General help

Hi Visvanath, without that little bit of information, it does make a difference, but Offline Moodle is a great idea. I will be talking to Dan Marsden in the next couple of days at MoodleMootAu probably, and find out a little more about this project, likely to be very interesting. 

The portable aps method may be part of the solution I present. My local University maintains computers with full Internet Access for students. Each semester they reformat the hard drives replacing anything the students have loaded. I will propose something like this on a monthly basis. I will have to find a keylogging program. I will suggest a sneakernet email program to give inmates a reason to not destroy the computer.

I will not bring up the concept of inmates using computers. It will not fly. There are programs in the central prisons which do use computers but I am not conversant with them. I worked at mine. 

I want to present the ability to have a library of video presentations. I will also suggest the sneakernet email system which can be meshed with the present one of email at the library costing fifty cents each.  There will be no email between barracks. Although it occurs communication between barracks is forbidden.  I can also see a library of e books being available because storage is so cheap. These suggestions will be a means to protect the equipment. Things break easily in a prison. If a core group of inmates value a device it is much more likely to keep working.

The computer on a stick is fascinating. But I will not even suggest it. There will be no wifi or bluetooth unless it will be easier to transfer the videos to the hard drive and collect the email. If I suggest used state equipment I will have to demonstrate that all wifi and bluetooth is disabled probably mechanically.

The thick envelope on a monthly basis is now more expensive than what I will propose. It is also limited to literate individuals who can assimilate through the printed medium.  The USB stick is how I will propose to to move data. I will have to learn how far a USB cord can be from the computer. The computer will have to be stored away from inmates just to avoid having a place to hide contraband.

If someone wants to make videos on Meditation as part of a lifestyle I will be glad to include it in the video library. I know an 'Alternatives to Violence' program which is put on by volunteers. I could record this. The volunteers can go to a prison about three time a year. A video can be available every day. 

I will not present endless possibilities to a prison administration. They fought the right to wear a beard all the way to the Supreme Court. Beards can be used to hide contraband. Beards can be immediately shaved after an escape to change appearance. Maybe the Supreme Court made the wrong decision.

I was surprised that the voiced opposition to using computers in barracks was the cost of the software. If I can show that Moodle can be used as software that objection can be silenced. Video visitation was recently approved reluctantly. Physical visitation is encouraged as much as possible fitting into the work schedule. The video visitation will be provided by a vendor with a kiosk. The cost will be borne by the family. I would be glad to undercut that business with something cheaper for inmates but it is not my focus. 

I can see a flat screen in a barracks with earphone jacks. A keyboard of some kind with a touch pad for input would be available.  Inmates would watch video presentations and provide responses via the keyboard and touchpad.

There is no intranet where I propose learning to occur, in the barracks. That is where I worked.

I thought about contacting the other states. That would be fifty states. With feedback and call backs even that project would overwhelm me. I am going to contact my state education department. They support home schooling. I suspect they purchase software for this. There is about $5,000 per student per year available to be used so vendors have probably flocked to fill the need and their pockets. But the  technology experts at the education department know more than I, if there are any.

Prisons are peculiar places. All prisoners are required to work, which they do voluntarily. There is no pay so there is no cost in the budget. The perks are the incentives people find attractive about jobs. There is the ability to move about, to do things which help others, jobs requiring thinking and skill. I think I can get support from the kitchen staff by offering food safety training, from the field crew by showing videos on mower safety etc. Prisoners work as volunteer peer counselors. I am sure a video recording crew can be recruited producing copyright free material. 

So I can expect to get prisoners to do the maintenance, the installations, and the resource creation. I will have to demonstrate the security of the system, and find a keylogging program. 

I have a six month window where I cannot be employed by the state. Then I could quickly ask for compensation just as any other vendor does. This is only one of the many projects which interests me. 

Poodle seems to be a solution I can try. http://www.maflt.org/products/poodle

I am going to look for a used desktop computer on Craigslist for experimentation purposes. I would appreciate any help along the way. But as you say, retirement comes first.

I should expand a bit more on this. The system we're developing is call spoodle (Shared Portable Moodle)

The bit we have working, has been developed for students in remote areas. Initially it was an exploration to see if we could developed an alternative to student's downloading all relevant pdfs and working remotely. We wanted to see if we could provide scaffolding learning, and the advantages of online learning to students in remote areas. A DVD was the first suggestion, but we wanted to see if we could give students a similar experience to online learning, as student who could access Moodle online. 

Now, besides getting it to work, the other issues were how to provide students with the interaction they would get from other students, and enable the students to submit assignments. We debated various solutions included going old-school. IRC networks used to be big in the 1990, they enabled fast communication across the glob using very slow internet connects (when 56kb/s was the standard top speed). IRC networks still exist, but they are not secure, and you can't restrict students to just the channels you want them to use. In the end we dropped that as a possibility, we instead decided to drop the forums as an activity, although we debated keeping a few active so that students and teachers could reply to each other as the USB moves from one person to the next. 

I will explain this a bit more, if spoodle is install on a single USB stick, and the stick is provided to a student, the student can then write their questions as they come up in a Forum type environment, the student may end up answering the questions themselves as they work through the material, but at some point, the student could then pass the USB stick back to the teacher (e.g. intensive school), the teacher logs in, reads the forums, responds to any queries, accesses any assignment to retrieve submitted assignments. The teacher then marks any assignments, returns grades and comments (into spoodle) and then gives the USB back to the student to continue working.

In a prison system as Robert discusses,  you could get each inmate a username and password for the spoodle. Students do their work for the week/day and post any comments to the forum, submit any assignments. The USB would then be passed onto the next inmate who would do their work for the day/week, add/reply to any comments in the forum, post any assignments, and then when finished they would pass the USB onto the trusted inmate who would then pass the USB down the line to the next inmate and so on. Forums are sort of possible using a portable Moodle, but they are limited in the timeframe between the post and reply based on who happens to be holding the USB stick.

Assignments are a little tricky, you want the time between submission and feedback to be as short as possible. For a student in a remote it is not viable to post the USB to the student, and have the student post it back whenever they submit the assignment because it would mean sending their lessons away also, so they would be unable to study while waiting for their assignment (spoodle) to return. A prison system would be faster. Theoretically, and we haven't tested this, but you should be able to take the portable Moodle outside of the prison walls, plug it into a computer with internet access and then the teacher should be able to remotely access the portable Moodle from wherever they are in the world and respond to posts and download assignment to mark. We are fairly sure that this should work. Once the teacher has accessed the posts and assignment, then the USB could be unplugged, taken back into the prison and the cycle could begin again.

What we have been able to achieve, which indicates some promise, we can plug the usb containing spoodle into a computer and access it remotely from elsewhere on the intranet, we have also been able to convert a computer's wifi into a hotspot, plug in our portable Moodle, and accessed the spoodle (which is still on the USB stick) from mobile devices accessing the hotspot. During these tests, we wanted to see if spoodle could be used as a Moodle for classroom in remote areas (where the entire class had no access to the internet), so during the test, we also disconnect the computer from the internet, so that student only had access to our hotspot, and our version of Moodle. The only drawback we had was cause by android devices which wouldn't connect to ad hoc networks, so only ipads and iphones connected to our portable Moodle. Cheaper android devices would have been our preferred outcome. However, the functionality of accessing spoodle over intranet and wifi hotspot means that we've happy to say that it is a shared portable environment (hence the name spoodle) 

Now since looking into portable Moodle and it's possibilities we've established that it would benefit student's in remote areas, classes in remote areas, student that cannot attend classes because of cultural reasons (learning centres in opposing clan territories, women in certain countries, etc), inmates and navy/army/airforce personal on deployment.

The uses are wide, but we've hit the limit of what we can achieve on zero funding. It will take some funding to get the Mac version off the ground, and to enable wifi access to spoodle using android devices. 

But it does achieve what we set out to achieve in the first place.

Regards,
Michael