Intro

[Michael A Hamblin <michaelh@utdallas.edu>]

Hello all...

I've been lurking since last month so I figured I'd say something, now
that my finals are out of the way...

I am currently a Junior in college attending the University of Texas at
Dallas.  I have had a general interest in education since I was in high
school and more recently I was interested in how open-source software
could be leveraged at the grade school level.

The rest of this is a loose conglomerate of ideas I've had, and it's not
too well developed.  So here goes...

Anyhow, I'll mention some of the obvious quirks in the district I attended
school for reference to those of you who were working on a gradebook.  Our
district used six-weeks grading periods instead of quarters (which was
rather annoying, every time you turned around grades were coming due). My
district also had no 'D' letter grade, just A B C and F.  Then there were
the classes that had to grade different from everyone else with 9 & 18
point grades :) 

Another thing you need to remember while coding the gradebook is to make
it easy to hack into ;)  err rather to make it safe from students who
would love to get in and change their grades.

Another thought is a program called 'handin' that some professors use at
the University here for handing in assignments.  Was anyone here familiar
with that?

I have seen situations brought up here where Linux would simply be
relegated to a role as a server.  Although that does limit what can be
done as far as running a Linux box, giving students accounts on such a box
would allow students to use Linux directly.  I could see having a box that
students in computer science classes could telnet into to write programs
in other programming languages such as Fortran, Lisp, Perl, etc.  Or set
up discussion boards for students to collaberate or just mingle (would be
fairly easy with Cyrus IMAP server).  Or create a 'bbs' style interface to
the machine with menus of functions.  None of that would neccessarily take
more than a couple hours to set up.

Some schools though I doubt would be willing to try Linux even that far,
even though some do allow internet access.  Perhaps another possibility
would be machines housed outside school buildings on the internet that are
desinged with student security in mind that students could use, even
students from other campuses and districts could use together to
collaberate on.  The only real limitation to that would be firewalls
blocking the telnet port. If anybody was interested in how one would go
about doing this sort of thing, let me know.  I am currently running a
server called ductape.net which is currently doing just about everything I
had in mind or is pretty close.

Another idea for a piece of edutainment software that might be of value is
an economic simulator.  You have several "companies" (groups of students) 
selling a "product" (say tennis shoes), and they can set the price of
their product, their marketing, R&D, production levels, plant expansion,
etc and the teacher can operate the economy controls, like interest rate,
employment levels, market saturation, etc.  This would probably be popular
all the way from the fourth grade level to the twelfth grade level :)

Another thought was how to share files easily between two or more people
so they could easily work on a project together. The obvious solution is
to create a UNIX group that the two people belong to so they could share
their files safely. However, if the administrator of the machine or
machines is having to set up these sort of groups for hundreds of students
for dozens of teachers, clearly there are going to be serious problems.
What would be nice would be a set of programs that would allow certain
people to add and modify the group files without actually touching the
group files directly, and making it easy to do. This situation isn't
totally unique to Education, more of a general Unix/Linux problem, however
I haven't seen anyone who had any good ideas on how to set it up (other
than ACLs, but many systems don't support ACLs).

Lastly, I'm trying to figure out ways to use older equiptment. It wasn't
that long ago when I thought a 486-100 was a super-computer, and now I'm
using a 486-120 and people think I'm in the dark ages.  Well the same
situation exists for 386s, 286s, and downwards. XTs and 286s won't run
Linux, but they could be useful still.  Transform them into Terminals and
FTP boxes and you've found a use for an old machine. I've seen articles
describing how to take old 386s and 486s and turn them into Xterms using
Linux, and apparently it's worked out quite well at some universities.
It'd be a good use for them seeing as how they just aren't going to be
popular running Windows 95. Anyway, there's no sense wasting this old
hardware that could be put to use.  The question then is what software is
available that would allow a DOS machine to talk TCP/IP, run telnet and
FTP, maybe even do NFS mounts.

Anyhow yall let me know what you think.  My mind is a bit burned from
finals right now, although I would like to write some of this up into
something-like spec sheets and toss it on my web page somewhere later.

Thanks all...

--
Michael Hamblin            http://www.utdallas.edu/~michaelh/
michaelh@utdallas.edu      http://www.ductape.net/
UTD Linux User Group       TCS HelpDesk (x2911, assist@utdallas.edu)