Columbia Teacher's College

I was quite nervous and anxious last night when I was before a doctoratecolloquium to present Ubuntu Linux with the objective of laying foundations for further exploration of its use in Education. Yes, there was a discussion of Edubuntu, in fact that was the flavor of Ubuntu which most people were interested in using.

Now, I prepared slides[note: in ODP format] and printed out some notes. However, as is frequently the case with my presentations, we very quickly get derailed by questions from the floor, and I engage in a long Question and Answer session with my audience, skipping the slides altogether. I did demonstrate the software that was loaded on my laptop, which BTW Just Worked^TM with the Projector. And there was really an exchange in knowledge on our parts. Afterwards there was a nice little semicircle of interested people who continued peppering me with questions, which very, very warm and fuzzy to my little heart. Plus I handed out 30 CDs of Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Edubuntu for them to try out.

I did come away from the presentation with some observations, some of which were disturbing to me. I discussed some of these with my wife afterwards and somewhat dissected these observations in an attempt to determine my part in this so that I can make adjustments and changes to my presentations. [nice use of wishy-washy wording here isn't it?]

1. As the average interest level of the group as a whole increased, the average interest level of the percentage of that group who were female decreased.The women were much more reluctant to ask questions and towards the end some of them begin to glaze over and then slip out of the room to leave.


2. There was a great proportion of Mac laptops to PC laptops on the desks, which means that Windows may have its hands full over the next five to ten years, trying to keep its market share.


3. Those who had actually any knowledge of Linux to begin with, had quite a bit of knowledge, whilst those who had only heard the word.... well that's obvious, right? What's more is that those who had any knowledge to begin with were deeply curious about Linux, Ubuntu and how it worked, while the other set were really not very interested, except for one or two who seemed to make a small shift towards actual interest.


4. There was not nearly enough foundational knowledge on either side to give a rock solid description of the Pedagogical underpinnings if the Edubuntu offering.


5. My jokes are nearly as corny as my father's jokes, and barely solicited polite groans [NOTE TO SELF: stop trying to tell jokes in front of audiences!!]

I have an entire sociology class to finish up at school, and I think that I would like to explore the causes and symptoms of the first Observation as part of my final project. IT does seem to be indicative of a greater trend in the FOSS world that women are quite reluctant to enter even an exploration of it, much less engage in active participation. This has been noted elsewhere and in greater detail than I will go into in this post, however last nights presentation gave me a brief glimpse into this problem and I would truly like to explore this further with the first objective to be able to become a much more effective speaker that can relate the FOSS message to a greater audience and a greater share of the audiences which I am placed before. I know that if I am a part of the problem that there can be little movement towards a solution in my sphere of influence until I address that fact.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, I'm keen to discern that which is steering women away from FOSS and ICT in general, with the naive hope that this can be addressed and our community can find a greater method to encourage more participation from women.

Comment? Suggestions? Lewd Remarks? [Actually if you'd skip the lewd remarks, I'd really appreciate it!]

Technorati Tags: Education, Columbia, Ubuntu, Presentation, sociology

Ubuntu users and Tribal Wars

We've gathered a team of Ubuntu users and parted to conquer the browser based game Tribal Wars. Do you want to have some fun and get to know some other Ubuntu users? Come and join us!This is also my first blog post from within Digg, who knows maybe we'll get a couple diggs this way!

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It's War!!!

Since getting my new computer, I have been able to do some things that I was not quite able to do in the past. Now I am able to play games because the cpu is much faster than I have been used to so I have been enjoying Planet Penguin Racer, Neverball and Battle for Wesnoth. It's great fun being able to play games again, plus they are somewhat light-hearted fare for my entertainment.

Yesterday, a new proposition came through my RSS Feed Reader to join an online game called Tribal Wars. So I did. Now, I'm on the team and building my little village so that we can slowly infect continent # 76. Delicious!! It's really fun bein a part of a community that is as diverse and far-flung as the Ubuntu Users!


Technorati Tags: games, linux, ubuntu , community

Notes from the UN

This week I went to the United Nations Headquarters in New York registered as the Representative from the Ubuntu Community, hope you guys don't mind! The event was a web seminar in the ICT Policy Issues for Development series. This particular event was organized by both UNITAR and UNCTAD and was focused on the practical xperiences of corporations, and small to medium organizations who are using FOSS extensively throughout their business. Ultimately, this series is aimed towards providing the delegates information that will hjelp them to make an informed decision towards the adoption of FOSS throughout the United Nations, particularly as that helps make progress towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals.

The keynote weas delivered by Rishab Ghosh, who is a Senior Researcher at the United Nations University in Maastricht. He presented the findings of a study which is documented at FlossImpact and was ultimately quite supportive of Free and Open Source Software adoption based upon economic figures and studys. One particularly telling quote demonstrates the whole of the presentation

The economics of FLOSS is closer to the economics of softwate in general than the economics of proprietary software.

The rest of teh day was spend in informal panel discussions, I even managed to interject a little personal testimony about Ubuntu Linux and the Community that we are so proud of. This had an almost immediate effect, as the experts were all nodding heads at the various points I was making and then later, each one use the word "Ubuntu" in one of their responses. During lunch, i was even asked to install the java jre plugin for firefox on trhe UNCTAD representatitve's computer ( running Feitsy 7.04). I saw at least four other installations of Ubuntu on computers around the table, plus got a really wonderful story from an intern whose University in Western Africa is using Ubuntu to develop a network of universities in order that more people can be educated in that area of the world. I look forward to recieve an email about those efforts in the future.

I was going to drop some names about who was there, but it is not really that terribly important as what was more important that there was lots of really good reasons and practical experience acknowledgements of the impact of Free and Open Source Software on the global economics and society.


Technorati Tags: unitednations, FOSS, MDG, linux, ubuntu

Ok, it works, sort of

After a couple of days, getting myself all set up and ready to go with my new computer, the ever sexy Fujitsu U810, it is time to give a little priliminaty run down of what I have here. Since you maybe aware that I am not running the Microsoft software on this machine there are somethings which I am left figuring out how to do. The first thing is enabling the touchscreen, that is not picked up by default in Kubuntu Linux- nor did I really expect it to be picked up. This screen is really quite samall but has a super high resolution, and one of those higfhly reflected coatings. I can play Elephant's Dream on it and it looks absolutely fantastic!! I used a .avi and it played automatically in Kaffeine. Incidentally, I have never used Kaffeine, mostly because my other machines were too slow to try doing any of this stuff, I think i like that application!

Kubuntu's Gutsy also handles getting Flash and Mp3 support really quite well.

The next issue I have is getting the built in webcam and microphone working, but really the touchscreen I know will be a watershed moment, being able to use the tablet as a tablet, I am just waiting to install Xournal in order to write out my morning pages again! But with a WebCam and microphone, I can get on that YouTube thingy!!1

The dual montiors with the docking bay worked pretty good, I did have to install xrandr and pass a command to do it on the fly, I think I am going to need to add that to my xorg.conf file so that I can pop that puppy in the docking bay and pull it off however and when ever I so desire.

I have yet to explore the bluetooth stuff, but I plan to get the wiimote working as a mouse via that channel. Maybe, just maybe, I'll take a crack at getting the fingerprint swipe to work for signing into KDM, but that is not near the top of my list.

I am really happy to have a laptop that is a working laptop now. I also like the tiny little 1.5 pounds formfactor of this machine and am quite pleased. The only thing that really bothers me, is this. The laptop is so small (smaller than an average paperback novel) my two and a half year old daughter thinks that it is for her. She keeps trying to muscle in on my action when I take to to go read the news on the bed!

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Hooray! I'm a big doofus

So my much anticipated new machine arrived yesterday. I played with the default OS for a little bit, then attempted to install Kubuntu over the internet. I was a bit confused by the partitioning dialog, as this is the first time I was attempting to leave the previous occupant on board. Well, it went fine, until deep in the install (note: my ADSL has been shakey lately) and I could no longer see the screen. I attempted to blindly abort which only caused the whole thing to be useless.

So today, I went out and bought a USB CD/DVD drive and tried to "recover" Windows. no dice. And all they ship you are the Recovery Disks, no the install disks. i had a pirated copy of XP but it doesn't have all the shiny Tablet stuff or the drivers so forget that. Right now, i am in the midst of installing Kubuntu from an Alternate installation CD and feel pretty dedicated to using FOSS only solution on this machine, particularly as i will be going to the UN next week as an advocate for using FOSS, I had better eat my own dogfood, as they like to say.

When I am done with several other balls in the air, i'll post thee Unboxing photos. hehe

Oh Boy, that was fun!

The Wife and I spent an afternoon looking at a very attractive living arrangement today. We took the child with us of course and she was wonderfully well behaved. When we got back, I put the littel girl to bed and then sat down to check my news feeds. My jaw hit the floor when I saw my full name in the first sentence of one of the stories. Of course I remembered being interviewed for the story about a month ago, I had just forgotten all about that with all the preparations and schooling that I was going through. o that was quite a happy Columbus Day for me!