Linux and Education

General discussion about Linux, Linux distribution, using Linux etc.
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osmansiddiq
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Linux and Education

Post by osmansiddiq »

A link between free software and education was first made by Richard Stallman in his essay Why Schools Should Use Exclusively Free Software.
Allow me initially to summarise what Richard Stallman said in his essay: free software should be used exclusively in schools because:

* It can save schools money.
* Schools should promote ways of living that benefit society as a whole; and free software, like recycling, does this.
* It promotes the idea that learning is not wrong, as proprietary software does when students reach an age when they start to ask “how does this work?â€
Last edited by osmansiddiq on Sun Jul 08, 2007 11:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.
osmansiddiq
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45 Minutes to a Moodle Education Server

Post by osmansiddiq »

This beginner article by Mark Rais provides step-by-step instructions for installing Moodle, a Learning Management System, on to a Fedora Linux server. It provides everything necessary to setup a full powered intranet web-server that can support course listings, event calendars, student/teacher communication and much more. Best of all, a prototype server can be functional within about 45 minutes.

http://www.reallylinux.com/docs/installmoodle.shtml
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Post by osmansiddiq »

U can use FreeNX (used for thin-client systems) in schools.
http://freenx.berlios.de
http://nomachine.com/

The mEDUXa project - mEDUXa is a large-scale, government-sponsored initiative to provide a technology-enhanced education to students. So far, over 35,000 computers have been distributed to 1,100 schools, with a potential userbase of 325,000 users.

The mEDUXa project started in 2005 with a choice between GNOME and KDE. KDE was chosen as the best solution in the evaluation stage, partly due to the lower resource requirements and the excellent KIOSK framework, which allows administrators to effectively lock down computers to prevent their misuse and reduce maintenance needs. The system is based on the KDE-derivative of Ubuntu, Kubuntu. The project has 4 main elements: the network, desktop clients, school servers and central servers, which aid administration and system upgrades.

Simplicity is a primary goal of the project, with simplified desktop profiles provided to different student strata, including the important 6-12 age group. A large advantage is that the KDE-based desktop can be comfortably provided in several different languages, which greatly aides language teaching and immigrant students (English, French, German and Arabic), and distinguishes the system from proprietary competitors.

A wiki containing project documentation can be found at hexperides.org, and many of the custom system modifications can be found on https://launchpad.net/~hexperides/
http://www.hexperides.org/hexperides/index.php/Portada

GCompris is an educational software which propose different activities to children from 2 to 10 years old.
GCompris is an educational software suite comprising of numerous activities for children aged 2 to 10. Some of the activities are game orientated, but nonetheless still educational. Below you can find a list of categories with some of the activities available in that category.

- computer discovery: keyboard, mouse, different mouse gesture, ...
- algebra: table memory, enumeration, double entry table, mirror image, ...
- science: the canal lock, the water cycle, the submarine, electric simulation ...
- geography: place the country on the map
- games: chess, memory, connect 4, oware, sudoku ...
- reading: reading practice
- other: learn to tell time, puzzle of famous paintings, vector drawing, cartoon making
http://gcompris.net/-en-

SchoolNet Namibia (http://www.schoolnet.na) so far has hooked up 300+ schools to Linux
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Scratch

Post by osmansiddiq »

Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art -- and share your creations on the web.

Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills. As they create Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also gaining a deeper understanding of the process of design. Currently available for Mac OSX and Windows ,linux version on the way.Scratch is developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab, in collaboration with the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies

http://scratch.mit.edu/
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Post by osmansiddiq »

links of interest

EDUCAUSE is a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology.
http://www.educause.edu/content.asp?PAGE_ID=720&bhcp=1

educational technology, free and open source software, e-learning blog
http://www.stevehargadon.com/

Suns Education Project as a Nonprofit
https://edu-gelc.dev.java.net/

Sakai is an online Collaboration and Learning Environment. Many users of Sakai deploy it to support teaching and learning, ad hoc group collaboration, support for portfolios and research collaboration.

http://sakaiproject.org/

Education 2.0: The next evolution of school software has arrived
http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/showSto ... cleID=6739

Novell Innovation in Linux Education Drives New Learning Options
http://www.irishdev.com/NewsArticle.aspx?id=3085
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Post by osmansiddiq »

How would you like to study at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) for free? It has been nearly six years since MIT first announced their MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) program. More recently, MIT announced that the OCW program, a free and open educational resource (OER) for educators, students, and self-learners around the world, is online and will be completed by 2008. The OCW provides open access to course materials for up to 1,550 MIT courses, representing 34 departments and all five MIT schools. The goal is to include materials from all MIT courses by next year.

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/courses/courses/index.htm
http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html

Eleven other U.S. colleges plan to follow MIT's example, and six of those 12 colleges have offered an online presence (other than MIT):

* The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
http://ocw.jhsph.edu/
* Tufts University
http://ocw.tufts.edu/
* University of California, Irvine
http://ocw.uci.edu/
* University of Notre Dame
http://ocw.nd.edu/
* Utah State University
http://ocw.usu.edu/

The OpenCourseWare Consortium is a by-product of MIT's OER initiative, and its rate of growth makes this a clear success in the educational field. This group now includes members from 16 countries, not including the 14 additional affiliate organizations in its fold. Of these, China is the largest participant with 30 colleges that are active in OpenCourseWare Consortium programs under the organizational group CORE (China Open Resources for Education).

http://ocwconsortium.org/
CORE
http://www.core.org.cn/en/index.htm

Open Source Education Foundation — Purpose is to enhance K-12 education through the use of technologies and concepts derived from The Open Source and Free Software movement.
http://oedb.org/online-programs/educati ... -education

School Forge — Mission is to unify independent organizations that advocate, use, and develop open resources for primary and secondary education.
http://www.schoolforge.net/

Global Network Academy — Purpose is the research and development of open source tools that promote distance learning and online communities.
http://oedb.org/online-programs/educati ... -education
osmansiddiq
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foriegn language learning

Post by osmansiddiq »

And if you are trying to learn a foriegn language
Something that will come in very handy for writing French is a verb conjugator. If you are using Un*x, there is an excellent one for Gnome called Verbiste
http://perso.b2b2c.ca/sarrazip/dev/verbiste.html
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Post by osmansiddiq »

EDU-Nix aims to provide Public Schools with Open-Source alternatives to expensive proprietary software products. The project will consist initially of a redistributable CD that has both a live CD environment, as well as Windows versions of the office and productivity programs.
http://www.edu-nix.org/
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Mind-blasting Japanese language learning tools

Post by osmansiddiq »

Knowledge of a secondary language has long been a coveted skill, whether it be for academics, business, or travel, but learning another language can be a challenging task. While many Western languages at least offer a level of familiarity by sharing the Roman alphabet, Japanese and other Eastern languages offer no such comfort. Here are three applications that can help you overcome some learning roadblocks.
Japanese in particular utilizes three character systems: kanji or Chinese characters, hiragana, and katakana. The last two are Japanese syllabery used when there is no kanji for a word or for pronunciation. Kanji tends to make up the bulk of written Japanese, with hiragana being used for grammar such as verb tenses, leaving katakana reserved for foreign words. Hiragana and katakana can be tricky to learn, as each has 64 syllabic characters, but many of these are only slight variations.

While there are quite a few books on learning Japanese, books can be cumbersome to lug around, along with flashcards and other study materials. But if you have a notebook computer, you can get some learning done anytime by utilizing Kanatest 0.4.2, TangoBlaster 0.7.2, and Langdrill.
http://www.linux.com/feature/116692
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Post by nomankhn »

Dear Osman,

Thanks for sharing your knowledge, that information is really good

Regards
Noman Khanzada
osmansiddiq
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Post by osmansiddiq »

An Australian Math Professor, NJ Wildberger, has developed a new approach to Trigonometry that eliminates the need for classical sine and cosine functions. In his book he claims the approach is more accurate and more rational.

http://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~norman/book.htm

DOAJ lists journals that have an Open Access policy, in this link in the Computer Science field.

http://www.doaj.org/ljbs?cpid=114

Indexed - Fun with Math
Jessica Hagy has a blog called Indexed where she posts philosophical ideas as images drawn on index cards using set theory, Venn diagrams, and the like.
http://indexed.blogspot.com/2007/01/wer ... -hell.html

For some medical videos
http://www.klab.caltech.edu/cns120/videos.php
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Post by osmansiddiq »

VMath - The Next Generation for Math Lectures

http://www.msri.org/communications/vmath/index_html

Free Science and Video Lectures Online
http://freescienceonline.blogspot.com/

Another link
http://www.teach12.com/ttcx/coursedescl ... 160&id=160

webcast.berkeley
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course_deta ... 1906978238

http://www.wifimaps.com/

Wikiversity is intended for the creation and use of free learning materials and activities. The mission of Wikiversity is to empower people to achieve their educational goals using resources produced by the free culture movement. The goal is to create a community of people who support each other in their educational endeavors.
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikiversity
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Post by osmansiddiq »

IRAQI VIRTUAL SCIENCE LIBRARY
https://www.ivsl.org/

Free Global Virtual Scientific Library
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl? ... 01/1643204

International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications
http://www.inasp.info/peri/free.shtml

The electronic Journals Delivery Service (eJDS) is a prototype programme geared to facilitate the access to current scientific literature free of cost in the fields of Physics and Mathematics. The goal is to distribute individual scientific articles via e-mail to scientists in institutions in Developing Countries who do not have access to sufficient bandwidth to download material from the Internet in a timely manner and/or cannot afford the connection. Providing scientists with current literature supports their ongoing research.

http://sdu.ictp.it/ep/ejds.html

HAL is designed for authors to deposit and thus make publicly available scholarly documents from all academic fields. These documents should be uploaded either by one of the authors with the consent of the others or by an authorized person on their behalf (information specialist or librarian, for example).
Before you may post documents to HAL, you must first register as a depositor.

http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/index.php?langue=en

The Directory of Open Access Repositories - OpenDOAR

http://www.opendoar.org/

Multilingual Information Center about Esperanto
http://esperanto.net/
osmansiddiq
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Post by osmansiddiq »

FREE INTERNET GERMAN COURSE
http://www.deutsch-lernen.com/

Translation Course
http://www.logos.it/pls/dictionary/ling ... en?lang=en

This is a comprehensive site providing Video lectures, Audio lectures, animations and Text materials on new technologies in the fields of Electronics, Communications, Computer Science, Networking and Mechanical Engineering.
http://www.freevideolectures.com/index.html

http://www.video101course.com/
http://digital-video-101.classes.cnet.c ... slide_more

totally free internet marketing course
http://imsimple.com/video-totally-free- ... ng-course/
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Post by osmansiddiq »

Teaching with Technology

http://www.mtsu.edu/~smcdanie/CSS_Site/ ... omeSLC.htm

A site for FREE online training, presentations, lessons, tutorials, quotes, quizes, information and courses on Quality Management, Six sigma, Business excellence, 5S, Lean, Benchmarking etc. through internet.
http://www.qualitygurus.com/courses/

Access thousands of lessons or use our tools to create and control access to your own courses, collaborate with colleagues and much more
http://www.tutorom.com/

Artificial Intelligence
http://courses.cs.vt.edu/~csonline/AI/L ... index.html

http://www.ion.uillinois.edu/resources/ ... /index.asp

http://www.indiawaterportal.org/multimedia.html
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