Edubuntu Summit: Eat your heart out!
From Schoolforge-UK
Day 1 - Friday 1st July 2005
I've just spent all day at the Edubuntu Summit, where Mark Shuttleworth is facilitating a seminar on various aspects of GNU/Linux in schools, including success stories in Norway, Spain and South Africa. The aim is to bring together in a new distribution - Edubuntu - all the different strands of work on Linux in schools. Ubuntu, sponsored by Mark Shuttleworth's company Canonical is a highly successful Linux distribution based on Debian.
Norway is home to Skolelinux, a complete school distribution that includes LTSP, which has now been installed in over 200 schools, including translated versions in other countries such as Germany, Italy, Greece and Africa. Skolelinux was started with funding from Norway's Unix User Group, and is subcontracted by companies that install computers in schools to provide the ongoing software support service for those schools.
Another presenter came from the Spanish region of Andalusia, where the government has mandated that all state schools should use free software. This is being implemented via the Guadalinex project. In 2005-2006, Guadalinex is being installed on 200,000 computers in state schools, plus 366 public Internet access centres, 165 Information centres, 14 homes for the elderly and 156 public libraries.
In neighbouring Estremadura, 60,000 workstations are now running Linex. In these two Spanish states, the PC:pupil ratio is already approaching 1:2.
As you can see, I'm blown away by these numbers! The presenter's slides and presentation notes are already available on the Edubuntu wiki.
The afternoon split into two sessions. I attended the session on legal and privacy issues, which including a discussion on the potential impact of software patents. The Skolelinux team require users to accept the GPL with no modifications, and when asked what assurances it provides, they invite the user to compare the GPL against the alternative proprietary licences. It was also noted that while software patents are of concern to developers, end users cannot be sued for patent infringement.
Quote of the day: "Despite all the research, pedagogy is still a mystery. The only piece of educational technology that we can count on to work all over the world is the school bus".
Day 2 Saturday 2nd July 2005
The numbers didn't stop! On Saturday we had a presentation (in Spanish) about free software in the Spanish region of Valencia, where the local government is encouraging (rather than mandating) adoption of free software. Drawing from the experience of Estremadura and Andalusia, the region created the Lliurex programme ("lliur" means "free" in Valencian). Again the numbers are impressive: aleady 45,000 workstations are running the Llurex distribution, and by the end of 2007 this number will have risen to 100,000. The team behind it comprises 3 developers and 5 teachers.
Quote of the day: "Free software is not a political option, it is a political principle" (Valencia's Minister for Culture, Education and Sport)
tuXlabs is a project sponsored by the Shuttleworth Foundation in Cape Province, South Africa. More numbers: 111 of the poorest schools in the region are now running the tuXlabs distribution. For some schools the phone bill costs more than the average salary, so they only dial up at night when it's free. In one area, a car drives around to download the requested next day's web pages via WiFi.
The great thing about tuXlabs is the social structure developed to support free software in schools. Support is provided first with local help (which may include local volunteers), then help from neighbouring schools, then mailing list help, and as the last resort, help from tuXlabs technical support.
Another session was spent discussing which educational packages should be included in the default Edubuntu distribution, which is planned for release in October this year. While the entire set of Ubuntu repositories will be available to schools with broadband connections, others with little or no telephone connection will rely on the CD or DVD distribution, and the core packages provided are aimed at meeting the basic needs of these schools. In South Africa, for example, tuXlabs are installed from 2 CDs: the first is the current Ubuntu CD, and the second is an add-on (Skubuntu) that installs all the educational software including LTSP
The final session was a discussion on international collaboration: what are we collaborating for - "to produce the best educational distribution in the world" - who is involved, and which tools to use for collaboration.
Day 3 Sunday 3rd July 2005
The final session was spent on a further discussion of the packages to be included in the first Edubuntu distribution, due in October 2005.
The goal of Edubuntu is to build a Debian based educational free software distribution that will provide the base for these and other local regional distributions: SkoleLinux, Guadalinex, Linex, Lliurex, tuXlabs and others in the future. It is also intended that the widely used K12LTSP (currently based on Fedora) will migrate to Edubuntu. The maintainers of each of these systems are collaborating to release the first version of Edubuntu in October 2005. One measure of the success of Edubuntu will be the number of modified versions created to meet local educational needs.
The first version is aimed at supporting the classroom, with succeeding versions providing software such as SchoolTool to support the whole school, and then the school district. Edubuntu will follow Ubuntu's six-monthly release cycle, which means that schools upgrading in the summer holidays will need to go through two upgrade steps.
