (K)Ubuntu, not with Vista. Jr. High and High School students would rave about that!

Mohtech

When you do set up the computers, set them up to make the computers look nice. I have seen linux in school, and compared how linux could look, they are not set up to look good at all. In kde it is possible to remove some eye-candy resources and have it look decent. I have tryed many distributions but KDE alway's looks litterly all grey the first time I used it.

Reply back someday, it would be interesting to know how it went to setup linux computers in schools.

So I was sitting on the can this morning reading Linux Magazine (Feb 2007 issue) when I ran across an article on Edubuntu that made me think of this thread. In addition to the student progs included with the distro, they mentioned some open source software for the educator that I thought might interest you:
http://www.schooltool.org/

Apparently Mark Shuttleworth is the project's sponsor, so they definitely won't go broke.