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2015 Week 10 (w/c 02 March)

I finally have a week at home after working away in Sweden for the last 5 weeks. I have a backlog of many small projects and experiments related to eLearning. I’d like to provide a snapshot here, partly to encourage me & also in case you’d like to help somehow.

  1. Test RACHEL on the new Raspberry Pi Model 2 B+. I bought six of these cute, more powerful units a month ago. I need to update the kernel on an existing RACHEL Pi image so the software will boot on the new model.
  2. Explore with reducing the runtime memory to see if we can get RACHEL to run adequately on the Raspberry Pi Model A+ devices (with 256MB RAM). Damien already discovered one of the web servers is using 10’s of MB of RAM to simply redirect a web browser from port 80 to ka-lite in one of the older RACHEL distribution. We should be able to slim down the memory footprint with a little experimentation and might even be able to improve the performance in other ways.
  3. See if I can create a working LibraryBox image to run in a TP-Link mini-router.
  4. Try ka-lite for Android on a Tablet device
  5. Then there are lots of tasks related to improving the management and deployment of RACHEL
  6. Plan my workshop for eLearning-Africa conference, on 20th May in Addis Adaba, Ethiopia.
  7. Write/publish various articles related to the field-trials of the Android Tablets and Raspberry Pi’s.
  8. Help volunteers at Cognizant who have asked for manuals to help people get involved in aspects of the project e.g. translating ka-lite, and some of the content used in RACHEL.
  9. Helping the OPTE school in Santiago, Chile to guide a teacher in the use of ka-lite with teaching mathematics to class 4 pupils.
  10. Experiment with the 3 recently arrived BRCK devices. One was a replacement for my early kickstarter device and the other 2 are potentially for pilot projects in the field.
  11. Ongoing tests of the reliability of Raspberry Pi’s, the SD-Cards, etc.
  12. Testing alternatives to the Raspberry Pi’s

I suspect there’s lots more I’ve forgotten to include. However this might enough suggestions of where people might be able to help.