Open Source Schools - one year on

It's getting close to the 1 year anniversary of Open Source School's web presence, and so we'd like to invite you to contribute to a review of our first year and planning for our future.

We'd be very grateful for any feedback you can provide on the development of the community so far: we're particularly interested in your views on

  • things that have been particularly helpful,
  • any stories of how this community has affected your practice in schools - for example,
    • have you tried out new software after something you've read here? If so, how did this go?
    • have any of our materials made it easier to persuade school leadership to consider open source software?
    • has anything on this site encouraged you to contribute to open source projects?

We'd also be very pleased to hear any feedback on the Unconference in July if you joined us for this - what aspects of this did you find helpful? Is this something we should repeat? Should it be organized differently?

Finally, if you have ideas for how the community and the website should move forward in the months ahead, we'd be very pleased to hear them.

Rather than completing a survey, please just provide any feedback you have below, or via the contact form.

 

Tagged:  
Where to start; For a closed source system admin to approach open source, the 'Server' platform is a decision they must make, and live with. There are many choices, where do you start? How about some guidance and information on the various Server platforms available, which schools are using them, the benefits and drawbacks of each flavour, and who can help maintaining them. It's not easy to help schools directly; they operate in a 'closed' environment with their politics, budgets, filtered/proxied broadband and broader regulations, somewhat contra to the open source philosophy.
We use Debian and RedHat. Debian because it is free and we can have a server local to each department. This prevents high bandwidth activity in one department causing unpredictable performance issues in another - the traffic never leaves their wires. The RedHat is there because some on line exam systems have to be on a system RM can support, and RM need a paid-for support service they can outsource. Or at least they did when BECTA forced the decision on us. The differences are not as great as the similarities.
This must be a different Becta in a parallel universe. The usual complaint, which is not wholly justified in my opinion, is that Becta fails to force or mandate anything at all. English state schools have very high levels of autonomy when compared to those almost anywhere else.
aaronsloman's picture
For people who have got linux running it may be worth considering installing Poplog, which is a free, open source, relatively low-footprint system providing three AI programming languages (Pop-11, Common LIsp, Prolog) and a functional language, ML, in a uniform framework (common editor, help system, etc).

There is a lot of introductory teaching material on AI and general programming, including 2-D graphics. Some of the teaching materials make use of specialised libraries, e.g. for natural language processing, vision, logic programming, rule based systems, interacting agents and others.

For samples see http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/poplog/freepoplog.html#teaching Instructions for downloading/installing the latest version are here http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/poplog/latest-poplog/

If it is installed on a local server, then it can be run over the net from a linux machine or from a msWindows PC which has Xming installed and PuTTy or some similar ssh client.

A senior teacher in a south london school is considering using this for teaching and I willing to help others and facilitate collaboration.

This could be a useful alternative to the currently available highly graphical programming tools for learners especially for projects aimed at giving simple programs the ability to think/reason/communicate, play games, learn, etc.

Aaron
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs
School of Computer Science
University of Birmingham

aaronsloman's picture
This morning someone sent me a draft web site on how to get the latest Linux Poplog working on Windows, using andLinux (http://www.andlinux.org/).

I have posted his instructions here:
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/poplog/winpop/andl/

Please send any comments, suggestions for improvement, or successes, to me.
Thanks