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I forgot to introduce myself :-)
Hello, all!
I am reading SEUL-EDU archives at the moment and I noticed that
almost everybody here posted introductions. Though I am
participating in this list for quite awhile, I think it is good
idea to introduce myself as recommended.
I am 24 years old postgraduate (technical sciences: applied
math) student of Petrozavodsk state university situated in the
city of Petrozavodsk, Karelia, Russia. At the same time I am
working as a programmer-methodologist (it is so formally
called) at Karelia Educators qualification and retraining
institute. The essense of my work is to make, find, describe,
etc educational software, recommend or give it to teachers and
teach them to use it. I am also in charge of our institute
intranet and all computer administrative tasks which could
occur in Mac/Win/Linux environment.
It is a common practice in Russia to "give away" commercial
software and this practise I am trying to reduce. One way I see
how computer piracy can be prevented is by going into free
software. Thus the choice of Linux.
But educational software for Linux in our native language
(russian) is non-existant. So, I was very glad to join
seul-edu.
Unfortunately, I can't even demonstrate Linux properly in our
Institute (where the most powerful machine is 486DX-66 with 12
Mb of RAM and 256Kb of videomemory, to add to my troubles,
hardware is broken: I can't even compile Linux kernel without
problems.)
Fortunately, there are now 2 schools here which are using Linux
and 1 trying it. I am helping them with Linux.
Teachers I met have "cautious interest" in Linux due to lack of
russian applications and russian menus in the software.
Of course, there are teachers who came to school from industry
(and from Unix/RT OS/VMS/...) and tell me they could be happy
with Linux.
I am also teaching a small group of schoolchildren C
programming. I do it on Linux server.
To add to the basket, I am a moderator of relcom.education
usenet group... (And you can easily believe everybody reading
that usenet group knows what Linux is!)
You know, Open Source software is being done volunteerely, on
free will of the developers. The current situation in Russia is
such that majority of the population are volunteers: our
salaries are postponed for 1-7 months and after this fall's
crisis, they are also negligent. So, one more volunteer job
doesn't matter ;-)
*
The problem with me is that I am good at idea generation but
not so good at their realisation. I had 6 more or less software
projects in the past, 2 of which I failed ;-) (please, don't
throw rotten tomatos at me!)
These 2 failures were due to me over-estimated my time budget or
was not able to organise other people properly...
Even now I have some deadlines I must meat instead of typing
this introduction or reading seul-edu archives.
So, please, excuse me - I will try to concentrate on problems I
have at the moment, including my newborn OSS project QZB
( http://cvs.seul.org/~rnd/index.html ).
*
BTW, does anybody mind if I post some seul-edu material into
relcom.education newsgroup? (with proper acknowledgements, of
course!): our educators are interested in american ways of
education, though argue against "hands on" practise ;-) (we had
a discussion on it some time ago).
In exchange I must tell you that in Pereslavl Zalessky region
in Yaroslavl oblast of Russia we have an educational net build
almost completely with free software (FreeBSD and Linux
routers, servers...). They use ucblogo on UNIX workstations
with 4-6 form schoolchildren (if I remember correctly)
Unfortunately, their page when I last looked at it was only in
russian http://www.botik.ru/tech and their channel to the world
is always overloaded.
I will try to find time (and patience!) to explore their net
more to mine more details.
C u later!
Roman A. Suzi
-- Petrozavodsk -- Karelia -- Russia --
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