Interactive whiteboards, also known as “digital whiteboards”, seem to be the latest trend in education. At least from the teacher’s point of view.

Given that all my immediate family are teachers, and I have taught my mom how to use the digital whiteboard at her school, I feel like I can talk a bit about them.

A digital whiteboard is essentially a big touchscreen (100” or more). Usually the image is projected with a beamer and they use infrared, ultrasound, or some other cheap system to touch-enable the board.

From a hardware point of view, it is quite simple. You can even use a WiiMote to convert any surface into a digital whiteboard thanks to Uwe Schmidt’s WiiMode Whiteboard software.

The interesting part of digital whiteboards, at least for me, is software.

I have tried myself three software packages (TeamBoard, SMART Notebook and Promethean ActivInspire) but there are many more: DabbleBoard, NotateIt, Luidia eBeam, BoardWorks, etc

All of those can be used for education. Some of them are generic enough to be fit for business meetings (DabbleBoard, NotateIt, TeamBoard), while others are highly specialized (Interact, focused on music-teaching).

I consider ActivInspire very good, with SMART as a distant second.

Now, let’s cut the crap. Why am I talking about digital whiteboards and commercial software in Planet KDE?

For starters, because there is no open source alternative. The only open source package I have found is Open Whiteboard and it has not been updated in four years.

Then there is the Linux issue. SMART works on Linux but that’s about it. And it’s not even the full package, some features are missing.

And of course, in KDE we happen to have the wonderful KDE Edu project!

Back in December I thought about this: would it be possible to develop a digital whiteboard software based on KDE? That’s actually why I started working on KSnapshot: screen capturing was one of the missing features in SMART.

The answer to the question is “of course”. However interested I am, currently my spare time is all taken by another project I am working on. I do have a clear picture of what needs to be done, though, and I’d love to mentor if someone is interested in taking over:

  1. Dissect ActivInspire, SMART, TeamBoard, eBeam, etc. They all have nice features and huge failures. Give me one day and I’d hand you a long list.
  2. Start small: use KParts and DBUS and take advantage of KolourPaint, KSnapshot, Flake, etc
  3. The first application would be a simple single-page, vector graphics, Paint-like program: draw lines, figures, insert text boxes (with formatting), pictures, hyperlinks, etc. Add snapshotting (via a call to kbackgroundsnapshot).
  4. Then, extend that application to allow multipage “notebooks”, some screen effects (like Calligra Stage‘s), template pages (useful for exercise sheets, “blank” pages which include date, time and letterhead), hiding the solutions, record and reply, etc
  5. Going a bit further, we could have a special “personality” of Plasma Active for education. Let’s give some actual use to those iPads kids are receiving. Anyone involved in an educational Linux distribution knows the kind of customization I am talking about.
  6. And of course let’s not forget about “apps”: let’s develop a framework for “educapplets”. Educapplets is the name I give to small edutainment games, applications (Mathematical, Geography, etc). Kind of what you can do these days with JClic, but based on Javascript + KDE Edu QML components + something like Windows Runtime but for KDE. (This is big enough to be split in two projects apart from the whiteboard project: one for the KDE RT, another for the educapplet framework).
  7. Your ideas?

I think this project could be developed as a collaboration between KDE Edu and “KDE Business” (a hypothetical extension of KDE PIM). Being unique (open source, multiplatform, powerful), it would have a lot of potential to carve in those markets.

On the other hand, this is actually an application, something built outside KDE SC, which means it might fit better as one of the projects in that hypothetical Apache-like KDE eV I talked about a few weeks ago.

Oh, by the way: some schools seem to be adopting whiteboards for children of all ages. I am strongly against it. In my humble opinion, and that’s what my experience says, computers should only be involved in the classroom after the students have mastered how to do things manually. Disagree? OK: what would you say if when you were a student, you would have been told to use a typewriter and a solar calculator instead of a notebook and a pencil? Ridiculous, isn’t it? My point, exactly.

Volunteers, please comment and/or contact me.

Yesterday one of our developers messed up our git repository pretty badly. We only noticed the problem after other people had pulled, committed & pushed, updated their topic branches, etc.

To make things worse, this developer was in Bangalore and it was quite difficult to figure over the phone what had been going on. All this was going on while about 30 other developers worked on. It took me a while to guess the past, but in the end I was able to fix the repository and colleagues from Germany and India reviewed and checked everything was OK.

In case you are interested, the easiest solution was creating a new branch from the latest not broken commit + cherry picking the good commits + merging back into master.

For some reason, I couldn’t but think of Toni Braxton‘s Unbreak my heart. Here comes my own rendition, “Un-merge my branch”:

“Un-merge my branch”

Don’t leave me in all this pain
Don’t leave me out in the fail
Come back and bring back my codeline
Come and take these changesets away
I need your rights to push it now
The conflicts are so unkind
Bring back those commits where you coded side-by-side with me

Un-merge my branch
Say you’ll code me again
Undo this havoc you caused
When you pulled in the code
And reverted out my line
Un-do these changesets
I tried so many patches
Un-merge my branch
My branch

Take back that bad commit good-bye
Bring back the joy to my repo
Don’t leave me here with these changesets
Come and cherry-pick this line away
I can’t forget the day you merged
Pull is so unkind
And coding is so cruel without you side-by-side with me

Un-merge my branch
Say you’ll code me again
Undo this havoc you caused
When you pulled in the code
And reverted out of my line
Un-do these changesets
I tried so many patches
Un-merge my branch
My branch

Don’t leave me in all this pain
Don’t leave me out in the fail
Bring back those commits where you coded side-by-side with me

Un-merge my branch
Say you’ll code me again
Undo this havoc you caused
When you pulled in the code
And reverted out of my line
Un-do these changesets
I tried so many, many patches
Un-merge my

Un-merge my branch oh admin
Code back and say you commit it
Un-merge my branch
Sweet admin
Without you I just can’t code on
Can’t code on…

It still needs some rhythm and metric work, but I’m not a musician. Volunteers for singing it? 🙂

I was at the beach today and somehow this came to my mind.

When the Apache Software Foundation was born back in 1999, its sole purpose was to support the development of the Apache HTTP server. One foundation, one project, more or less like the KDE eV and KDE until very recently.

Over the years, many more projects have been born inside the ASF (Tomcat, Xerces) , or have been “adopted” by the ASF (Subversion, OpenOffice).

For many years, KDE eV has been focused only on KDE.

Recently, Necessitas, the port of Qt and the Qt SDK to Android, joined under the umbrella of the KDE eV: mailing list, git repositories, announcements, etc.

Today I had this vision: should KDE eV go further and become “the Apache Software Foundation of the Qt-related world”?

A few projects that in my humble opinion would fit very well under this new umbrella:

  • MeeGo
  • The community ports of Qt to iPhone, webOS, Haiku, etc
  • PySide (the Python Qt bindings that nearly killed PyQt are being killed by Nokia, what an irony)
  • A Qt “target” that compiles to an HTTP server that generates AJAX, like Wt does but implemented in terms of Qt (yes, I know about QtWui, creole, etc — all dead)
  • … others you propose?

I think that would also make the Akademy’s more interesting, because we would have a lot of conferences on many totally different topics. Lately, when I see the program of Akademy, I feel like “same, again” (maybe because I’m subscribed to many mailing lists and I keep an eye on everything? I don’t know).

What do you think? Should the KDE eV widen its scope and accept other Qt-related projects, even if they are not directly related to KDE?