[ILUG] ILUG @ CESI - Thanks

[Brendan Kehoe]

> It was quite notable at a number of the talks that words and phrases like
> opensource, cross platform compatible, Openoffice, Firefox, Moodle, Audacity
> etc are becoming part of the common language of teachers involved in IT. It
> is still very much a Windows world in schools but I am conscious that the
> level of awareness and openness to other ways of doing things is growing. In
> particular if someone had been selling the Asus eeepc they would have sold
> quite a few over the last couple of days. Any others at the conference share
> these thoughts?

I had conversations with two different teachers who were looking at 
buying a laptop for their school and were curious what might go into the 
description of a good, inexpensive one.  Both discussions were during 
coffee breaks, and I pointed at the laptops set up on the tables and 
said they'd probably be a decent place to start in terms of specs.  I'm 
a strong believer that laptops for schools with >1GB of memory have a 
lot of never-used content.  Others may disagree, but I think lower-scale 
is still absolutely efficient for students and teachers using stuff like 
OpenOffice, Firefox, et al.

Under this comes the recommendation to try to use XP (if not Linux or OS 
X).  I pointed out how so many places are selling memory-drenched 
laptops because they also have the V-word draped over them.  I couldn't 
disparage Vista enough.

Thus having Gavin's talk about Edubuntu and lots of thin clients running 
it for people to try was absolutely awesome.  I was particularly happy 
to see the mention of ILUG in the conference's bag of papers.  (And next 
time want to help with the build-up/tear-down!)

B