I've been too busy at home, but finally I found time to wrap up
-another interview with the people behind
-Debian Edu and Skolelinux.
-This time we get to know José Luis Redrejo RodrÃguez, one of our great
-helpers from Spain. His effort was the reason we added support for
-several desktop types (KDE, Gnome and most recently LXDE) in Debian
-Edu, and have all of these available in the recently published
-Debian Edu
-Squeeze version.
-
-
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 implementation 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 proprietary and free
-environments, schools using only workstations, other schools using
-laptops, netbooks, tablets, interactive white-boards, 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
-multi-platform 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.
-