ICT in Education Conference & Expo - Durban ZA

[Craig Adams]

Hi All,

Just a note about the conference and expo which was held last week in
Durban, South Africa.

The event was held at the MTN Science Centre at the Gateway Shopping
Mall and was entitled the ICT & Electronics in Education Conference and
Expo. It was attended by about 400 Senior Primary and High School
science and computer studies teachers from the greater Durban area.

I was representing OpenOffice.org at the event and was accorded the
opportunity to provide a 20 minute presentation on FLOSS in general.
This presentation was extended to 40 minutes due to the interest shown
by the teachers.

Thomas at the Shuttleworth Foundation kindly sent me 480 Ubuntu CD sets
to give away at the event, of which I only have 50 left, mainly because
I was rationing them to one per teacher. Demand from the teachers would
have seen me easily giving away over 1000 copies.

I found that the wealthier schools are generally aware of FLOSS and
GNU/Linux, whilst the poorer and previously disadvantaged schools remain
largely unenlightened. The level of interest in FLOSS, GNU/Linux and
specifically Ubuntu (the name was a particular draw card) could only be
described as overwhelming and, the few of these schools lucky enough to
have a computer lab, showed particular interest in various LTSP based
solutions to help bolster their ageing and/or inadequate infrastructure.

HP were represented at the event by proxy, a local reseller, who were
showing off the HP 441 (www.hp441.com) which utilises a derivative of
Mandrake Linux. This solution also gained a lot of attention from the
smaller, underfunded schools as a low cost option for small computer
labs.

At the OpenOffice.org table I was demonstrating OpenOffice.org (1.1 &
2.0 developer build) on Warty. Teachers were allowed to sit down and
work with the computer and the various applications I had installed.
Those that took advantage of this opportunity commented on the ease of
use of Warty and were impressed with the capabilities of OpenOffice.org,
with the Math module being particularly popular.

In general, the event was entirely successful from a FLOSS perspective.

Kindest Regards

Craig A. Adams