Re: New to the group

[Bruno Coudoin]

About my experience on gcompris, teachers are easy to convince that they
should teach free software but it is hard for them to go further
because:
- they don't have enough technical expertice to force the windows admin
out there to install a dual boot
- the windows admin refuses to install it
- they need to convince other teachers but they don't have the
information we have to convince them.

So as about material, documenting our software is great but we need also
to help teacher come to us easily. 

Perhaps, we could create a specific little book dedicated to the
education market that would contains explaination on why free software
in school is mandatory and a description of a list of free software and
in what they can be used for (or what can they replace) and why not a CD
like demo linux with that (or a full distrib).

My analysis is that we arrive to lobby the top level management, but at
least in france, shool computers are not centralized and the changement
won't necessarily come from the top.
On the other side it is good because local initiative have been possible
but now how can we deploy and generalize the linux pilot schools. For
example, in my town Blagnac in france, the school IT depends to the town
hall, and the guy in place refuses to hear the work Linux. The teachers
are locked, he refuses to suport them if they make any change to the
computer. 

Well, I believe our software is good enough often much better than
proprietary ones but we lack the marketing staff to promote, install and
support it.

Bruno.


Le lun 08/04/2002 à 13:24, Kristian Rink a écrit :
> > le sam 06-04-2002 à 12:03, Christian Selig a écrit :
>  
> > > The situation is even worse. There is a Microsoft/Intel partner project 
> > > "Lernen für die Zukunft" (Teaching for the future), which consists of 
> > > training materials for MS Windows and MS Office and cheap copies. It is 
> > > even supported by politicians who view Microsoft as an innovative 
> > > company with great products. With this initiative, Microsoft tries to 
> > > secure itself a long-lasting monopoly on the school sector.
> > 
> > 
> > Producing free multilingual training materiel for free production
> > software as Evolution, OpenOffice, KOffice, Gnumeric, The Gimp may help
> > a lot. It will help to convince people using free software
> 
> Well, I am willing to spend quite some energy on trying it this way, but,
> honestly, I am not sharing your optimism about this. The experience I've made,
> here in Germany, so far, is that most people working with computers don't
> know about word processing software, about spreadsheets, about web browsers or
> e-mail clients, but they know Microsoft(c) Word(c), Microsoft(c) Excel(c),
> Microsoft(c) Internet Explorer(c) or Microsoft(c) Outlook Express(c). I have
> seen a lot of people being totally unable to get working with StarOffice for 
> the
> simple (yet stupid) reason that the text files created with StarOffice don't
> end in .doc . So, I guess even before doing anything to give people an easy
> step into some great free software products (allow me to use this term in
> this connection), we basically should try to do something about people's 
> general
> reception of computers, about telling people that you don't necessarily need
> any Microsoft software to get your letters written, to get your mail done,
> to browse the web or to do whatever you want to do with your computer. IMHO
> the first step to make people interested in some alternatives is to actually
> *show* them that there are some. I am by heart interested in how to get this
> done in an effective way. :)
>  
> > May be could spend some energy there. We should have some reflexion on
> > how to achieve that.
> 
> Full ACK, here. First and foremost, as stated above, I would see it
> incredibly necessary to make people aware that, for each task to be done with 
> a
> computer, there is a whole category of (both free and non-free) software one 
> might
> utilize to get this special task done. I think it would be a good thing to
> have some guides the way "What do I need to [write e-mails | write letters |
> post-process my scanned images | listen to music | <insert-your-task-here> ]
> with my computer?" This way we possibly would at least make some more people
> aware that there actually *is* a lot of different software out there serving
> right the same purpose.
> 
> Secondly, another problem I am sometimes seeing is that people are having
> severe difficulties in seperating different fields of software, ending in
> statements like "But I am running Microsoft Windows, so I also *need* to use
> Microsoft Office for working." In fact I spent quite some time explaining to 
> one
> of our customers that, for storing *.doc - files on a file server, it doesn't
> matter at all whether this server runs MS Windows, Solaris, GNU/Linux,
> FreeBSD or whatever I could come up with. This, anyhow, probably is a little 
> bit
> more difficult to be done, and I don't quite know how to get it done, since at
> least around here people are, when thinking about computers, just too much
> tied to the Microsoft terminology, to the Windows understanding of how things
> are.
> 
> Comments, anyone? :)
> 
> Cheers,
> Kris
> 
> -- 
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Bruno Coudoin
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