Title: Debian Edu interview: José Luis Redrejo Rodríguez
Tags: english, debian edu, intervju
Date: 2012-04-15 11:30

<p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>

 José Luis Redrejo Rodríguez 

 * Who are you, and how do you spend your days?

    I'm a father, teacher and engineer who is working for the
Education ministry of the Region of Extremadura (Spain) in the
pimplementation of ICT in schools

 * How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu project?

    At 2006, I verified that both, we in Extremadura and Skolelinux
project, had been working in parallel for some years, doing very
similar things, using very similar tools and with similar targets, so
I decided it was time to join forces as much as possible.

 * What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu?

    A community of highly skilled experts working together, with a
really open schema of collaboration and work. I really love the
concepts of Do-ocracy and Merit-ocracy and the way these concepts are
been used everyday inside Debian Edu.

 * What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu?

    Sometimes the differences in the implementations, laws or
economical and technical resources in the different countries don't
allow us to agree in the same solution for all of us, and several
approaches are needed , what is a waste of effort. Also , there is a
lack of more man power to be able to follow the fast evolution of the
technologies in school.


 * Which free software do you use daily?

    Debian, of course, and due to my kind of job I am most of my time
between Iceweasel, Geany and Terminator.


 * Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to get schools
  to use free software?

    I think there is not a single strategy because there are very
different scenarios:  schools with mixed propietary and free
environments,  schools using only workstations, other schools using
laptops, netbooks, tablets, interactive whiteboards, etc.

    Also the range of ages of the students is very broad and you can
not use the same solutions for primary schools and secondary or even
universities. So different strategies are needed.

    But, looking at these differences, and looking back to the things
we've done and implemented, and the places were we have spent most of
our forces, I think we should focus as much as possible in free
multiplatform environments, using only standards tools,  and moving
more and more to Internet or network solutions that could be deployed
using wireless. I think we'll see more and more personal devices in
the schools, devices the students and teachers will take home with
them, so the solutions must be able to be taken at home and continue
working there.

 * Who should be interviewed with this questions in the future?

    Petter Reinholdtsen, of course. I also think Nigel Barker can give
very interesting points of view, since he's working daily inside the
classroom.