Asian Penguins is another illustration of giving the gift of Linux to help cross the digital divide.
The Screening Room
Stuart Keroff, a visionary middle school teacher in St. Paul, Minnesota, recently received a distinguished humanitarian award for his work in founding Asian Penguins computer club at the Community School of Excellence. This club refurbishes computers with Linux to be used both at the school itself and to deliver to the homes of students who don’t own a computer at home. View the video made by the Minnesota State University – Mankato Campus – to learn more about this award.
You can stay in the loop about future news from the Asian Penguins by following Stu Keroff on Twitter and by subscribing to the Asian Penguins YouTube channel. Let’s help grow the number of subscribers to 250 or more. That’s an easy way for all Linux enthusiasts to honor Stu and his students. Costs about the same as a smile, too.
For the past 10 years, Phil has been working at a public library in the Washington D.C.-area, helping youth and adults use the 28 public Linux stations the library offers seven days a week. He also writes for MAKE magazine, Opensource.com and TechSoup Libraries. Suggest videos by contacting Phil on Twitter or at pshapiro@his.com.
Neat.
Here in Arizona we’ve got an organization called StRUT ( http://www.azstrut.org/ ) that refurbs and donates computers; half my life ago I took a StRUT class from Douglas Taysom at Tempe High School. (And, paying it forward, a few months back I dropped by and donated some of my own computer equipment.)
Back when I was doing it (class of 2000), we’d zero out hard drives and then install DOS 5 or MacOS 8 (both of which were abandonware by that time) before donating them; Linux was growing in popularity but we weren’t using or deploying it in those days, for whatever reason (too niche/too user-unfriendly/took too long to install/poor hardware support?). I didn’t think to ask when I went to visit last year, but I expect they’re putting Linux on a lot more machines before they donate them now. (Though I expect it’s probably also common just to do a system restore, now that OS licenses are typically issued on a per-computer basis and transferable with the hardware, and most Windows machines come with a restore partition and MacOS can be trivially reinstalled from a USB stick.)