I am just about to go to Oksapmin in the remotest highlands of PNG, where there will never be road access, as nature surrounds it with her finest such as the Strickland Gorge. The only access is a 5 day trek or a single engine plane (landing on a one-way strip sloping with 9000 mountain on one end). People only have access to newspapers several days late, there is no free to air TV, no power, and of course school libraries are non-existent partly because they can never be sustainably stocked with having to be flown in. In a nutshell, a very information poor area.
Thus the school servers are seen as a highlight of the programme. Even before the XOs are being used in class in a properly focused way, the teachers themselves, who are also almost complete beginners with computers, point out the early gains in terms of early-age students learning information literacy skills by searching through the resources on the server. This is a selling point (badly needed as there is such weak support from the education authorities and their donor partners) that is obvious to everyone, i.e. the highly efficient means of enriching the educational with resources. I agree with Sridhar that with the skill sets available in these remote schools, it is simply not an option to train them and support them in Moodle administration and so on, but there are some basic functions that the teachers can use and are very useful, such as the upload facility. I was just training some teachers to prepare worksheets for students (mostly using Write but also Joke Machine and other formats) and upload them to a folder where the students can access it in class. This is so simple and obviously useful, saving time, engaging the students, and allowing teachers to work more on one to one basis, that it makes a great introduction to lesson planning. Not to mention the productivity gains saving time writing and copying from the blackboard, as they have no way to provide paper worksheets regularly. We are also now training teachers to access the OLPC-AU training resources offline, via the server. The excellent XO-Cert Manual can be browsed with all the instructional videos and examples of lesson plans, etc, from a teacher's XO. The mobile network there is only just workable for Internet at 2kbps and the teachers can't afford to view videos online even if possible. So the server makes it possible to provide a self learning resources - which w support with an initial workshop. At a later date w hope some of the teachers can do the guided online XO-Cert and XO-Expert courses, and we will localise them for PNG. Thanks Sridhar, Tracy and team!!! [Note - to do this, we had to figured out how to install offline all the codecs needed for Jukebox to play FLV, etc] So the XS is really a highlight for us. We do use Moodle but only to provide links to the 40GB or so of mainly OERs, which are mainly accessed in html (Schools Wikipedia, UNESCO ASEAN SchoolNet resources, regional organisation resources, Khan Academy videos, PNG teacher curriculum documentation, diverse local stuff, e-books collections). Those are just links to /library folders using aliases, added as resources on the Moodle home page. We then add a couple of folders and set up the system so teacher's XOs can upload and "edit files" and students just browse and download, plus another for students to upload. We don't bother anymore with class segregation because even with a maximum of 250 XOs potentially connecting to the server, the server use is still not very intensive. We just set up the systems, which run on solar power, and give some basic trouble shooting training mainly on rebooting the server and checking the access points are on. The small e-boxes that we use (15W, 1-2GB RAM, with BIOS set to auto power up in case of power outage), seem to be very robust as well as the XS itself. In one school we returned after 18 months to find it all working with the server having run almost continuously 24/7 throughout that time with no problems. The maintenance strategy would be - make it as reliable and simple as possible. If it doesn't work, return it to someone who can fix it, and sorry the "school library" will be closed for a couple of weeks. The only other feature we use is to enable the news and announcements so teachers can discuss things with each other and announce to students. It still needs someone to add new roles for XOs when the teachers are transferred and so on, but it is a great initial compromise. David Leeming Solomon Islands Rural Link P.O.Box 652 Honiara, Solomon Islands +677 7476396 (m) +677 24419 (h) www.rurallink.com.sb -----Original Message----- From: server-devel-boun...@lists.laptop.org [mailto:server-devel-boun...@lists.laptop.org] On Behalf Of Sridhar Dhanapalan Sent: Thursday, 12 April 2012 1:58 p.m. To: Martin Langhoff Cc: George Hunt; XS Devel Subject: Re: [Server-devel] Looking for new low power server hardware candidate On 11 April 2012 22:59, Martin Langhoff <martin.langh...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Wed, Apr 11, 2012 at 5:29 AM, George Hunt <georgejh...@gmail.com> wrote: >> I think it was Sameer who was telling me that in Australia, they are >> thinking about one XS per classroom. In that setting, seems to me that >> XO1.75 (even with only 512MB memory) would be more than adequate. It's just an idea for us. We haven't actioned anything. > One XS per classroom is a _bad_ idea for other reasons. One AP per > classroom is a good idea, OTOH, and an XO-1.75 can probably handle a > mid-sized school OK. Why is it such a bad idea? The thought was to do away with registration, moodle and other unnecessary services and focus only on the XMPP server. Cheers, Sridhar _______________________________________________ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel _______________________________________________ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
