Mobile IT Education? 240
SickKiwi asks: "A
client, a local polytechnic, has recently asked me to come up with
plans for a mobile IT bus to bring technology to rural areas. I
would love to find out what other people in the field have come up
with in the way of workstation layout, OS choices and Internet
connectivity. There doesn't appear to be a huge amount of material
available but as the technology gets smaller, mobile classrooms
become more and more practical." What vehicles would work best
for this kind of application? A converted bus? A mobile home? An
18-wheeler with a heavily customized trailer? What kind of hardware
would you put in it?
Depends on budget of course. (Score:3, Insightful)
Honestly... (Score:3, Insightful)
Have the ambitious ones come to the city to learn and take their newfound knowledge back with them.
Unless this is simply a scam you are running.
OS Choices? (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, if that isn't a loaded question...
Of course 99% of the community will say Linux, but I'll be the guy modded down that says go with Win2K. Don't do anything too hairy with the Win2K boxes (to get it so you don't need to worry about crashes), but MS makes good GUI's. Its easier to understand point-and-click with people that don't know how to use a mouse, than command line execution in a shell window.
Sure, you can spend mucho time getting SuSE (or GNOME) to have nothing but point and click, but I ask one question:
What do you have more of (or, more freedom of)?:
Time to setup the systems, or
Money to buy the systems?
hmmm (Score:3, Insightful)
i-Macs (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, OS X is perfect for little kids that haven't yet gotten into the bad habit of using MS Windows.
Bus - Bad, Trailer - Good (Score:2, Insightful)
Put it in a trailer that can be pulled by a large rig. This will give you much more space and better heating/cooling options.
A school bus is made to commute students, not sit around w/them working in it. Your eqipment would kill most of your available space. (Not just computers- but power, a.c., all that good stuff)
Not to mention- what do you do when the bus breaks down? Let it sit until you can drop a new engine or tranny in it?
Much better to hitch the trailer to a new truck and keep rolling.
These are just a few of what to seem to be the more obvious reasons why a bus would be a poor choice.
.
better idea (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:OS Choices? (Score:3, Insightful)
What? Oh my...
My Grandma got a new computer from the family for Christmas. Nice new Dell box with WinXP pre-installed. Now Grandma's last computer was running DOS, with automenu. (automenu would run programs for you, and when you exited the program, it would dump you back into automenu. She never used the command line.)
Anyway, try and answer this question:
When do I click once, and when do I double click?
Doesn't seem like a hard one, but...
single click web links.
click once to select icons on desktop
click once for start menu
click once to run a program on the start menu
double click to run a program from it's icon on the desktop...
and it goes on and on...
If MS created good UI, you would be able to answer that question in four sentences at most...
Re:OS Choices? (Score:3, Insightful)
I believe if you enable "Active Desktop", everything is a single click, web-style. You might give that a try (I haven't used it in a long time, and I don't know what it looks like in XP).
The easiest... (Score:3, Insightful)
Use the largest van (trailer) you can legally drive around with (53' I think) and build in a slide out section on one side. If you figure the front five feet go to HVAC, servers, a generator (sound insulated, 5 kW may be more than enough, two 5 kW if you want to be sure and have a backup) and storage and use 4' per workstation you should be able to fit a total of 24 workstations in. I would seriously recommend using laptops with 802.11, again Starband and a proxy. During transport and parking of the van these can be stored in a secured location. You want to be careful you don't have too much trouble with vibration damage too, not much of a problem if you've got a suspension system in the vehicle or trailer.
Keep in mind you'll need an exit at both ends, you don't want to be the guy responsible for a bunch of kids getting incinerated.
Be careful with the lighting too. Think about a nice warm environment, the kind you'd like to work in.
Fire for the prehistoric man? (Score:4, Insightful)
Is this like introducing fire to early humans? Or is it like selling freezers to Eskimos? Are those living in rural areas really going to benefit from this?
I think we can all agree that broadband connections in many urban areas are either severely lacking or extremely expensive... so why would they be any cheaper in rural areas? Sure, there could be a community effort to bring broadband to all, but I'm guessing this bus is not going to be visiting those communities anyways. Local telcos are forced to sell rural telephone lines below cost (offset by higher prices in urban areas); however, broadband does not fall under this regulation.
So one day, suddenly the mobile-tech bus drives up and stops next to Billy Bob's house. Billy Bob doesn't know anything about computers and probably is not going to understand the possibilities of them. But if Billy Bob has children, they may be very much interested in the mobile-tech bus and the goodies inside. But how does the mobile-tech bus really do anything for the rural inhabitants? It's like parading around in a Ferrari and saying, "Gee, isn't this cool? You could have this, but you can't afford it... sorry."
So now you've managed to generate some interest in computers and broadband in rural areas, but they still won't be able to make use of it.
I'd like to offer you a solution to the problem, but I cannot. I would recommend that you build your mobile-tech bus while at the same time working with local ISPs or government to promote broadband, etc so hopefully when the bus shows up, you're not trying to sell freezers to Eskimos -- instead, you have a plan for dispersing the technology to those who you're hoping will benefit from it.
Easy way to get around this. (Score:3, Insightful)
There's an easy way to answer that question.
Open Windows Explorer and go to Tools -> Folder Options. At the bottom of the dialog box, there is a "Click items as follows" selection box. Select the bottom radio button, and everything on your desktop acts like the Web -- single click to execute; mouseover to select.
That's not to say that Windows doesn't have its share of usability issues. However, this one is no longer one of them.
What are you trying to teach? What size classes? (Score:4, Insightful)
Some of your decisions will be pretty obvious - basic flat-screens have come down in price enough that you're far better off using them than CRTs, because you're trading off the cost of the equipment vs. the cost of a bigger bus and more electricity. But if you're trying to show things to a larger group of people, you'll have to find something that fits your budget but still works, though that may be "display the same slides on N screens at once." And of course you'll want a couple of CD-R-burners for giving away software, as well as stacks of blank CDs and floppies.
Will you be showing off how to build hardware? Letting people know what the basic guts of a PC are like is valuable, so you'll probably want some basic PCs, card tables, and screwdrivers for people to play with, and spare parts to make up for the ones you'll lose or break. But if you're also doing telemetry, you'll need whatever flavors of hardware that uses, whether it's simple RS-232 stuff like X-10 or fancier data bus things, and you'll need a few sample things to telemeter.