Recently in School Category

Thank you, folks.

By Sebastian Dziallas on July 4, 2010 12:35 PM | 1 Comment | No TrackBacks
I'm going to Olin. It's the place I want to go to. I didn't imagine this to happen, but apparently, sometimes everything in the universe aligns and a lot of magic happens.

A close friend of mine once said, that sometimes, no matter how many more words one strings together, one can't get any closer to the true sentiment. He's right. So thank you, folks, for being there and making this happen. This is totally awesome.

Why I like Olin...

By Sebastian Dziallas on March 26, 2010 12:25 AM | 1 Comment | No TrackBacks
This is the school I want to go to: http://olin.edu/

When I arrived on campus in December, I met Colin, who was the student who had replied immediately to my post to the Olin OLPC mailing list a month before. "Oh, it's cool you're doing Sugar on a Stick - want to meet up when you're around?" So I talked Colin and some other folks in the OLPC chapter about SoaS and open source and education.
The people there are generally really, really open - they throw questions at you, they are interested in what you're doing.

It's a small place. You run across the same people all over again - "Oh, hi! What are you doing?" "We're doing this cool project!" "Let me see!" People are hilariously busy over there. I don't know how this is at other colleges, but you can walk into the Academic Center at midnight and work on projects... when I went to bed, at 1 or 2 AM, it was "Wait, you're already going to bed? We're just starting to work!"

In the evening, there was something I'd never heard of before, "Professors Storytelling." Everybody sat down in the dorms; one professor had his kids read a Dutch book for children and was translating that into English. Another professor told the story about how he met his wife when she bailed him out of jail for a college prank. It's like a huge family sitting together and talking about all this stuff they have been doing when they were young.

It's hard to put it in words.

Fast forward three months to Candidates' Weekend, the final step in the Olin admissions process. This weekend is not about your academic abilities, but rather about the cultural fit. You find yourself talking a lot to students and professors, exploring Olin, while everybody is out there, trying to figure out how you'd do at Olin. My friend Greg DeKoenigsberg accompanied me on this trip. When we got there, a couple of students I had been talking to before in December came by and went "Oh, hi! You're back! Good to see you! What have you been up to?"

And this is where Sebastian thinks "this place is it" again.

I went to the entrepreneurship session, where a student named Matt Ritter was giving a presentation on how FAIL belongs in your time at Olin and how FAILING and learning from all this FAIL is a good experience. FAIL FASTER. (http://blogs.olin.edu/pgp/2010/03/taking-a-leave-of-absence-loa-from-olin--matts-story.html)

Greg and I went to the robotics lab. There were girls building some robots to be able to crawl and walk on a surface like Mars. "You want to control him?" they asked, and they pushed the XBox controller into Greg's hands. We started a conversation on how they had trouble putting all the code chunks on the robot because LabView compiled all these libraries together until the program couldn't execute any more...

We did student-led projects under hilarious time pressure, with strange materials and arbitrary limitations and requirements - some way of transporting water... almost all teams failed epically, constructions collapsed even before the organization started - FAIL FASTER!

I was talking to Allen Downey, a professor there. He wrote an open source textbook called "How To Think Like A Java Programmer," and then someone took his textbook and applied it for a different language (Python). "Yeah, this was Jeff Elkner," said Allen, and Greg and I jumped around and went "Jeff Elkner! We know him!" The world is pretty small. We talked about getting students more into open source projects and having them actually do something during the time they were studying.

When we were talking about the different majors you could take at Olin - you could do electrical engineering, mechanical engineering and a different number of concentrations like computing, bioengineering...  you could also design your own concentration. And Greg and I looked at each other and went "OPEN SOURCE!"

And that is what I want to do there.

College News & Funding Pondering

By Sebastian Dziallas on March 22, 2010 1:52 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Dear Lazyweb,

Olin wants me. And so does Allegheny. Both are wonderful places, but college education is still incredibly expensive. So if you're aware of anything in this regard that applies to international students, please holler.

I'm excited. Seriously.

By Sebastian Dziallas on February 6, 2010 7:58 PM | 2 Comments | No TrackBacks
There's something in the air that's desperately needed for Sugar on a Stick and its future development: deployments - as a central pillar of its philosophy.

Caroline and Simon are already using it in Boston and Berlin and now there's a new one emerging. Mel and Lynne May are going to run a local deployment. In a way, this is going to lower the entry-barrier for other people interested in running deployments.

Mel's blog post has all the awesome details, so I'll just refer you there.

Now what can you do? As you've probably heard, Sugar on a Stick is going to become a Fedora Spin. This is important, because it's a significant part of the effort to make the whole SoaS project sustainable. So we need help especially concerning packaging and reviewing activities [1], to ensure a consistent user experience compared to the former releases. We've a wiki page and a tracking bug, as well as weekly meetings in #fedora-olpc on 1500 UTC.

Just stop by and introduce yourself - do so on-list.

[1] If you're new to packaging software for Fedora, you might be interested in skimming the logs of our recent Fedora Classroom session.

Help us to get teachers their tools!

By Sebastian Dziallas on December 18, 2009 3:38 PM | 1 Comment

This post has been due for quite some time now, but I finally got to writing it. This is about teachers and the tools they're using. Mel Chua has attended the K12 Open Minds conference some time ago and transcribed a session on open source software teachers recommended. From this list, I've composed a wiki page, listing which applications have already been packaged and which not. The latter one gives us about twenty apps that are currently not in Fedora. So, what's next?

Last note: It's a wiki - go ahead and edit straight away and add comments, links and whatsoever.

SoaS v2 Beta Release - "The Next Big Thing"

By Sebastian Dziallas on August 30, 2009 12:00 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Here we go! I'm pleased to announce the availability of the Sugar on a Stick v2 Beta Release. This release includes already a preview of the features of the upcoming final release, which is due to November 24 right now.
Major updates have been applied and we are now shipping the Fedora 12 Alpha base system as well as the latest Sugar 0.85.3 release. Additionally, we are now shipping the zyx-liveinstalller by default.

Please download and test your version of this release from here:

http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/releases/soas-2-beta.iso

6b2a235251d545013c020ded05a8336eceff8114 soas-2-beta.iso

When placing the image on your USB key, please use either liveusb-creator for Windows or livecd-iso-to-disk for Linux. We are also providing an appliance image for use with VirtualBox, as well as VMware, to allow even Mac users to test Sugar on a Stick. Later in the development cycle, SoaS will also feature specific images the XO.

Finally, please note also that we are going to have a test day on SoaS together with Fedora QA this Thursday (September 3). Let us know how it goes! In case you encounter any issues, please report them at our bug tracker: https://launchpad.net/soas

So I'm looking for a College now...

By Sebastian Dziallas on August 2, 2009 12:00 AM | 1 Comment | No TrackBacks

Entering my last year in high school here in Germany, I guess it's time to think about a college for the time after school. I've been working on the Fedora Education SIG with the goal to create a development environment for students and teachers (here's the first version, btw), to allow them to jump easily on the train of contributing to open source projects. And I'd love to continue to do so.

Any recommendations college-wise?

HowTo: renew your school's computer environment

By Sebastian Dziallas on August 29, 2008 12:00 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
...or: Fedora in Education - a true story

In the last weeks, I've been working on a software solution "based on Fedora" for my school. To give you a rough overview, I'll try to sum the most important facts up. Please note that this is just a report and not an announcement of a new product or so ;).

For now, I've been propagating a switch from proprietary software to open source solutions, but currently, there're several clients around, among with a windows terminal server. Since we wouldn't be able to accomplish larger changes (also due to political concerns), we decided to stick with the latter one, but try to give some linux-based clients a test run.

So I hurried up, created kickstarts, pondered about space management and stuff like an intelligent distribution strategy. Later, I also came across our school's webpage, which also seems to need more than a quick check-up - but later more on this.

Let me draw up, what I'm imagining for now: The clients would be based on Fedora (currently on F9, but I'm working on rebasing them for Rawhide / F10) and include a number of education and office applications. The connection to the terminal server would be established using tsclient (there is a new version in rawhide - looks good!) and will be followed by the usual suspects:

  • an office suite (openoffice.org)

  • a web browser (firefox)

  • a flash implementation

  • a bunch of education apps (kdeedu)

  • a photo viewer (eog)

  • a document viewer (evince)

  • a media player (totem)

  • a lockdown editor (pessulus)

  • a graphics program (inkscape)
On the other hand, this image also needs to be deployed - therefore, we'll be using a CentOS server, which should then include applications like:
  • spacewalk (for system management)
  • cobbler (for deployment)
  • func (for network controlling)
The first one also needs Oracle XE as a dependency, but you can get this one from Oracle. We'd then use cobbler for system deployment (using kickstart files) and spacewalk to manage them from the web interface.

For the webpage, I still need to get an idea, of which CMS to use... so far, Drupal, Joomla and SilverStripe had appeared on my screen. But these are just the ones I came across recently.

Those were just some of my ideas, but this seems to be an example, how Fedora can be used for educational purposes: We're going to propagate the software - once we managed to install it completely - to the people in the school, so that e.g. more educational apps get used by the teachers.

If you've any ideas or maybe a suggestion concering a CMS, please come up with it! :)
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