Czajkowski

A while back I heard about an initiative being run in Limerick where I’m from about using Ubuntu in the schools this naturally got my attention.   I popped out to met Jennifer who helps run the school for kids.

Firstly some background on the Learning Hub – The Northside Learning Hub was founded as a charitable company limited by guarantee in October 2007. The NLH was formed with an overall aim of working in partnership with local education providers, families and young people to develop and implement practical and solution focused responses to the high levels of educational disadvantage and early school leaving experienced by local communities on the Northside of Limerick City.

I spoke with Jennifer on how she was getting on with using Ubuntu and how the kids found it, but I was curious to see if they had any issues.  I asked them some questions as I was in a bit of a hurry to head out to UDS and then over to the UK, so this post was due out a bit sooner.

Q: what made you use Ubuntu

A friend of ours was getting very excited about Ubuntu and gave us a talk about it. The staff were really won over and we decided that as a community education facility it was really important that we walk the
walk and start using Ubuntu and introducing it all our learners. We wanted to show all our learners ( 9 years upwards) that there is world of free and amazing applications that they can access. We also wanted to show schools and teachers that these applications are free to use and are an very accessible resource for their schools.

Q: How have things change and how do you find it?

We haven’t found it difficult to migrate at all! However, we’ve had some hitches with email and calendars but I’m sure they will be resolved in time. As far as the younger learners are concerned they don’t care what
they are using as long as its fast and does what they tell it to do!

Q: Issues you’ve found when using Ubuntu

Determining the correct setting to use on all machines to ensure that you have a reliable and consistent performance when using networked printers. We work with a number of different operating systems and so
ensuring that we have consistency when manipulating and displaying data can be a challenge, this is not an ubuntu or open source specific issue but a challenge of opening in a multi platform environment.

I’m very glad to see more schools are looking at alternatives to teach and looking at open source software as a tool they can use in the classroom!

Just found this out today, there is a meeting tonight to discuss the plans to set up a Limerick Hackerspace.  If you can make it, come along to the Absolute Hotel at 7:30pm or you can join up to the group on Google Groups HERE. Nice to see one taking off here as there are ones in Galway, Cork and Dublin.

Just for those who might not be keeping up to date with developments at other hackespaces – there are now three in the country – TOG.ie in  Dublin, 091Labs.com in Galway and a new one in Cork

There’s an active forum on Boards.ie for 091labs

There is a Twitter list for people involved in the various  spaces - http://twitter.com/eirepreneur/hackerspaces

I had a pretty amazing weekend down home last weekend.  I was asked back to give  a talk as part of a weekend of talks that took place at my old University. It was a great honour and rather amusing at the same time.  Years ago I had set up the Skynet talks, where you’d invite a Skynet member back and members of the Industry.

Friday night kicked off in the stables, a flash back from my college days. We have two pubs on campus and a small bar. Walking into the Stables bar it was a flash back to the 90′s music.  All of the cheesy head wrecking songs that you know once your heard them the lyrics were going to be in your head for the night.

Clearly my age showed as I couldn’t hear myself and moved out to the courtyard to have conversations, albeit it was a bit chilly I could hear the music and have a conversations so worked out better.

Saturday morning, I was up in time to go into the Market for breakfast and collected Matt Zimmerman who kindly agreed to come over and take part in the days talks.  After a cup of tea in the what looked to be someones kitchen and listening to a Trad Session at 11am we were fed and set up for the day headed to UL for the talks.

1. “Talk 1″ - Paul O’Connor
2. “Google Summer of Code” - Jimmy O’Regan
3. “So you want to build a Hackerspace” - Jeffrey Roe
4. “Ubuntu Inside Out” - Matt Zimmerman
5. “To Ubuntu and Beyond – Where individual participation can take you” - Laura Czajkowski
6. “An introduction to CouchDB” - David Coallier

This time I was a little less nervous talking, but not by much! I gave a similar talk to the one last month but this time was a bit slower and updated slides as I knew the target audience had a clue about Ubuntu and Open Source.

Matt gave his talk with such ease and clarity and it was very enjoyable. All of the talks during the day were interesting and nice to bring people together. they covered a range of topics so there was something there for most people. Students came from Cork, Dublin and Galway so that was great that it wasn’t just one college having these talks. It was a nice way to spend an  afternoon. David and his entertaining ways gave his talk on CouchDB, and very nicely obliged to get us to the pub for the last half of the Ireland V England Rugby game.

It was great to be back again and I had a lovely weekend. glad I gave the talk, and I believe it was recorded and will be up at some point.  Here are the slides at least.