Warm Greetings To The FOSS Community, The Meeting for the month of February 2009 was conducted successfully.
The turnout at the meeting was pretty impressive compared to the last few months. The interesting thing was that, the people who came were from varied fields: - Teachers - Journalists - Students - Hardware Vendors and Service Providers - Neurosurgeon, Psychiatrist - System Administrators - Accountant - Programmers - Vigilance - Business Manger The Meeting agenda was planned in accordance with the ongoing initiative to bring the teachers closer to the Free Software Community. This time we had a better turnout with 4 teachers attending the meeting. Two of them were master trainers in the district. There were also two other people related to educational sector, one providing support to the teachers and the other a computer lab in charge. Following is a brief snapshot of the meeting. Date: 22-02-2009 Time: 2:15pm - 6.00pm Venue: Internet Club, IInd Floor, AMI Trust Building, Broadway Enclave, Broadway, Ernakulam Attendance : 30 - The first session as usual was an Introduction to Free Software, GNU Movement, Open Source Software, Licenses and GNU/Linux Distributions. - There were lot of questions from among the audience, especially on the License. "Debian GNU/Linux v5.0 Lenny" - The release of Lenny has been one of the most anticipated events in the Free Software World, and we started our meeting with a brief discussion about the Debian Project, its goals and how it was a true community project. The discussion was interesting because it was centered around GNU/Linux Distributions. - The presentation used was the one from Jaldhar H Vyas, an Official Debian developer. http://people.debian.org/~jaldhar/talks/ - After the presentation many among the audience were eager to get their hands on using Debian Lenny, for which we had a couple of DVD Sets available. - Since many people were new to GNU/Linux, we decided to do a parallel session on Debian Installation. Agenda: How the community can come closer to Teachers and students ? - The discussion moved into top gear with teachers, students, hardware vendors and managers come together to discuss, how the Free Software community can embrace the Teachers and students. - Many people proposed solutions, but the implementation was difficult, due to the politics involved in the educational sector and the lack of vision among the teachers. - The teachers explained that the basic technical issues faced in schools, were the major hurdle that was preventing the teachers from gaining confidence to use Free Software. - The teachers also emphasized the lack of proper knowledge among the top level trainers. The direct impact was that the knowledge was almost nil when it finally reached the students. - This was a major hurdle for students to think out of the box with Free Software and teachers to properly guide them. - Many also criticized the syllabus which was just another conventional model one. One person commented that if the school IT syllabus could be formulated through collaboration over the Internet with people from the Free Software Community and Teaching community. The same was suggested for Textbook content Problems faced by teachers : - Lack of core knowledge, apart from basic operating knowledge. - Lack of support for common hardware problems. - Lack of interaction with community. - Lack of time for teaching IT and Free Software Subjects. - Lack of knowledge on the possibilities of Free Software. - How to effectively teach Free Software ( not just as an alternative). How the community can help - Conduct training sessions - Brainstorming with people from community and teachers. - Build community based support centres. - Involve teachers and students in all Free Software community activities. - Build up a suitable syllabus for the curriculum. - Create suitable content for textbooks. - Initiate formation of high school groups. - Try to improvise the teaching methods used for IT. Some immediate action items were listed as follows ACTION ITEMS: - Involve more teachers interested in collaborating with the Free Software Community. - Vacation classes for students and teachers, in the model of "Swathanthra Software Sangamam" - More interaction of teachers with ILUG Cochin and thereby finding solutions for their own problems. Everyone moved on to have Tea and snacks. After the tea break, it was time for the technical presentation - Teachers are not introduced to Command Line tools. This makes it very difficult for them to understand the core working and also makes them crippled to handle situations where the problem requires more than a "few clicks". Technical Presentation : Command Line Utilities by Sameer The session started of with discussing about the basic GNU/Linux Filesystem. - Different directories were explained - The significance of the contents of the directories and their relevance for users were explained. - Device Files and Names of common devices were explained. - FHS was mentioned. Next the session moved onto command line Utilities - fdisk - mkfs.ext3 - tar - gzip.gunzip - bzip2.bunzip2 - mount,umount - Questions like formatting USB Disks to using the apt-get tool in Debian were raised. Conclusion -The meeting concluded with the teachers expressing their support to realize the action items mentioned above. The plans to change the name of the group was also mentioned. The meeting concluded at 6.00pm. - As usual, there were tons of questions being fired from different locations as soon as the meeting got over. Many of them were answered personally for the person in question. Although not everyone got his answer, they returned with the hope of finding it through the Mailing List. We thank the following teachers who spend their valuable time for our initiative. - V.K.Nizar - Sanal Kumar - Jayadevan - Antony We thank all the attendees for coming and urge them to put their feedback on the mailing list so we can improve future meetings. And hope the next meeting is bigger and better. Photos and Details of the meeting will be available on the web site soon. Attendees Roshin Roy Sunil Kumar A U Siby P Varkey R Satheesh Dr. Tharun Krishna A X Antony Arun Aravind Rahul R Kumar Shaun Thomas Jennings Joseph Johny Thomas Sanal Kumar Rajesh V Azad N Dileep A Z Kevin Sha G Venkata Subrahmanian S Anandan Akbar Ali V K Nizar C S Jayadevan Binny V A Shibin K Reeny Kurian Mathew Thayyil Ajith C Sujiv Sreenadh Sameer Jay Jacob Sanjai Website : www.ilug-cochin.org IRC : #ilugkochi on irc.freenode.net ML : mailinglist at ilug-cochin.org _______________________________________________ Mailinglist mailing list [email protected] http://ilug-cochin.org/mailman/listinfo/mailinglist_ilug-cochin.org
