<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif">Martin,</font>
<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif">You bring up some good points.</font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif">By "Wifi" I meant a simple
hub that has both wired connections for the XS, as well as WiFi for teachers/guest/administrators
to have unfiltered access to the internet. The one I have is a D-Link
4-port hub. This would also allow the teachers/administrators to
have a shared network printer if appropriate. The XS would be directly
wired into this hub, not wireless, I agree.</font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif">I agree the XO, in and of itself, is
a great learning tool. I envision three levels here:</font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif">(a) XO only. Teacher has an XO,
students all have XO, and they are able to mesh on their own without any
active antenna. Is that true? I have only</font>
<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif">one XO, so no idea how meshing works.
Teachers maintain their own lesson plans on their own XO machines
and push them out to their students.</font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif">I suggest the "buddy system"
for files. Any files that a student wants to keep, he shares with
a fellow student, and and vice versa. In the event a student has
a problem with their laptop, the files they shared with others will be
on other XO laptops, and can be copied back. This is the logic
behind "LOCKSS" (Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe) --- I am not
suggesting the use of this FOSS software, per se, but rather the concept
can be done between students. Here's a video.</font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif">http://hurstassociates.blogspot.com/2007/10/videos-on-lockss-lots-of-copies-keeps.html</font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif">Alternatively, students learn to save
their work on USB memory sticks. These are getting cheaper and cheaper
every year, and like you have your own XO, you can have your own memory
stick, personalized on a keychain for example. Many of us at IBM
have one on our keyring or attached to our employee badge, to share files
with clients, to act as our digital-briefcase to take stuff to work on
at home, etc.</font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif">(b) Students have XO, Teacher has XO
and access to a WEP-protected WiFi hub. This would allow the teacher
to download activities, digital</font>
<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif">content and such, and do "manual
filtering" (only content he/she deemed age-appropriate would be something
she could offer to the rest of his/her class).</font>
<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif">It would allow teachers to collaborate
with other teachers, guests, and administrators, share lesson plans with
each other, etc. Students can continue to communicate over the mesh,
with each other as above. If there is a centralized "Library
Server", the teacher can access it, download specific content and
send out to the students over mesh. Students that are looking for
specific content could make a request to the teacher to get it on their
behalf.</font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif">If the teacher wants to protect his/her
own lesson plans, student records, etc. he/she can upload to Google
Docs, or one of the many free services that lets people have a 1GB or so
of space to store things remotely.</font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif">(c) Students/teacher have XO, XS has
active antenna and filtered, cached content for high-speed access, downloads
of ebooks and activities, etc.</font>
<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif">Students would have an enriched experience
available to them, in addition to activities on their own XO, have the
option to explore and download digital content, surf the web, send email
to students or mentors in other places, etc. Teachers would have
access to moodle, and students can access moodle lesson plans. Students
and teachers would have access to Library server content.</font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif">The suggestion that we could back up
student XO home directories to the XS machine is not bad. Worst case,
it is only 500MB (space available per XO) times 200 students, so 100GB
disk capacity. We could probably make a "Backup My Data"
page in moodle that uploads the /home directory to the XS server. This
could be activated by the student, or scheduled to happen once a day, once
a week, etc.</font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif">Alternatively, with students having
access to the web, they could backup their files to Google Docs or other
external service. In the event that their laptop broke, they could
download the files onto a fellow student's XO and share the XO until repairs
are complete.</font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif">Everybody I know has lost work in progress
at some point. It is painful, and reminds us to save our work and
take backups more often. This is a lesson in life, and kids can learn
it early. I have found that sometimes losing something means starting
from scratch with a fresh perspective, and often I have much better second
version as a result.</font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif">While all three levels are better than
what students have today in most schools, one could argue that each successive
level provides benefits, obviously at a cost, but without sacrificing dropping
down to lower levels during a time of outage. Teachers should be
able to teach without moodle, access to the internet, or LIbrary server
content. I agree we do not want to set up artificial dependencies.</font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif">As I mentioned on the topic of redundancy,
you can figure out single-points-of-failure, determine the impact of their
failure, and then decide what to do about it. This could all be part
of the teacher training process. Teach teachers how to operate at
all three levels, and let them be able to adjust as appropriate to the
current conditions.</font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif">--- Tony<br>
</font>
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<td><font size=1 color=#0060a0 face="Microsoft Sans Serif"><b>Tony Pearson</b></font><font size=1 face="Microsoft Sans Serif"><br>
Senior Storage Consultant, IBM System Storage™<br>
Telephone: +1 520-799-4309 | tie 321-4309 | Cell: +1 520 990-8669<br>
email: tpearson@us.ibm.com | GSA: http://tucgsa.ibm.com/~tpearson<br>
Blog: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/InsideSystemStorage
AKA: 990tony Paravane, eightbar specialist </font></table>
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