Edubuntu Ideas, Advocacy, and so forth

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

On Tue, 16 Oct 2007, David Trask wrote:

> I have a bazillion ideas for things that we need to work on for Edubuntu. 
> Not many are programming so much as marketing, advocacy, support and so
> forth.  I'm soliciting ideas from all of you (as an educator/IT support
> person) to bring up for discussion and work at the Ubuntu Developers
> Summit in just over a week (programming ideas welcome as well).  

I think there was a reasonable subset of the attendees in Sevilla who
agreed that what Edubuntu needed was to start focussing on the education
side of things.  A capable desktop is now available from the main ubuntu
project and the addition of LTSP certainly makes for more efficient and
cost-effective maintenance and hardware use.  However Edubuntu lacks
something that you can point teachers to and say "this is why we're using
edubuntu, it's clearly better for education".

With that in mind, I've a few suggestions.

== A Teachers' Platform? ==
While the static content-driven stuff like kde-edu is nice, I don't think
it addresses education on computers as schools would want it.  Every
country has its own language and curriculum and every teacher teaches at
different levels so they really need to be empowered to create their own
content.

I may be totally wrong on this, but a platform which allows the
non-technical teacher to easily put together their notes, quizzes, extra
material, etc. and for which a publisher or country's education authority
can devise content for all students would be very useful.  You might argue
that moodle already does this and you might argue that SCORM is the format.
You may be right, though I'm not sure that many teachers (ordinary
teachers, not technophiles) would really agree.  Moodle may be the display
platform, but it's not the editor for this process.  That means a
non-technical teacher must master use of a SCORM creator and moodle.  The
chances of this are remote.  Here are two SCORM creation tools which I
think could be radically improved upon.
	http://www.reload.ac.uk/ldeditor.html
	http://exelearning.org/

== FOSS Literacy Software ==
This is needed in my 1st World country and I'm pretty sure it must be
relevant in others, not to mention the developing world.  A multi-lingual
Literacy platform which could change its language, look and content to suit
the age-group/location/language of the user would be an awesome
contribution to the planet.

== Computing Tutors ==
Almost no technical computing is taught in a lot of countries until
University level.  If tutor programs were available on the desktop which
keen students could sit down and learn from, that would be really
fantastic.  Years ago, I learnt HTML from this website:
	http://www.case.edu/help/introHTML/toc.html
Many people would consider this a bit primitive now, but it was a really
great tutor and I learnt HTML in a few afternoons using it.


Some of these are pretty lofty requests and maybe some readers will have
fallen off their chair laughing.  I think edubuntu needs to have high
ambitions for education or else we will just spend 6 month periods waiting
for the next new firefox and openoffice versions, new artwork and a better
functioning thin client.  All of those are great, but they're not
interesting to a teacher.  Very few people seem to do computer-based
education well, it's a tough problem in need of a good solution and the
opportunity is there for anyone who can provide that solution.

Apologies for a long email,
Gavin