Everything easy is hard

[nigel.kennington at btinternet.com]

Evening All,

I love the idea behind Edubuntu. I desperately want it
to succeed, to contribute in whatever small way I can
even, yet I am paralysed by the non-existent
documentation, the opaque language and the baffling
glimpses of invitation that, when investigated, thwart
you at every turn.

Let me explain, I am a computing teacher in Scotland.
By the standards of teachers (at least here) I have
godlike understanding of the technology, and yet by
the standard of geekdom, my knowledge is limited,
almost superficial. I mention this to give you some
idea of the level “educators with limited technical
knowledge” actually work at. Literally last week I was
explaining to a fully qualified (and senior to me)
computing teacher how to shut down a windows PC
without a mouse because she didn’t know.

Edubuntu is way out of my depth and will be to any
normal teacher in Scottish education. Let me highlight
some of the issues:

** Feedback **
You welcome feedback: “Please remember to give us
feedback of what you think of Edubuntu (good and bad)
to help us to improve it for you...” Yet the link
takes you to a “Locked Page” with a frankly painfully
complex login procedure. I still haven’t managed it
successfully. Why does it need to be so complex? Why
not just put up an email address that comments could
be sent to?

** Welcoming the new folk **
At no point (that I can find) do you explain what LTSP
actually is, not even in the faq. Do you really
believe most teachers know what that means? Speaking
of the faq, see the questions below in the Installing
It section...

** What it’s got **
Basic requirements are more important here. “On the
Desktop” and “On the Server” are dandy if you know
what those are, but most “educators with limited
technical knowledge” don’t. Plus you’re telling them
that the default installation is a server, do you mean
every machine then, or the server-server?

Further, the first thing listed “On the desktop” is a
bunch of applications I had to google them to find out
what they were. What most educators need (in rough
order of importance) are:
* A Word Processor
* A Presentation package
* A web-browser
* A video/DVD/audio player
* An email tool
* An image manipulation program (vector and bitmap)
* A spreadsheet package
* A database package
* Acrobat reader
Then they’d be thinking about all the stuff you’ve
listed. Yes it’s all there from Ubuntu, but nowhere do
you explain how the two are related and summarise the
changes.

** Installing it **
“By default Edubuntu installs a one classroom LTSP
Thin Client server”
Does it? Lovely. What does that actually mean? What
system requirements does that have? If it’s thin
client, do I need a server too? How do I do that? Are
the server requirements different from the thin client
ones?

There's more I could say, but frankly thats enough
negativity for one day.

Again, I love what you're trying to do here (I've been
watching this project for several months now). but
it's just not something I can even mention to my SMT
at the moment.

Yours,

Nigel Kennington.