[Server-devel] testing out new packages on top of school server images

[Toby Knudsen]

Greetings,

It was a pleasure speaking with Nate, Kapil, Brent and others at the
Plone Sprint last Friday.  I'd certainly attend another event that
they organized.  I've been confirming a couple things that we
discussed and being distracted by summer phenomenon.

Half of our questions and requirements were technical, but those that
are of a pedagogical nature are equally important to courseware and
need to be addressed.  Here's what I think we agreed upon:

- Hardware requirements.  Will the OLPC laptop be able to display all
the Plone javascript in an acceptable manner?  Are the client-side
requirements too much?  Perhaps Kapil can recommend a series of Plone
actions to test on the internet.

- Educational/pedagogical requirements.   How are teachers going to
use write or specify courseware?  What are best guidelines or rules
for those writing courseware.  I've looked at the OLPC educational
wiki and don't see that this is a policy or convention in place yet.
Any suggestions?  similarly:

- Migrate or adopt available courseware distributions?  What are the
available conventions and what is optimal?  Is MIT OCW a good example
or the best one to follow?

- Packages.  Should Zope/Plone and dependencies be in the core OLPC
server distribution?  What about adding content/courseware after it is
in place?  Are there any risks to adding content and how can we
mitigate these risks?

Toby


On 7/19/07, Toby Knudsen <tobyknudsen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi SJ,
>
> > There has been some discussion of a two-step school server setup,
>
> It would be great to hear what requirements that inspired this
> discussion.  This helps to avoid the phenomenon of qualifying the
> technical issue but missing the actual solution to peoples' needs.
>
> > an installer that sets up core software on a new disk, and a set of
> additional software that gets built on top of this (which might change
> by region).  the latter may need its own package/project.
>
> I feel ready.
>
> > Is there a machine where people who want to test out additional software
> can see what works?
>
> VMware or Xen virtualization means never having to ask if there's a
> machine available.  Userspace VMware has been working fine for me.
>
> Let me know if I may be of any assistance with this.
>
> Toby
>
> [responding to mail list digest, may display quite right.]
>