The Debian Edu / Skolelinux
project consist of both newcomers and old timers, and this time I
was able to get an interview with a newcomer in the project who showed
up on the IRC channel a few weeks ago to let us know about his
successful installation of Debian Edu Wheezy in his School. Say hello
to Dominik
George.
Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
I am a 23 year-old student from Germany who has spent half of his
life with open source. In "real life", I am, as already mentioned, a
student in the fields of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering,
Information Technologies and Anglistics. Due to my (only partially
voluntary) huge engagement in the open source world, these things are
a bit vacant right now however.
I also have been working as a project teacher at a Gymasnium
(public school) for various years now. I took up that work some time
around 2005 when still attending that school myself and have continued
it until today. I also had been running the (kind of very advanced)
network of that school together with a team of very interested and
talented students in the age of 11 to 15 years, who took the chance to
learn a lot about open source and networking before I left the school
to help building another school's informational education concept from
scratch.
That said, one might see me as a kind of "glue" between school kids
and the elderly of teachers as well as between the open source
ecosystem and the (even more complex) educational ecosystem.
When I am not busy with open source or education, I like Geocaching
and cycling.
How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
project?
I think that happened some time around 2009 when I first attended
FrOSCon and visited the project
booth. I think I wasn't too interested back then because I used to
have an attitude of disliking software that does too much stuff on its
own. Maybe I was too inexperienced to realise the upsides of an
"out-of-the-box" solution ;).
The first time I actively talked to Skolelinux people was at
OpenRheinRuhr 2011 when the
BiscuIT project, a home-grewn software used by my school for various
really cool things from timetables and class contact lists to lunch
ordering, student ID card printing and project elections first got to
a stage where it could have been published. I asked the Skolelinux
guys running the booth if the project were interested in it and gave a
small demonstration, but there wasn't any real feedback and the guys
seemed rather uninterested.
After I left the school where I developed the software, it got
mostly lost, but I am now reimplementing it for my new school. I have
reusability and compatibility in mind, and I hop there will be a new
basis for contributing it to the Skolelinux project ;)!
What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
Edu?
The most important advantage seems to be that it "just
works". After overcoming some minor (but still very annoying) glitches
in the installer, I got a fully functional, working school network,
without the month-long hassle I experienced when setting all that up
from scratch in earlier years. And above that, it rocked - I didn't
have any real hardware at hand, because the school was just founded
and has no money whatsoever, so I installed a combined server (main
server, terminal services and workstation) in a VM on my personal
notebook, bridging the LTSP network interface to the ethernet port,
and then PXE-booted the Windows notebooks that were lying around from
it. I could use 8 clients without any performance issues, by using a
tiny little VM on a tiny little notebook. I think that's enough to say
that it rocks!
Secondly, there are marketing reasons. Life's bad, and so no
politician will ever permit a setup described as "Debian, an universal
operating system, with some really cool educational tools" while they
will be jsut fine with "Skolelinux, a single-purpose solution for your
school network", even if both turn out to be the very same thing (yes,
this is unfair towards the Skolelinux project, and must not be taken
too seriously - you get the idea, anyway).
What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
Edu?
I have not been involved with Skolelinux long enough to really
answer this question in a fair way. Thus, please allow me to put it in
other words: "What do you expect from Skolelinux to keep liking it?" I
can list a few points about that:
- always strive to get all things integrated into Debian upstream
- be open to discussion about changes and the like, even with newcomers
- be helpful at being helpful ;)
I'm really sorry I cannot say much more about that :(!
Which free software do you use daily?
First of all, all software I use is free and open. I have abandoned
all non-free software (except for firmware on my darned phone) this
year.
I run Debian GNU/Linux on all PC systems I use. On that, I mostly
run text tools. I use
mksh as shell,
jupp as very advanced
text editor (I even got the developer to help me write a script/macro
based full-featured student management software with the two),
mcabber for XMPP and
irssi for IRC. For that overly
coloured world called the WWW, I use
Iceweasel
(Firefox). Oh, and mutt for
e-mail.
However, while I am personally aware of the fact that text tools
are more efficient and powerful than anything else, I also use (or at
least operate) some tools that are suitable to bring open source to
kids. One of these things is Jappix,
which I already introduced to some kids even before they got aware of
Facebook, making them see for themselves that they do not need
Facebook now ;).
Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?
Well, that's a two-sided thing. One side is what I believe, and one
side is what I have experienced.
I believe that the right strategy is showing them the benefits. But
that won't work out as long as the acceptance of free alternatives
grows globally. What I mean is that if all the kids are almost forced
to use Windows, Facebook, Skype, you name it at home, they will not
see why they would want to use alternatives at school. I have seen
students take seat in front of a fully-functional, modern Debian
desktop that could do anything their Windows at home could do, and
they jsut refused to use it because "Linux sucks". It is something
that makes the council of our city spend around 600000 € to buy
software - not including hardware, mind you - for operating school
networks, and for installing a system that, as has been proved, does
not work. For those of you readers who are good at maths, have you
already found out how many lives could have been saved with that money
if we had instead used it to bring education to parts of the world
that need it? I have, and found it to be nothing less dramatic than
plain criminal.
That said, the only feasible way appears to be the bottom up
method. We have to bring free software to kids and parents. I have
founded an association named
Teckids here in Germany that does
just that. We organise several events for kids and adolescents in the
area of free and open source software, for example the
FrogLabs, which share staff with
Teckids and are the youth programme of
the Free and Open Source Software
Conference (FrOSCon). We do a lot more than most other conferences
- this year, we first offered the FrogLabs as a holiday camp for kids
aged 10 to 16. It was a huge success, with approx. 30 kids taking part
and learning with and about free software through a whole weekend. All
of us had a lot of fun, and the results were really exciting.
Apart from that, we are preparing a campaign that is supposed to bring
the message of free alternatives to stuff kids use every day to them and
their parents, e.g. the use of Jabber / Jappix instead of Facebook and
Skype. To make that possible, we are planning to get together a team of
clever kids who understand very well what their peers need and can bring
it across to them. So we will have a peer-driven network of adolescents
who teach each other and collect feedback from the community of minors.
We then take that feedback and our own experience to work closely with
open source projects, such as Skolelinux or Jappix, at improving their
software in a way that makes it more and more attractive for the target
group. At least I hope that we will have good cooperation with
Skolelinux in the future ;)!
So in conclusion, what I believe is that, if it weren't for the world
being so bad, it should be very clear to the political decision makers
that the only way to go nowadays is free software for various reasons,
but I have learnt that the only way that seems to work is bottom up.
