blog/draft/2012-05-skolelinux-jose-luis-redrejo-rodriguez.txt

   1 Title: Debian Edu interview: José Luis Redrejo Rodríguez
   2 Tags: english, debian edu, intervju
   3 Date: 2012-06-26 08:00
   4
   5 <p>I've been too busy at home, but finally I found time to wrap up
   6 another interview with the people behind
   7 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>.
   8 This time we get to know José Luis Redrejo Rodríguez, one of our great
   9 helpers from Spain.</p>
  10
  11 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
  12
  13 <p>I'm a father, teacher and engineer who is working for the Education
  14 ministry of the Region of Extremadura (Spain) in the implementation of
  15 ICT in schools</p>
  16
  17 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
  18 project?</strong></p>
  19
  20 <p>At 2006, I verified that both, we in Extremadura and Skolelinux
  21 project, had been working in parallel for some years, doing very
  22 similar things, using very similar tools and with similar targets, so
  23 I decided it was time to join forces as much as possible.</p>
  24
  25 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
  26 Edu?</strong></p>
  27
  28 <p>A community of highly skilled experts working together, with a
  29 really open schema of collaboration and work. I really love the
  30 concepts of Do-ocracy and Merit-ocracy and the way these concepts are
  31 been used everyday inside Debian Edu.</p>
  32
  33 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
  34 Edu?</strong></p>
  35
  36 <p>Sometimes the differences in the implementations, laws or
  37 economical and technical resources in the different countries don't
  38 allow us to agree in the same solution for all of us, and several
  39 approaches are needed, what is a waste of effort. Also, there is a
  40 lack of more man power to be able to follow the fast evolution of the
  41 technologies in school.</p>
  42
  43 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
  44
  45 <p>Debian, of course, and due to my kind of job I am most of my time
  46 between Iceweasel, <a href="http://www.geany.org/">Geany</a> and
  47 <a href="http://www.ohloh.net/p/gnome-terminator">Terminator</a>.</p>
  48
  49 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
  50 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
  51
  52 <p>I think there is not a single strategy because there are very
  53 different scenarios: schools with mixed proprietary and free
  54 environments, schools using only workstations, other schools using
  55 laptops, netbooks, tablets, interactive white-boards, etc.</p>
  56
  57 <p>Also the range of ages of the students is very broad and you can
  58 not use the same solutions for primary schools and secondary or even
  59 universities. So different strategies are needed.</p>
  60
  61 <p>But, looking at these differences, and looking back to the things
  62 we've done and implemented, and the places were we have spent most of
  63 our forces, I think we should focus as much as possible in free
  64 multi-platform environments, using only standards tools, and moving
  65 more and more to Internet or network solutions that could be deployed
  66 using wireless. I think we'll see more and more personal devices in
  67 the schools, devices the students and teachers will take home with
  68 them, so the solutions must be able to be taken at home and continue
  69 working there.</p>