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.
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