School server ideas
Some ideas for school server implementations and extensions.
Korea: experimental ideas
THE CONTENT BELOW IS WRITTEN NOT BY THE OLPC FOUNDATION, BUT BY OLPC KOREA CITIZEN GROUP, WHICH IS NOT RELATED WITH THE OLPC FOUNDATION.
Refer to School server by the OLPC foundation.
As some the OLPC models deployed by South Korea are somewhat modified in their specs, school servers also are. The most prominent aspect of school servers to be distributed in South Korea is their mesh network. We hope those school servers themselves establish an independent national-wide communication infra.
Secondly, as we hope those school server architecture to be harmonized with the Vision 2030 plan of the Korean government, we need some additional features.
School Servers for South Korea
We estimate that there be about;
- 25,000 servers for kindergartens
- 40,000 servers for primary schools
- 59,000 servers for middle schools
- 17,000 servers for occupational training high schools
- 38,000 servers for high schools for preliminary college education
- 80,000 servers for undergraduate courses
- 30,000 servers for graduate schools (master degree)
- 4,000 servers for graduate schools (doctoral degree)
Total 293,000 servers, needing budgets of approximately 87,900,000 dollars (assuming $300 per unit).
As almost every town has more than one school, those 293,000 servers alone can form an independent information highway not to mention of current wired information super-highway.
Government servers
Why government servers?
According to the long-term IT plan of the Korean government (which want to integrate all national-wide IT resources into ONE (or SINGLE) Enterprise Architecture), we hope to establish A Kind of School Server Infra for the Korean government.
Secondly, we hope to remove barriers between academic (or tutoring) areas and non-academic areas such as governmental server or business sectors. we think government itself or business itself can be a good education field for student as is a classroom.
We hope to distribute ONE governmental server Per every 100 governmental employees. As there are about 1,000,000 government employees at the end of 2006, we need at least 10,000 governmental servers. We are now constructing some kind of web architecture for those servers to act as Intelligent Governmental Web Server, which performs some repetitive service processes automatically without intervention of government employees. See Federal Enterprise Architecture.
Educational role of governmental servers
We are now analyzing the services provided by the Korean government, and approximately classified those services into 60,000 types, being hierarchically structured from level 1 ~ level 6.
Those 60,000+ government services will be expressed by Moodle courses. We hope any student (or citizen) can visit those Moodle servers and learn how governments operates and how each service is provided to citizens.
Briefly, we are now converting governments to yet another classroom for children.
Business servers
Factory or office also can be a good classroom for children. So, we classified all business sectors of South Korea into about 30,000 categories based on UNSPSC (UN Standard Server and Product Classification).
Our plan is quite simple. Establish a virtual company or factory where children can play as business men or factory workers, which is more real than SimCity and less real than actual businesses. Those servers also be equipped with Moddle.
We hope those 30,000 servers be located in somewhat isolated areas where school server or government server is unavailable, and perform a role of bridge between school or government servers.