This article describes the work in progress of applying Ubuntu Linux sensibly within an underfunded school, and as part of a wider well thought out and alternative educational structure. I shall emphasise best practices and try my best not to dwell too much on the underlying technologies.

The school

Education is a fundamental pillar of civilization. Without learning structures, humanity will descend again into the dark ages and superstition will rule. Supporting children in their learning activities is not an optional extra, but a community responsibility as part of the global community that we all live within. Placing these sentiments in context, we all pay our taxes and as part of those taxes, we collectively pay for the educational system that supports our way of life and our betterment in the future. This system mostly works.

The pressure for consistency of quality to some extent enforces uniformity within the school system; the tool of this enforcement is budgetary with a layer of legal requirements. If you step away from the main stream, funding becomes scarce. Methodologies outside the majority view can be dangerous for long-term survival. If a school sits at the edges of common practice, then receiving government funding takes a lot of patience, skill, paperwork and diplomacy. Enter the Guus Kieft School right.

Enter the Guus Kieft School right

The Guus Kieft School sits snuggly next to a park in Amstelveen (Holland). The quality of air is excellent and the motivation of the student children (ages 5-14) envelops you on entrance. Positive energy resonates within every nook and cranny of the old scouting building and pleasant mosaics (figure 1) and markings scatter the grounds. My younger son is part of this outstanding enterprise; notice my pride in the statement.

Figure 1: Mosaic seen as one walks into the School grounds

The Guuf Kieft School is based on an sociocratic organizational model similar to that of the Sudbury valley school in Framingham, Massachusetts.

The sociocratic approach is decision making by consent and places the student to a great degree at the center of influence. The schools structure enables students free range to learn at their own pace and with their own definitions of direction. For a mildly autocratic parent such as I that can be scary, as you need an element of trust in the process. However, after a year of observing the incremental results on my younger son, I am delighted with this approach’s structural effect of building self-confidence, understanding of social context and plain old knowledge building.

Despite the obvious quality that permeates the project, the school is fairly new in its existence and lacks significant funding. Therefore, the school needs still to tap into government acceptance for long term viability. As a consequence, there is currently a requirement for a low budget, no budget IT policy. Having worked as a teacher, course writer and developer of heavily used scaled up systems it seemed natural to me to want to help define a two-year IT policy to bridge a perceived funding gap.

Consent driven contracts

It may very well be in the best interests of a lead miner to pollute the upstream river water of a village, but it is definitely not in the interests of the community as a whole. Consent driven policy is very democratic in scope and on average causes the least damage to the local environment. I can say the same for children playing in school time on the internet. The power of the internet is very attractive. However, if a group form around the computer area whose only activity is to shoot as many targets as possible then the ebb and flow of learning of the group and the wider community is disrupted and potentially negative.

Before launching new IT facilities, the students and mentors at the school need to decide a definition of fair usage of the computers. If you do not preplan a codification of best practices then you will risk ending up with a select few monopolizing the internet connection for gaming purposes. In an educational environment, a fast computer with a brilliant graphics card risks the concentration and focus of a whole subset of a school primarily the male segment. Defining a personal contract and allowing the best interests of the whole community to speak through sociocratic processes enables broader advantage.

Per student topics, that the student and mentor need to agree include how to time share, how much of the time the student spends on the computer and for what purpose. Without a containing consent, the lack of school policy may inadvertently place young minds at risk.

Ubuntu has a positive role to play

Okay, the community has agreed on best practice. Now it’s time for the IT policy to structurally support the governance. The school is small and we already have one laptop connected to the internet. I intend to install two reference machines chock full of free software and show the parents and mentors how easy it is to customize for a particular student’s needs. Better still, I will describe how to copy shortcuts from one machine to another so that with a couple of command line actions the student’s home machine has the same software as at school. If a mentor wishes the student to focus in on a task, or if a student wishes to follow through at home, the learning path is not limited by technology.

Now it’s time for the IT policy to structurally support the governance

Before buying the new, let us consider the old. With the help of a kind parent, the school has scored two Pentium 1.5 GHz machines, the memory and hard disk are limited, time to call in GNU/Linux in the shape of Ubuntu. At this point you may well be asking why not Edubuntu or another one of the many excellent flavors of GNU/Linux. The answer is you can, there are many distributions that are viable. However, Ubuntu is a strong candidate. Ubuntu has good solid market penetration and I have no issues in recommending it as a desktop for home use in dual boot mode with Windows or stand-alone. A standard install includes all the software one comes to expect like office suites, multimedia applications, games, etc., and just as importantly a standard file structure and application installation process. I prefer APT over RPM for package management and find from practice that there are very few dependency issues. Finally, Ubuntu is well known and the homepage does promise to continue releasing for a solid number of cycles to come.

Ubuntu is a strong candidate

The simpler the approach one takes the less maintenance is required later. I intend the flow of operation for sharing consistency between school and home computers to be similar to:

1. Install Ubuntu with a given version.
2. Install all the educational free software that you can via apt-get or a package manager.
3. Add a user account per student and hence a clean desktop.
4. The mentor sits with the student and agrees which software is useful for a given period and places shortcuts on the student’s desktop for the given piece of software.
5. If the parents wish for a mirror on their home computer then the relevant mentor sends desktop shortcuts with a list of apt-get commands via email. Notice that the standard environment enables this approach.
6. The parents downloads the shortcuts to the students desktop at home and then run the enclosed apt-get commands to install the software.

Perhaps (at worst) periodically, I may need to explain to the teachers and parents what apt-get is or have an install fest for Ubuntu, but this is not a significant cost as the parents are all so friendly.