Design for Isolated and Inexperienced user base

[Jonathan D. Proulx]

On Thu, Mar 16, 2006 at 08:07:00PM +0200, Jonathan Carter wrote:

:Which model Thinkpads are those, btw? Have they been sourced yet? I
:would also suggest a laptop with a smaller display- since it would use
:slightly less power. Slower hard disks will help too, and making sure
:that the cpu scaling works is also important (Edubuntu should do it
:fine, but just make sure).

I expect them to be R51's, I know at least a couple of them are and
that's my test bed.

:>From what you've explained, there'll be a high user to laptop ratio in
:the areas these laptops will go into. I think it's likely that the
:productivity tools will be high in demand, OpenOffice will probably be
:quite highly utilised. Something like Scribus might be of importance for
:community newsletters, etc. I would also include Inkscape, and of
:course, some documentation/turorials for all these packages. I don't
:know what the mandate of the sponsor is, but if the communities have
:full autonomy over the use, I would assume that they'll address their
:primary ICT needs first. Will they have cell phones with GPRS
:connectivity? (that would be fantastic)

There's no sponsor mandate, except I suppose that they be used for
educational purposed in the schools, which is pretty broad.

I'm speculating two broad classes of use.  First the teacher in
preparing lessons and other school management.  For this desktop I've
listed the productivity tools.  For the student use (age about 6-12)
I'd expect gcompris, tuxmath, a typing tutor, tux paint, and and
editor probably openoffice write.

Do you think more of the productivity suit would be used by the
students?  I do have 7 and 10yr old testers at home but they learned
to type before they learned to write so a bit of a different
demographic.
 
:> I'm a bit concerned that the well meaning folks who've proposed this
:> donation haven't thought through how to really make use of the
:> resources we're handing out.   I'm hoping they have, but given my
:> rather vague marching orders... 
:
:I hope they take your feedback into account ツ

I think they will, but I'm trying to come up with what that feedback
should be just now.

:> Worst case maybe I'll need to fly out to Fiji to run additional
:> training, there are worse things.
:
:Worst case!? Sounds like good fun to me.

You ned the proper inflection on "worst case" :)

-Jon