[ale] Please help me give away PCs.

[Jeff Duffy]

Well,

 I've contacted Jon and let him know that we have a home for at least
some of the PCs for the Lassiter project. Our supplier baked out at the
last minute because of an overzealous legal department (who was worried
that they would be sued for not disposing of the monitors as hazmat), so
this is a godsend for the project.

 We have been contacted by BSDi and Red Hat, both of whom are going to
donate software and books. I agree that just throwing computers in a
classroom without any sort of plan is a recipe for failure, but we are
steadily moving toward the goal of rewriting some useful training tools
in mod_perl, and at the very least can provide the students with access
to a wider range of research material via websites we have already
selected for the purpose.

 I suppose a few people are skeptical about what possible good a bunch
of old 486s can do in a classroom, but I think that we've been pretty
careful about engineering the plan to account for *exceptionally* thin
clients, and kept in mind that a computer in a classroom shouldn't just
be a tool to get kids out of the instructor's hair, but provide some
real value in terms of learning.

 I'm interested to hear in past failures, too; any mistake I can avoid
is worth the time. 

 Jeff Duffy
 jeff at wegrow.org
 http://www.wegrow.org
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