nubae's Habari | Linux and Education

So I was pondering these 2 little pieces of relatively similar technologies, wondering if there migh be much use for them in collaborative classrooms of tomorrow. It came to me that since tweeting or denting doesn't just need to be focused on the use of text, there could be countless possibilities. All of them involving human interaction, some even being easy open solutions that would otherwise be expensive and even computationally difficult.

Take the class that is studying Spanish, for example, and they want to know how certain words or sentences sound in different Spanish accents. Well, a twitter group that was linked either countrywide or even globally could then tweet the sentence in his/her accent (expaining where they are from somehow, geo location, tagging or whatever), and then a couple seconds - minutes later a reply via twitaccent.com with a reply from someone somewhere else. Such a simple application, with the advent of wonderful collaborative backbones like mesh networking and scalable solutions like ejabberd would allow for little activities to be made. I could imagine an activtiy like this one being quite the hit on Sugar.

Since I gave an example on how to do audio based twitter examples, how about a picture based one. A Biology class goes out with their laptops or mobile phones or cameras. They are told to take pictures of any edible plants they might find in their surroundings, not forgetting to tag their pictures with the area, altitude, near water or not, and other such items. At the end of the class they compile their data and the kids enter their edu-twitter accounts, or twitter-wiki accounts and this data is then uploaded to groups, where people can use that data or compare to that data in the future. Others can even grade the quality of tha data, or if its a professional botanist, tell them their right or wrong and why.

The strength of both twitter and much more so identi.ca is that they allow following and followers, so groupings of people interested in similar material. It would just take the participation of schools together to implement such little experiments to get great results. Identi.ca's grouping abilities as well as its open source platform base obviously make this the ideal choice. And anyone can go out right now, set up a laconica server and implement an idea like the 2 I've just mentioned in a couple of days, make it a web based app, but it would be much nicer to imagine such particular apps on the XOs and on Sugar in particular.

The last kind of activity I thought about was really a video based one, but then it starts to become far to similar to youtube videos and its ilk. Still, the idea that one could localise video streams that are very small (ie, perfect for sending to blogs, mobile phones etc.) and group them according to followers and following might work for ideas like multi-day events, parties, etc.

So to end with, how about a pic based identi.ca/twitter app that shows sugar deployments/OLPC in action around the world? Wouldn't that be quite simple to get updated. Someone at a particular deployment, even a student, takes pictures of the equipment, the staff, the students, teachers, etc, and groups them by tagging. Just tweets the pic with the tags and it goes into is appropriate groupings, which then everyone can look at. We could get an idea of what is going on in deployments around the world very easily this way in a matter of days (with a little coordination of course...)

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We recently held a olpc / LTSP presentation in Vienna, which had the enormous turnout of 11 people. Though the turnout was pretty bad, it did give us the opportunity to be experimental and check the wonderful world of using sugar on various platforms via LTSP.

We hooked up 2 acers, a thin can (artec), a laptop acting as LTSP and ejabberd server, along with 2 traditional xos. Before going into the details of the experiment some explanation is due. LTSP stands for Linux Terminal Server Project, and refers to the use of a mainframe like infrastructure, where minimal systems without hardrives and little cpu and ram can be used as diskless terminals. The idea is that everything runs from the server, with the client netbooting the environment and using the little ram and cpu it has to load the kernel and connect its display session to the server.

Usually older computers (pentium 200hz+ with 64 MB ram) are re-used in this way, though there are various dedicated thin terminals that are mobile phone sized and are highly energy efficient. LTSP terminals usually have no moving parts, making them hard to break. Whereas the XO, and rightly so, has been marketed as the guerrilla
educational device for the 3rd world, it is a little tied in with a specific company and a specific set of hardware. Sugar on the other hand is not, and in my view the more hardware can run sugar natively and flawlessly, the closer we get to a solution that can really feed the masses. As the politics of OLPC grow and change, such as dropping
sugar support, or moving to windows (these are just speculations), Sugar's growth and deployment should not be affected. If anything gives sugar and Sugar Labs a firm grounding its its ability to run on multiple systems and scenarios. I am aware that Sugar Labs is in communication with various vendors and distributors, and it is only a matter of time before some interesting deals are struck.

In our presentation case, for a mobile server, we used a dual core 1.8ghz with 2 gigs of RAM. Setting up the server on the laptop was pretty straight forward, and involved installing LTSP on top of a base Ubuntu system, and then
adding ejabberd as well as Sugar sessions for all newly created users. One can choose other sessions of course, but our interest was to test collaboration on all the machines, in which case Sugar was our environment of choice, and the login session for all our users. Installing ejabberd on the ltsp server was the only requirement for sharing across all machines. I followed the instructions as layed out on the laptop.org wikipedia and nubae.com site. There are still some issues installing ejabberd, such as permissions of the /etc directory, but it has generally become much simpler to install for anyone. Without ejabberd the machines did see each other via xmpp-local, including seeing shared activities, but they tended to fall of the network neighborhood. With ejabberd the machines were visible continuously and were very responsive to connections.

For testing purposes we tried sharing chat across all the machines, which worked flawlessly. The applications in general seemed to load much faster than with the xo hardware, both on the thin can and the acer ones. It was nice to see that a dual core laptop with 2 gigs of ram was more than happy to serve 6 thin terminals at once. This makes
the perfect mobile school, with all the machinery fitting into one backpack!

The laptop server was set up to get wireless internet, and then hand out LTSP through the wired interface, using a gigabit switch as a connector. One of the things that still requires a lot of work, and perhaps this
is due to using Ubuntu, is getting all the activities to work. I tested various activities like puzzle slider and jigsaw puzzle, which just left the activity icon cursor flashing on the screen and eventually fell back to the main screen. Another problem was that turning off or restarting the session was nonreactive. Also many, of the items in the control panel either crashed sugar out completely (date/time) or didn't work. These problems have recently been turned into bug reports, so we hope by the next release of Ubuntu, the environment works as it should.

LTSP and sugar are a great combination and much wished for in schools in the developing and developed world. We will talk a little more about the advantages of LTSP, Sugar and scaling, as well as wireless LTSP and Fat clients in another article.

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Recently there's been a bit of speculation about how one kid using 2 xo laptops, one being windows xp based, and the other linux based, reacted when using the machines. Although the conclusion of the article was that the kid doesn't care which OS they are using, as long as its unique, novel, and fun, the experiment really missed the mark a bit. The article, found here, http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10074298-56.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20 takes one user and shows the user experience on some very limited uses of the laptops. Reading it, one gets the feeling that the experiment was done without much planning or research.

As has already been pointed out by education specialists, without setting up a learning environment with a group of kids, using collaboration as it was intended, it is not an educational experience, just a computer user experience. Sugar was created specifically for collaboration, allowing users to share the educational computer experience amongst peers and a teacher. In this way they can work together on assignments, get feedback from each other and the teacher, and collaboratively create something unique and wonderful. Sugar is radically different and novel to the way computers have been used until now for education.

An experiment of this kind should have involved children using windows and linux xos to collaborate and create audio, video, documents, and journal/blog the experience. It is not hard to set up something like that, and would bring new methods of teaching one step closer to the general public.

Of course, most people involved in OLPC, Sugar and collaborative teaching already know all this, and its most likely preaching to the choir, but to be effective, this message needs to get across to everyone including parents, students and teachers. They need to realize that there are other methods of learning, methods that will break the rigid boundaries that currently focus usage of computers in the most rudimentary direction.

Computers and the collaborative experience can be so much more, some examples of which might be:

- using an astronomy program collaboratively in the field while actually looking at the skies
- experiments in recording and cataloging nature and really doing scientific field work like the scientists they might one day become.
- making music in groups with each person focusing on a particular part of the song, then remixing, tweaking and re-releasing, like real musicians.
- playing educational games in groups where team building becomes a natural element, just like in online/lan games.
- creating teaching materials that can be distributed and shared across groups, classes and schools, thereby facilitating an easily transferable repository of teaching content.
- online discussions about particular moments in history, sensitive laws, todays culture, and the politics of life, all which encourage interaction and sharing of ideas.
- the uses of sensors to measure the environment, be it measurements, temperature, ph levels, or atmospheric pressure, and recording these.

Not only are all these activities fun, but they are practical real time user experiences that allow children and teachers to trace their educational progress.

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