Northeast Linux Symposium mini-report

[Bill Sconce]

This last Sunday - Tuesday saw the gathering of some 40-50 interested
folks from the educational community, primarily from Maine, New Hampshire,
and Vermont, at Gould Academy in Bethel, ME to discuss and learn about
Free software in education.

Put on by David Trask for four years now (and now assisted by our own
Matt Oquist), this symposium has proven that K12 education can and does
benefit when Free software is brought in.

There are many fields of activity, with LTSP (the Linux Terminal Server
Project) and its educational variants being the most visible.  K12LTSP
is installed and running in a number of schools.  The ability to use
thin clients made from otherwise obsolete PCs, clients with no disk
drives (and in many cases no fans nor any moving parts whatsoever) has
proven to be a godsend to administration.  Nothing to install on the
client.  If a client fails, bring over another box, plug in power,
video and Ethernet cables, boot - DONE.  There were I don't know how
many K12LTSP labs set up at the conference.  (One note, which only now
occurred to me:  you might think that a teacher, or anyone who has not
seen OpenOffice or Firefox before, would be put off by the desktop
looking "different".  I heard NOT ONE such comment.  It just works.)

(Our own Steve Amsden did a great presentation, complete with working
K12LTSP server and client farm, at CentraLUG a meeting or two ago.)

Another item which has been coming on strong is Moodle, a Free course
management system.  It's so simple that even I was able to get started
with it - on site, and the night before! - putting notes for my
presentation up on the Moodle server.  (My presentation:  "Bash 101".
Be afraid, very afraid...  :)

More items (which I know far less about): Single Sign-On (Samba/LDAP
and WinBind/Active Directory), Social Networking, LTSP Internals,
Advanced Tips & Tricks, Intro to Linux/Fedora/Ubuntu, a student
portfolio management project (Matt Oquist again) and SchoolTool,
a School Information System (SIS) written in Python.  (YES!!),

The real measure of any conference is the spirit, and any Linux person
would be pleased at the level of enthusiasm apparent for Free software,
from teachers to administrators to tech coordinators at NELS.  Not all
schools "get it", but some do.  And they're having a really good time.
The best part, to my thinking, is that we're beginning to see an
embrace of Free software not just by techies (sysadmins etc.) but by
teachers.  They want to use Free software in the classroom!

Several luminaries presented keynote speeches, among them Steve
Kossakowski of the Exeter school system (where Linux and Free software
are widely and dominantly used); Warren Togami, founder of the Fedora
project, and our own maddog (slides available off the NELS page at
    http://nelinux.net/
(which itself is a Moodle site, incidentally).

I've left a lot out, and I've surely failed to do justice to everyone,
but I wanted to let the LUG know that Linux in education is alive and
growing in our neck of the woods.


Still_recoveringl'ly yrs,

-Bill


P.S.  There's a New Hampshire edition of NELS coming up at UNH Durham
in July.  In case you know anyone in education who needs just a little
push to get interested in Free software.