UberStudent, Linux for Learners for Desktop Distribution of Educational Content

Academic Success Tool with UberStudent Learning Platform

Self Education Works!

He now holds a masters degree in adult education and has chocked up impressive instructional and administrative experience in postsecondary literacy and student success development. “I'm an educator first, foremost, and always,” Ewen emphasized. “Everything I do as a developer is done through that grid.”

UberStudent has thus taken a decidedly different approach from other Linux distributions designed for education, which Ewen hopes will make it too hard to resist for students and learning institutions. “To date, Linux distros for education, such as Edubuntu and Fedora's recent 'Education Spin', have featured a meta-package of broadly varying discipline-specific programs added to a basic install,” he said. While conceding that the approach is useful to showcase Linux's capabilities, Ewen said that it lacked the “pedagogical cohesion” routinely valued by educators and most beneficial to students. “It's little surprise to me that this approach has proven largely unattractive,” he said. “UberStudent fundamentally changes what it means to be an operating system for education,” he added.

College Prep Core Skills Approach Centers on Research, Writing, Study, Self-management Skills

UberStudent's Bibliographic Manager, Content Mapping, Multimedia Support

UberStudent is built upon Debian, Ubuntu, and “dozens of other distros who've helped make Linux the extremely desktop-friendly platform it is today,” according to Ewen. “I developed UberStudent in the same spirit in which public scholars build upon and refine the work of others to advance public knowledge,” he stated. “Hopefully, everyone will benefit,” he added.

UberStudent uses the GNOME desktop. Ewen said that he developed UberStudent's default desktop theme while referencing desktop design research into what reduces eye-strain and fatigue. Whether users find this to be so or not, the theme is clearly one of the most attractive available for GNOME.

Linux Base Provides Open-Sourced Flexibility

“The inadequately critical acceptance of proprietary computing platforms in academic computing has shortchanged student learning. As a result, emerging workforces are less innovative than they could be, and often require costly training in new versions of programs,” he said, while deflecting blame away from what he called “good-hearted educators.”

Ewen asserted, “When computing technology is open sourced, students more naturally move beyond knowing which buttons to push to knowing the how and why,” which he described as “the essential and profound difference between computer literacy and computer fluency.”

Computer fluent people of all sectors, Ewen explained “can readily apply computing knowledge to all sorts of novel situations, across computing platforms and knowledge domains.” Ewen said that because the line between users and developers overlap in the Linux world, computer fluency is “more or less a natural learning outcome” of basing one's academic computing in Linux during college. “UberStudent is very explicitly amplifying this factor among its users,” he added.

Ewen also said he hoped more academic institutions would reaffirm their mission to the public good by increasing their involvement in developing open source software and platforms. “In the long view, the funds they'll save will be greater than the funds they might gain by patenting things,” he predicted.

Home Page: UberStudent.org