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List:       kde-edu-devel
Subject:    [kde-edu-devel] Linuxtag - report of kdeedu meeting
From:       Eva Brucherseifer <eva () kde ! org>
Date:       2002-06-23 20:10:21
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Hi all,

Linuxtag is now since 2 weeks over and I still owe you a report of our little 
meeting... sorry for being so late, I was quite busy lately.

The people who took part in the meeting were:
- Tim Jansen (developer of krfb, desktop sharing)
- Jens Benecke (member of pingoS, http://www.pingos.schulnetz.org/, 
   This is a german group of linux users who helps schools to install and 
   administrate linux)
- Klas Kalass (developer of keduca)
- Robert Gogolog ('gogo', *sorry, don't remember where he is involved in*)
- Carsten Niehaus (developer of kalzium)
- me (involved everywhere and nowhere ;-)

There also is a picture of us at 
http://pics.jensbenecke.de/linuxtag-2002/IMG_0326

The whole meeting was more of a brainstorming, so here is an unordered list of 
the ideas ans comments that I have written down. Please excuse technical 
incorrectness in the following part, since I am no expert of all things. I am 
only trying to report what has been said.

* Squeak
Jens suggested to have a closer look at the Squeak project (www.squeak.org) to 
use it as a coding language for children, so that they can learn coding.

* using krfb in schools
krfb is a VNC implementation where one user can invite another one to to share 
his desktop. Both have then the same desktop and have both control over the 
mouse and the keyboard. This could be used in classrooms by the teacher to 
show somthing to the students or to look what the students are doing. 
Commercial projects in this field are:
- Apple's remote desktop: http://www.apple.com/remotedesktop/education.html
- MasterEye  http://www.mastereye.com/ (german) or 
http://www.mastersolutionus.com/ (english, but I couldn't find the same 
products there)
- INIS http://www.trinet.de/produkte/inis/info.htm (german only)
Right now krfb is focusing on remote desktop usage for user support and not 
for schools. But already a lot is possible and a good howto would of course 
help. Right now the system is based on personal invitations or invitation by 
email, where the first user gives a password to the second user, who can then 
attach himself to the desktop of the first user. The first user has than a 
little eye in the systemtray where he can control the session.
What is missing here is an automatic setup of privileges for a classroom 
session and also a tool for the teacher so that he can see the desktops of 
all students at one glance. Unfortunately I don't know if Tim or anyone else 
plans to work on this.
As a sidenote - Jens reported about a nice feature of MasterEye where the 
teacher can darken the screen when he shows something to the students. Only 
the cursor and an area around it is then in normal mode, so that the students 
can follow the cursor much better.

* libedu
Scott reported about his first steps for a common edu library. We mainly found 
that topic "configuration of the children mode" is not really clear yet. 
We agreed with Scott, that we actually don't know how children's needs are and 
that it is therefore rather difficult to code somthing. The question arose, 
if maybe accessibility requirements are similar. Actually we need to do some 
research here and get the help of educators and psychologists. If I remember 
right, Scott wanted to start that, but of course he needs supporters.

The second questions was, how to implement a children mode. One possibilty 
would be to have a complete children style using the QT/KDE style engine, but 
then all applications use that style and we cannot do everything we maybe 
would like to do. Also there is the question, wether we always switch _all_ 
edu apps or only one.
Scott proposed (was it Scott?) to implement own edu widgets, which either 
fallback to normal widgets in the adult mode or have some advanced look in 
the children mode. This could be compared to the buttons in the konsole which 
can be configured to show an icon, icon and text or text only.
With regard to the configuration we agreed on the idea to have a global edu 
dialog which is kcontrol, but which also must be able to be integrated into 
each edu applications configuration menu. An example for that is the crypto 
configuration which is in kcontrol, but also in konqueror's and kmail's 
configuration dialog. 

Well, in the end we again agreed that we first need more information about 
_what_ we should implement before we decide on _how_ to do it.

* Learning the Desktop
Klas told us that during his booth duty several people asked whether kdeedu is 
about edutainment programs or about learning kde. That brought up the 
question if and how it can be realised to record movies which show 
desktop/program usage. 
Tim told us, that the 80% of the code that would be needed for that is already 
implemented in krfb. The reason is, that he needs to capture the screen as 
well to send it via a VNC. But he doesn't do sound recording from the 
microphone and also both stream need to be combined into an AVI. 
What we cannot do with KDE (yet) is cutting and playing of the movie 
afterwords, since KDE is missing a video framework. 
Tim suggested to use gstream (the corresponding gnome framework), although he 
said, that it's hard to work with it, but that it is very complete. He was 
very pessimistic about the efforts in kde to start an own project. Actually 
the rest of us wasn't too much interested in the details since we'd rather 
let the multimedia people decide about it and we'd only use it :-)

OK, that was it. I hope I haven't forgotten anything or got it wrong. If so - 
please let me know.

Thank you for reading this huge mail until the end :-)

Cheers,
eva

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