Talk:School server

Status of this info

What is the status of the info in this page? User ramblings or OLPC page?

At first it seemed to fit the Category:Hardware ideas, but the use of XS & XSX names seems to hint or plays into some kind of officiality... although it doesn't give the impression of being so.

Given that there are OLPC plans for the servers, this page should clearly state the origin of its content: community or OLPC. --Xavi 09:34, 27 January 2007 (EST)

This page (the XS_Server_* pages) are currently ramblings (hence not referenced from a higher level), which over time have some decent chance of becoming official.

I'm new to these parts, can you explain why the origin of the information must be stated ? --wad

I was just wondering if my classification was 'correct'... :) I had heard 'rumors' about the server and its 'soon more info'...

Thus the 'origin' question: 'idea' or 'fact'? Personally, I take 'ideas' pages as that, ideas--without any concrete implications. While non-ideas pages have a bit more 'weight' on the subject. But that's my PoV... and of course, material is not consistently edited :) --Xavi 00:50, 28 January 2007 (EST)

All 'facts' begin as 'ideas'. You stumbled on a set of questions being posed, which I hope will blossom into 'facts'. The wiki is being used so that these questions can be discussed and edited by interested members of the community. --wad 1/28/07

The correct classification would also list it in Software ideas, as it is a system comprising both hardware and software.--Wad 00:03, 29 January 2007 (EST)

Any old OLPC laptop is a server

All of the OLPC laptops can act as servers. If one kid creates an activity bundle, then his laptop becomes a server. If one kid plugs in a USB thumb drive or USB CD Reader, then his laptop can serve content to others.

Of course. But there are resources needed which aren't well served by ad-hoc presence. If your laptop is acting as a server, you can't just put it too sleep to save power, or close it up to take home! Right now, we use a variety of methods for transferring content from machine to machine (rsync, ftp, smb). We can also do this transfer using an intermediary (rsync,ftp,smb it to a machine which serves it up via http/ftp). The advantage of using the intermediary is that others (even you) can easily access it later.

We ARE trying to build a system which is as distributed and scalable as possible (c.f. the choice of mDNS for service discovery). Perhaps the school server is just a laptop running a different set of software. At the end of the day, however, good engineering practice will probably suggest a slightly different combination of processor/memory/network than that optimum for a laptop, thus the discussion about school servers--Wad 00:49, 2 February 2007 (EST)

These pages seem to have been written by someone stuck in the US high-school IT environment mindset. Free your mind if you want to contribute useful stuff to the OLPC project! Who would have thought of a screen which shifts to low resolution monochrome to save energy? Who would have thought of a wifi module which keeps on running after the computer is shut down?

Please take your ad-hominem attacks elsewhere, they are not constructive... (And please identify yourself!) Constructive would be starting a separate page dedicated to explaining exactly how each of the services being proposed for the school server could be implemented in a fully distributed manner, and starting a real dialog on the pros and cons. Feel free to link to it from the School server page.--Wad 14:43, 1 February 2007 (EST)

BTW, the network interface of XO is strongly reminiscent of the Monsoon project at the MIT AI lab. Separate network processors are not a new idea.

School district networks

Indexing, whitelisting, blacklisting

A sensible index of suitable web pages for unlimited access by pupils in school could, for example, be built from the index of http://scholar.google.com/ (if available under license), the search index of the National Science Digital Library (if available under license) and further search engine indices (e.g. http://education.wikia.com/wiki/Search). A crawler could build a list of "neighboring pages" and permit websites into the index which were neither blacklisted nor filtered by automatic content filtering nor suspiciously "near" to blacklisted pages. Blacklisted pages could be pages without educational content but sufficiently interesting content so pupils could waste a lot of time on these pages. A small problem could be that some pages may contain games and edutainment adequate for younger pupils but inadequate for older pupils. A tolerant strategy would just allow these pages for all age groups. Use of a large web cache per school district or region would suggest itself for schools in developing countries. --Fasten 12:07, 21 February 2007 (EST)

School district wiki

A school district wiki for Cologne ^[CAS] could, for example, connect all pupils of the same grade (about 10000 pupils) in the whole city. Such a wiki could be initialized with the SOS Children 2006 Wikipedia CD Selection and invite the pupils to extend the knowledge base within their own grade. This could be a form of designed community: The overly large group could encourage pupils to experiment with forms of organization and would at the same time provide a sufficiently large pool to find any number of new acquaintances close-by. Pupils could be asked to publish select homework after correction as articles in the wiki but could otherwise be free to publish whatever seemed noteworthy or interesting enough.

Wiki essay

The task of writing a wiki essay could involve forming an author group of three to eight pupils from different schools in the school district wiki and working, over the semester or the holidays, collaboratively on an essay about a chosen topic. The author group could cooperate with other authors to contribute to a larger project in a chosen knowledge area (similar to Wikipedia projects). The results should be graded by tutors and teachers. Mentors could help to locate information or offer advice on how to collaborate.

Rationale:

Promote use of the wiki.
Promote computer skills.
Promote slow and considered communication through the wiki.
Promote writing skills.
Promote collaboration skills.

Promoting the use of a school district wiki may be necessary or infrequent use could spoil the community building effect. Other youth portals may suffer from lack of self-organization (an administrated forum leaves the users with nothing to organize), lack of motivation to produce appealing content (what good is an internet forum when the content is mostly small talk? Small talk is probably more entertaining when you meet people in person) and infrequent use (without an external motivation to visit a web forum pupils may chose to ignore it because the perspective of building an active youth community from an empty wiki or forum may not occur easily to young pupils).

Startup

The middle of junior high school may be a time when pupils may have sufficient writing skills and may be approaching sufficient understanding to build their own community. To facilitate cooperation teachers organized in their own school district wiki, inaccessible for the pupils, could prepare homework tasks to be published on the wiki that brought together pupils from different schools through converging research tasks. Converging research tasks are easily organized by publishing pages of topics and allowing teachers to note the specific tasks they have assigned or intend to assign on the pages of a topic. This way duplicate tasks can be avoided but groups of pupils would meet other groups with related tasks.

A startup phase could consist of two month in which every pupil would have to publish at least three articles in the wiki. Mentors could take shifts as mediators and administrators, especially during the startup phase, but could avoid to make any rules besides the self-given rules of the community.

Learning community

An overabundance of community activities can also prevent independent and deliberate learning by creating a continual disturbance; this is why a learning community with respect for learning and rules to promote learning can be a valuable addition for a teenager. What does a school district wiki do in this respect? The community found in the wiki is bound to be interesting because there is no other meeting place which a similar abundance of new acquaintances. At the same time the wiki gives the community a purpose that is missing from many other internet forums or chat systems: The goals of creating meaningful content and of self-organization in this community. The presence of mentors in the system can help to guide pupils to make use of the wiki in a meaningful way and to push back less sensible uses or over-commitment of eager pupils. Mentors as administrators could temporarily block users showing unintended behavior (e.g. over-commitment).

Pupil magazines

A school district wiki would also allow to form more interesting pupil magazines centered on areas of interest rather than local school affairs. A sufficient number of writers for almost any given topic can be assumed to show up in a larger school district. Pupil magazines could focus on music, cinema, games, books, travel, tutoring, mentoring or any other specific topic that may be interesting for pupils and try to aim for professional quality. In a wiki this would require defining, maintaining and defending editing policies of the individual publications.