Open Slate Project

Logo
Welcome
The goal of the Open Slate Project is to transform the way computers are used in secondary education. Rather than fencing computers in by making them a subject to study, computers ought to be fully integrated into the educational process, as common in classrooms as textbooks and chalk boards. The key to success is to recognize and use the skills of the students. The project encompasses self-made slate computers, a supporting network, and a collection of educational software.


 
News

New hardware forum

Gary Dunn, 2008.04.14

There has been a lot of good chatter on the openslate-brainstorms mailing list regarding a prototype slate. To encourage this activity I created a new forum at our SourceForge site, Open Slate Client Plateform. Please give it a look. You may also find related posts in the mailing list archives.

Home Schooling Conference

Gary Dunn, 2008.02.20

We will be participating in the annual CHOH Conference and Curriculum Fair on March 14 and 15 (Friday and Saturday), being held at Kalihi Union Church, 2214 N. King Street, Honolulu. That's at the West end of King Street just before it crosses over to the mauka side of the freeway. We were not able to get a work shop slot of our own; we will just be hanging out with Dick Rowland and our friends at Grassroot Institute of Hawaii.

This conference is put on by the Christian Homeschoolers of Hawaii, and the subject of most of the presentations is decidedly Christian. Open Slate is non-denominational and welcomes participation from any and all, in the same spirit that characterizes the best of what makes America great. Our goal in attending this conference is to solicit support from the home school community.

March 26 is Document Freedom Day

Gary Dunn, 2008.03.03

The ODF Alliance has declared March 26 to be Document Freedom Day, dedicated to document liberation through international grassroots action. DFD 2008 will give participants the chance to rally behind document freedom -- the right to freely create, edit, exchange, and store documents -- at events organized by local teams around the world.

Open Slate Wiki opens

Gary Dunn, 2008.01.11

The Open Slate Wiki was created primarily to take the first small steps along the path that leads to Chalk Dust. The idea is to have a place where interested people can go and contribute course material. This activity will seed the much larger and more complex Chalk Dust collection.

Please understand that we have had the ribbon cutting ceremony and are in the process of moving in. Over the next week or so I expect to have more structure roughed out. Also keep in mind that I have never worked with MediaWiki, so there is a learning curve to deal with.

Open Source Pizza

Gary Dunn, 2007.11.16

I will be giving a talk on Open Slate at the December meeting of Open Source Pizza, December 18, 7:00 PM, at the Marine Sciences Building, University of Hawaii at Manoa.

 
The Slate
The defining technology of the project is the client workstation. The design is optimized for mobility, collaboration, and browsing. It has enough capability to be useful on its own, but it comes to life with access to its network.

When this project was begun, in the Fall of 2000, the portable market was comprised of three categories: laptops, palm devices, and slates. Laptops were preferred for general purpose work -- a portable desktop. The palm category was owned by the Palm Pilot, despite the efforts of Microsoft in marketing Windows CE. The slate category serviced niche markets, such as health care, law enforcement, quality assurance, and warehouse management. There was no widely used, general purpose slate.

By 2002 the situation had changed, due to changes in the manufacturing sector in Asia, advances in wireless networking, motherboard size and battery life, and especially the announcement by Microsoft of Windows XP Tablet PC Edition. Not since Apple introduced the Newton Message Pad has the situation been better for realizing the concepts behind Open Slate.

To grasp the possibilities of the slate one must first understand why it has been so slow to catch on. It all comes down to the input device, the pen. The reason the laptop, with its keyboard, has been so much more successful than the slate is due to how we describe our work. Once we redefine what it is we are really trying to accomplish, the technology of the slate becomes the optimal design. Open Slate has many fundamental concepts; the one addressed here is about communication. Once we understand the significance of facilitating personal communication rather than formal printed text, the value of the slate becomes clear.

 
Chalk Dust

To achieve success in its primary role as a K-12 learning platform, Open Slate supports a new kind of educational content. Part software, part textbook, Chalk Dust applications are open-source projects which encourage participation by college students. Chalk Dust seeks to maintain high academic standards through oversight and review by acedemic subject matter experts.


 
Community
We encourage you to join the Open Slate community. We support the sharing of ideas through a mailing list and forums.

Brainstorms Mailing List

You can sign up to receive the openslate-brainstorms list on our handy registration page. To send a message to the list, send it to openslate-brainstorms@lists.sourceforge.net. An archive of previous posts is available.

Forums

Our forums are hosted at our SourceForge site.

Wiki

If you would like to contribute to the Chalk Dust courseware portion of Open Slate you should consider using the Open Slate Wiki. Eventually we will have Super Chalk Board and a complete application development framework for developing Chalk Dust applications. In the meantime, to help get things started we will welcome contributions through the wiki.

Whichever method you choose, we hope you take some time to share your thoughts with us.

 
Focus Areas
Reference Design Green
2007.11.13		 Concept proposal.
Operating System Critical
2007.11.13		 Has not started.
Chalk UI green
2007.11.20		 Initial concepts.
Handwriting Recognition Critical
2007.11.13		 Has not started.
Security Critical
2007.11.13		 Has not started.
Networking Critical
2007.11.13		 Has not started.
Chalk Dust Critical
2007.11.13		 Introduction.
Customs, Rituals,
and Ethics		 Critical
2007.11.13		 Has not started.

 
SourceForge Logo Schoolforge Member

 
Webmaster: Gary Dunn
Last modified: 2008.04.14