Archive for Education

GNU/Linux @ Schools

February 14, 2007 at 10:08 pm · Filed under CMS, Education

Current efforts to offer Israeli school’s an Open Source CMS have the potential of solving, altogether, many of the problems that we face today at schools.

Our on-going attempts to implement a GNU/Linux at schools have involved a considerable overhead, and unless its backed by substantial funding and especially the approval and commitment of the Ministry of Education or other powerful organizations like Match (CET – Center for Educational Technology), its bound to involve considerable and draining efforts. It takes time before the system is smoothly integrated with the schools system, and training must take place (we’ve been putting much efforts on building such a training program for school system administrators, teachers and off-course children, you can see these efforts here).

One of the major reasons Ort Hatzor High School was interested in a Linux Terminal Server (LTSP) system was the promise they’d be able to add additional computer stations for teachers loading exam results, especially during the crowded exam period. The only problem was, The Ort portal is only compatible with Explorer. We could not find a way to overcome the issue of loading exam results to the mutual Ort respiratory.

CMS’s Iv’e seen gathering pace and fund, in the last year or so, like Drupal, Joomla — which rumor says you’ll be in pains trying to get support for, and Lahak which unlike the other two is a native Hebrew CMS overcoming bidi problems, all have the potential to be comparably, low resource intensive, overcome schools sticky layer, while solving Web Site Standartization issues that are unfortuantly so common in Israeli Web Sites.

Comments (3)

About

February 5, 2007 at 12:05 pm · Filed under About, Database, Education, Enterprise web 2.0, FOSS, Open Source Companies, start-up, Wiki


Yael Talmor

Picture originally uploaded by pdcawley.
If I’d been asked to tag my interests they would probably include:
disruptive technologies, processes, change, innovation, organizations, and the idea of future scenarios.

I’ve been working with companies on building an on-line community of users around their product, and have recently began lecturing to organizations about the use of enterprise web 2.0 tools (always interested to know more about new tools, and also about methods of measuring these tools). You can find some of my thoughts on democratizing enterprises and more recent writing on social networking tools in the enterprise.

The Free and Open Source world has been and still is a great knowledge base of many of the current processes i’m interested in. For instance, the dynamics of social networking tools in enterprises, a culture of innovation, future organizations, democratization of certain enterprises, marketing techniques in a communication intensive world, and more are not new in the open source space, while many of these have been practiced by open source companies and communities for a while now.

At late 2004 I’ve started a database of Open Source companies. The database project, includes information about Open Source companies, their community relationship, ecosystem’s and many more, and was a semi-research project. It hasn’t been maintained for quite a while but can be found here. The database also includes a list of Israeli open source companies their area of expertise and their contact information.

I’m Founder/Director at Vaya Research Center for FOSS where we’ve been building a system that will provide support services for Israeli schools teaching and implementing FOSS. The project is a joint venture with ISOC IL and a major Israeli FOSS news and forum site called Whatsup.
The system is being written by Meir Kriheli and is based on Django, it promises to be a great Wiki style system. You can check it out at http://schools.whatsup.co.il (still in Beta stage and currently only for Hebrew speakers).

Leave a Comment