[ale] Please help me give away PCs.

[Dow Hurst]

Have we got a volunteer as a point of contact down here in this area for
the Lassiter project?  Can the PCs stay where they are for long or do
they need to be moved right away?  I still use a 486 as my main machine
at home and don't consider it obsolete for the basic stuff my wife and I
do.  I wouldn't run VMware and Win95 on it, for sure. You know, I think
there are people at my church who do home schooling.  A donation to the
church, who could distribute them to those in need, would be nice.
Dow

Jeff Duffy wrote:
> 
> 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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__________________________________________________________
Dow Hurst                   Office: 770-499-3428
Systems Support Specialist  Fax:    770-423-6744
1000 Chastain Rd.
Chemistry Department SC428  Email:dhurst at kennesaw.edu
Kennesaw State University         Dow.Hurst at mindspring.com
Kennesaw, GA 30144
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