Edubuntu: some observations.......contd

[raj kumar sarkar]

Dear Friends,

First of all thanks for all of your replies.

In my last posting I had mentioned a few problems we had been facing regarding Edubuntu. But there are other major issues. 

I personally feel that Edubuntu (Ubuntu as well) development process has been going on with some fundamental assumptions. Availability of Internet connectivity is one of them. But if we really want to make Ubuntu/Edubuntu ubiquitous then we have to negate this assumption. 

While availability of internet connection solves a lot of problems, the absence of it totally changes the scenario. No internet connection means no "apt-get"-ing. So installing new application becomes almost impossible for us. And unavailability of any kind of internet connection is the ground reality in major part of the world. 

So I feel we should devise some strategy to counter this problem. 

Another major issue is related to educational software. While GCompris and KDEdu is excellent for students upto class VII-VIII. But for students from class IX-XII there are hardly any good software. There are a hell lot of stuff on mathematics (ploting, geometry), chemistry (Ghemical, Kalzium),but subjects like History, Geography, Life Scieinces are very badly covered. In a poor country like ours if we can have some virtual subsitute of real world school-lab experiment
then it would benifit the students like anything. 

We also need to develop age-wise or class-based curriculum. Say for example the menu itself may contain items like "Age5"/"Age6" or "Std V"/"std VI" etc. In the next level these items would open links to applications suitable for that particular group. 

I think we (particularly the developers and educators) can propose preliminary list of applications suitable for a particular group, which can later be finalised. 

Another major issue is content development in local language. I have found the local language support to be mostly limited. We need some good quality content development application with local language support. 

Lastly I must say that the effort of you all are really commendable. Probably we are in too early phase of our development, and with time we would be able to solve all our problems. 

Thanks and regards,

Raj Sarkar


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