Arun and others, Can you please comment on the following article. http://www.newindpress.com/NewsItems.asp?ID=IER20050917015000&Page=R&...
Thanks Krishna
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The great moral question of the twenty-first century is: If all knowledge, all culture, all art, all useful information, can be costlessly given to everyone at the same price that it is given to anyone -- if everyone can have everything, everywhere, all the time, why is it ever moral to exclude anyone from anything? -Eben Moglen
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you should know one thing about kerala. even though the state is very literate, it is also very predictable. the congress and the left go about looting the state alternatively. at this time the congress is in power. during the next election the left eill come in power. so expect changes then too. i am from the state capital, so i should know :) now on the article: when almost all computers sold have pirated copies of Windows, how can you expect the teachers to know any better? they have seen only one OS.
On 9/18/05, Krishna Pagadala krishnaact@yahoo.com wrote:
My question is Last year there were 10 schools that opted for free software. Why only 2 this year? Anybody have answers for that?
-Krishna
--- Srijit Sreekumar srijit@gmail.com wrote:
http://www.newindpress.com/NewsItems.asp?ID=IER20050917015000&Page=R&...
===================================== To Reflect, to Inspire and to Empower http://www.employees.org/~krishnap/
The great moral question of the twenty-first century is: If all knowledge, all culture, all art, all useful information, can be costlessly given to everyone at the same price that it is given to anyone -- if everyone can have everything, everywhere, all the time, why is it ever moral to exclude anyone from anything? -Eben Moglen
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On Sun, 2005-09-18 at 09:35 +0530, Srijit Sreekumar wrote:
This is not fully true. The curriculum has had Free Software for three years now. An IT@School GNU/Linux CD has been distributed to all schools and about 200 master trainers and several hundred teachers have been trained on this CD. A number of schools in Thiruvananthapuram are already using the software. Training is being held in many districts with help from organisations like the Kerala School Teachers Association. Things are changing, but it may still be slow.
Best
On Sat, 2005-09-17 at 18:09 -0700, Krishna Pagadala wrote:
I am not able to access the article today. The page is asking for login. Could you send me the article?
Best
Schools open gates for Microsoft Saturday September 17 2005 12:11 IST http://www.newindpress.com/NewsItems.asp?ID=IER20050917015000&Page=R&...
THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Closing their windows on free software, Kerala schools have clicked on Microsoft as the operating system for IT@school.
Except for two schools - Government Mappillah Higher Secondary School, Koyilandi, and Patyam Gopalan Memorial School, Vatakara - all other high schools, numbering about 2,640, have preferred to install Microsoft software while voting for its credibility and flexibility.
And with this snub on the advocates of free software, it will be curtains on the controversy Kerala witnessed following the decision to introduce IT as a subject for SSLC.
The Left parties, especially the CPM which termed it an attempt to allow Microsofts entry into Kerala, had extended full support to the free software movement using the event as an opportunity to underscore their resolve against MNCs.
The pro-CPM Kerala School Teachers Association (KSTA) had even threatened to boycott the IT practical examinations as the softexam software selected for conducting the SSLC IT practical examinations was developed on Microsoft platform.
This forced the General Education Dept to include free software also in the curriculum making it clear that from 2005-06 academic year schools will have the freedom to select between free software and Microsoft.
The IT@school project also formed a panel of experts in all districts to help school teachers in this regard.
"V. Sasi Kumar" sasi.fsf@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, 2005-09-17 at 18:09 -0700, Krishna Pagadala wrote:
I am not able to access the article today. The page is asking for login. Could you send me the article?
Best
Hi,
Well, title of the article is misleading.
Kerala still has lots of schools running GNU/Linux. On 10th of this month some of us were in Kozhikkodu for a parallel teacher training.
IT@School project under the government was completely against free software. They tried all dirty tricks to get free software out of school.
Until last academic year many schools in north kerala were running only on free software. But some tricks were used to reduce the number.
When IT became a subject for SSLC exam, IT@School project introduced a software to conduct exam ( may be world's first state to conduct school exam with software ;) ). This software didnt work well on GNU/Linux. Particularly terminal server based system. Headmasters and other staff members were threatened to move out of free software just to conduct exam. Only two schools resisted the pressure.
After KSTA threatening to boycott the exams, project is providing (or at least showing ) some support to free software in schools. Many schools across the state now moved to free software. Official teacher training was conducted by IT@School and some parallel efforts were conducted by the community.
Efforts are still on to train more teachers. We learn that hundreds of people registered with IT@School project to provide free software support. IT@School has this database. Unfortunately the database is still not gone public. We need to ask why this database is kept in dark.
Any way Kerala is moving to free software very fast. www.space-kerala.org project is now conducting training program for small scale computer vendors on GNU/Linux. First program was conducted on 11-12th in Malappuram. News will be posted to project website soon.
regards, arun.
http://www.newindpress.com/NewsItems.asp?ID=IER20050917015000&Page=R&...
THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Closing their 'windows' on free software, Kerala schools have clicked on Microsoft as the operating system for IT@school.
Except for two schools - Government Mappillah Higher Secondary School, Koyilandi, and Patyam Gopalan Memorial School, Vatakara - all other high schools, numbering about 2,640, have preferred to install Microsoft software while voting for its credibility and flexibility.
Franz Nahrada f.nahrada@reflex.at has created a space for "investigating the the state of public knowledge politics around the world - in regard to the formation of information commons that allow widespread participation in this ultimate resource. Please also include politics on Free Software, but do not limit yourself to this."
Nations Present Open Source Argument to World Bank By Michael Herman ., The Press ., 09/17/05 5:00 AM PT
http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/dtpllQOc4B1G9m/Nations-Present-Open-Source...
The group's report -- described as a blueprint for creating national policies for open-technology standards -- poses a threat to proprietary software makers who are already facing stiff competition from the OSM in the public sector of many developing countries.
Senior government officials from 13 countries were among a group of open-source advocates behind a report presented to the World Bank last Friday calling on nations to accelerate economic growth by using products based on what are called open-technology standards.
The group defines open standards as technologies that are openly published and which are not owned by any company. The benefit of open standards is that they allow information to be easily shared by different software programs, reducing user dependency on a single provider and making information more accessible to a wider group of people. Enlisting Support While the objectives of open standards differ from those of the open source movement (OSM), which promotes a collaborative style of software development using a network of programmers to build and constantly improve software that is distributed free to users, OSM and the software freedom philosophy it champions have been significant forces behind the growing acceptance of the need for open standards.
The group's report -- described as a blueprint for creating national policies for open-technology standards -- poses a threat to proprietary software makers who are already facing stiff competition from the OSM in the public sector of many developing countries and, significantly, was delivered one day ahead of the second annual Software Freedom Day (SFD).
Launched last year as a grassroots effort to educate people around the world about free and open-source software, Christchurch, New Zealand, once again had an SFD team on the ground and was joined by a Wellington team to represent New Zealand's computer users.
Sponsored internationally by Canonical, the distributors of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, local sponsors included InfoHelp Services, The Computer Broker, the local chapter of the GNU/Linux Users group and Avonmore Tertiary Academy.
The local SFD team were based at Avonmore Tertiary Academy last Saturday, answering questions about migrating to Linux and distributing copies of of the celebrated free Linux distro, Ubuntu. Numbers Growing Rik Tindall of InfoHelp, who led the local team for the second year, says visitor numbers were more than double those of last year and that people gained a much better understanding of the popular alternative to Microsoft's (Nasdaq: MSFT) Windows OS.
Tindall says many users are still unaware that open-source software provides "high quality, well-tested free alternatives to many proprietary products" not only on the Linux platform but on Windows as well.
Tindall says the option to use free and open-source software is not only an important consumer choice, but is also a political decision as it returns control of an increasingly important resource to the people who use it rather than leaving it in the hands of commercial organizations.
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On Mon, 2005-09-19 at 12:42 -0400, V. Sasi Kumar wrote:
Sorry I missed the URL. Here it is:
http://www.globalvillages.info/index.php/GlobalVillages/AvailabilityOfTechno...
From Kannur,
It is a true fact that there are many schools who really wanted to use Free Software based alternatives in their school. If we can give sufficient awareness and support to the teaching community there will be a large number of school who will use Free software products in their curriculum. For the last couple of years, I have provided substantial support to schools by installing GNU/Linux systems and promoted the use of Free Software solutions in schools. From my experience it is clear that both teachers and students are now well aware of Free software alternatives and they really liked it and some of them even appreciated that it is better than MS. In fact Kannur was the first district in India, where MP( Member of Parliament) development fund was used to provide computer education using Free Software. We had implemented LTSP based diskless solutions for as many 43 govt. schools in district and it was in 'news' at that time. But hardly 3 or 4 of them now exist. Many schools were forced(?) to buy disks and use pirated softwares. Master trainees were told of only 'MS' and there were "hidden hands" which did not like use of Free Software.Add to that, the so called "first in the world" Softexam did not work on terminal servers. Many schools were told to use MS Software to conduct the IT exam.
Situations have now changed, teachers and students are more aware now. At Kannur more & more schools shows interest in installing and using Morphix based GNU/Linux cd for IT@SCHOOL project.
During this academic year ,I have supported the following schools with installation and training.
1.St Thomas High School,Kiliyanthara,Iritty (6 machines, (two of the old machine upgraded to 128RAM only for installing It@school Linux). After one day workshop, teachers told that it is better than windows.
2.Govt Higher Secondary School Chittariparamb.( 11 Machines, five old and rest new P4 machines.Seminar on GNU/LINUX and inauguration of IT CLUB held on JULY 13,and students found more interest than teachers.)
3.St Josephs High School,Karikkottakkari,Iritty (Five machines. One machine with even 64 MB ram is running Linux.Students are getting training on GNU/linux only (For 8th std)
4.Govt Higher Secondary Pala ,(15 Machines .Students already appeared for Linux Lab exam. This year there was no notification to conduct IT Lab exam even for 10 th students.
5.Govt Higher Secondary, Valapatnam
6.Govt Vocational Higher Secondary, Edayanoor
7.Govt Higher Secondary, Thottada
8.Govt Higher Secondary, ChattuvaIn all the above schools 8th standard students are only learning GNU/Linux and applications .
The Pattiam Memorial panchayat High School at Cheruvanchery is the one among the only GNU/LINUX schools of Kerala. Here the thin Clients (10 Nos) are running under RH9 ( I am trying to replace it with IT@School debian installation by installing LTSP on this server. Some tweaking is required for this.) This is the only school where you CAN NOT see MS in their computers and for the last three years all the students and teachers only use & knows GNU/LINUX. In fact it is the school where we struggled to get Softexam work in GNU/Linux and the teachers showed good spirit not to use MS even under pressure.
Teachers training are now going on only for GNU/Linux and One Training Center CERIT,Kuthuparamb has only GNU/linux as the OS.
In addition to this list there are many more schools using GNU/Linux installed by the school teachers themselves. Majority of them are in rural areas.It is difficult to coordinate with all of them as most of the teachers have no email-id to communicate with. But it is really a good sign that there is a positive change towards alternatives to proprietory solutions.
Altogether there is progress and we can hope to have batches of students who are open to the world of free/open source technologies and hopefully they will be able to contribute more to the cause. Consider that a high percentage of them will be from rural villages.
It is important that these small achievements get due highlight and we should find the media reporters who can report positive images to the world and give propaganda to that.
That's all from Kannur.
Regards,
Sujeevan S2S2, Kannur, Kerala. (M):09447449107 email:s2s2service@gmail.com -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Get CDs from S2S2: Slackware10.2,Debian Sarge,CentOS 4,Fedora 4, Mandrive2005,K12LTSP,Gentoo2005,FreeBSD,HOWTO cd, PHOENIX LiveCD,Ubuntu,LAMPPIX,KNOPPIX, SLAX,and VigyaanCD. You can buy PHOENIX, India's First PC interface kit under GNU/Linux( www.nsc.res.in http://www.nsc.res.in) from S2S2. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 98,2 Bot
Hi Sujeevan,
Thanks for the update from Kannur. Similar is the situation in many other parts of the state. Some educational subdistrict in trivandrum moved to free software completely. Same is case with north Kozhikkodu, Parts of Malappuram, Wayanadu and Kottayam. GNU has reached even remote corners of Kerala. In a way IT@School project has helped us a lot ;)
regards arun
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