FUD comes thick and furious these days. Or perhaps that’s the Loons that propagate the stuff.
As requested on LHB: Liraz Siri (open source evangelist) highlights yet another dangerous idiot in the public school system. It starts off slow and gathers pace. (The title is one of Liraz’.)
All over the world millions of kids are studying computers and technology. Imagine what a difference we could make if we could figure out how to help the open source community embrace that opportunity.
Unfortunately all too easy to imagine, but not quite in the direction he means.
Imagine if with a bit of guidance we could teach them how to leverage open source and the unprecedented wealth of knowledge Google puts at their fingerprints to learn autonomously faster and better than we could ever spoon feed them with traditional methods.
What, traditional methods like teaching and stuff? And what’s with this Google == open source nonsense? It hasn’t been banned off my IE8 yet.
The Chelsea School Team consists of:
A disastrous teacher called Rik Goldman: “Rik Goldman: trained as an English professor … [he] has always been interested in computers, dabbling with everything from web development to system administration. This eventually led him to transition from English professor to instructional technologist and it’s through this experience that Rik lost his tolerance for proprietary, closed software in education.”
I’m just guessing that being fired from his job teaching “University and College literature and composition classes” might have motivated this peculiar career shift.
There are also six poor sods of students in Chelsea School, which is a “school that specializes in teaching students with language-based learning disabilities,” whose future prospects have quite possibly been blighted by letting a maniac loose on them.
But that’s Freedom.
Do take the time to read the biogs of the kids, incidentally. They all sound like nice, bright, types who might actually benefit from teaching rather than proselytisation. I’m particularly worried about Maurice, although David sounds like the first one up for a mental breakdown caused by all this crap.
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Edited: she/he because Liraz is apparently male. Thanks to Joe for the prompt to check out Goldman’s OP, wherein we learn:
“With some guidance from me and the kind and caring support of folks at irc.ampache.org #ampache, our 6 tech students revised the Ampache patch based on Liraz’ suggestions”
and
“In was case the students had to force my to stop troubleshooting the script and look instead to the overlays” [this man trained as a College Professor of English]
and, from a comment on Liraz’ post,
“Charlie is perhaps too modest to mention it, but he was a key member of the Ampache team that helped and encouraged Chelsea School in their endeavors. Way to go man!”
So, let me get this straight. A whacked-out failed college professor links up with two freetards to hatch up some festering heap of FLOSS garbage, which they then foist on the children of a special-needs school. Between them they teach the kids to cut and paste off the Web, and Rikki G rides herd on them by basically jumping in and “fixing” things whenever the task is beyond a high-school junior. Three utter gits get slashdot points and six innocent kids get brain damage for life.
This is truly a heart-warming story. I can’t wait for the major Hollywood film featuring Jennifer Aniston (have you noticed how all fading Hollywood actresses get to star in at least one social-consciousness film? It’s Jen’s turn), coming any day soon now.
Comments
“how to serve audible editions of assigned texts to students who would otherwise have difficulty accessing these materials”
I don’t expect the usual answer for this to be “PulseAudio”, but, having said that, maybe that extra pounding from the speakers will prove just enough to get the teaching material across.
“The students had decided to focus their efforts on Ampache, a streaming audio and video server which they setup to serve as a compromise between text-to-speech software and an actual human reader.”
In case you don’t understand what said
“compromise” actually involved – me neither.
“Not content with just solving the problem for themselves the students built and configured a virtual appliance in which Ampache was pre-installed and pre-configured on top of Ubuntu, a popular Linux distribution.
This made it possible to distribute and run a fully functional Ampache server from a USB key drive.”
I don’t know if this is just my inability to comprehend written words properly or the article is actually making less and less sense by the sentence, but if you do happen to understand the motivation behind their decision to distribute a full-blown LAMP stack + Ampache on USB sticks and incur a whopping 500MB-1GB overhead in every poor student’s computer for the sake of delivering this elusive “compromise between text-to-speech software and an actual human reader”, please do not hesitate to give me a bit of enlightenment in this comment section.
“If that wasn’t remarkable enough they then proceeded to develop and document a high-quality patch that would allow us to add Ampache to the next release of the TurnKey Linux Virtual Appliance Library.”
This is what Rik Goldman himself has to say about the modified TurnKey LAMP patch, in his own words:
“My only reservations here is that the Ampache version in the repos for Hardy are several releases old. But I recognize this is a short term problem if the migration to Lucid is impending.”
Great – how are you supposed to show the strength of Open Source without a bit of BiannualForcedDeathMarch™ on the side? Never mind that the your poor students are now in fact counting on the reliability of your software in order to learn and have a loving future. Quality assurance be damned!
“This was no toy assignment. It’s a working technology product that thousands of other users all over the world will use. An authentic assessment of the skill involved in planning, developing and implementing an innovation.”
An with an “F” being the grade that it would rightfully deserve.
“Allow me to emphasize that when they started out these high school students had no prior exposure to Ubuntu or Linux.”
And we can only hope that these poor kids won’t end up being the next generation of basement-dwelling, arm-flailing, Stallman-worshiping free software advocates when they reach adulthood…
“Four of the six students even committed to maintaining the appliances as Ampache matures, even after they’ve left Chelsea School.”
Damn!
Joe: Admirable bile, but you err on the generous side. Check out what a virtual appliance is: http://www.turnkeylinux.org/virtual-appliance.
Damn, I now have to add the Schroot guy TM.
We were wrong, you know: there is a market for this lunacy. (And lo, both solutions are predicated on Hardy Heron!)
I wonder what happens when you want to run more than one virtual appliance from the USB stick.
Don’t tell me.
“I wonder what happens when you want to run more than one virtual appliance from the USB stick.
Don’t tell me.”
Let’s not get into that, but, nonetheless, allow me to elaborate on the predictable outcome of running even just one VM from a USB stick.
A contemporary solid-state drive usually has a very narrow write limit, which, when exceeded, will pretty much means the death of the drive itself (think bad sectors). In order to compensate for this shortcoming, a wear-leveling algorithm is implemented in each drive so that write actions will always be balanced across memory cells rather than concentrated on specific portions of the chip(s). Having said that, a typical solid-state drive is by no means capable of handling the continuous write actions demanded by, say, the virtual memory of an operating system and will wear out under such stress in a matter of days or even just hours. In other words, if you are aiming at running a VM from a USB stick, then either you make sure that you have plenty of system memory to minimize swapping (although the Linux kernel will always have a way to defeat that and, as I have implied earlier, system memory is bound to be something that many poor students will have a shortage of), or get yourself plenty of flash drives to wear out.
VM on USB flash is a dead stick – avoid!
“Joe: Admirable bile, but you err on the generous side. Check out what a virtual appliance is:
http://www.turnkeylinux.org/virtual-appliance”
Contrast this to the definition from VMWare:
http://www.vmware.com/appliances/getting-started/learn/overview.html
“Virtual Appliances are pre-built software solutions, comprised of one or more Virtual Machines that are packaged, updated, maintained and managed as a unit.”
The problem here is obvious – a “virtual appliance” is supposed to be delivered as an integral piece (think a network router complete with a web interface and run inside a VM rather than on actual hardware: see http://www.astaro.com/products/astaro-security-gateway-virtual-appliance-for-vmware), preferably to corporate clients running HA/load-balancing clusters inside a optical fiber network, not as some lousy software stack piggy-backing on Ubuntu H and booted from a USB drive, and definitely not to some poor students who probably can’t even afford a decent laptop to begin with.
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