Ubuntu in Education resources from Canonical

[Jonathan Carter (highvoltage)]

Hi Jack

On 02/09/2010 11:38, Jack ODonnell wrote:
> I see three challenges that we are facing:
> 
> How do you provide content to no/low bandwidth schools?
> Specifically how can we best provide public health content on our
> donated computers?

I've been asked those questions often. As someone who's distributed
off-line content to >200 schools in Internet deprived areas before, I
realise the importance of doing so.

I've been meaning to start work on a new tool for Ubuntu called
Manifest, but over the last release I haven't even had the time to
finish writing the specification[1] for it.

Basically, it would be a tool to populate a hard disk, dvd set or
whichever medium you want with a list of pre-selected content. Manifest
would have an index of a wide repository of distributable content that a
user could select and download somewhere there is plenty of bandwidth,
and then distribute that to areas where there isn't.

In a future Edubuntu version it would also be nice to have a classroom
server selection that would serve all this content automatically in the
right way to the rest of the classroom/school. Manifest could provide
sample web server configuration, dependencies, etc. I like to think of
it as the server equivalent of OLPC from a software perspective :)

It's still very early days, but let me know if you'd be willing to test
it and I could give you a link to it once it's working!

-Jonathan

[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NGO/Specifications/Manifest