Sunday, May 15, 2005

I'm at HESFES - home education at the seaside festival

It is at Charmouth, not too far from Exeter. The internet marquee is organised by Bristol Wireless and Psand (links from //psand.net

So far I have studied Psand from a distance. They are sometimes in the West Country, Glastonbury and the Big Green but I have failed to get a ticket. The Big Green sells out so book early if you are interested this year.

Hyperactive loaned a couple of dated pcs for Glastonbury a couple of years ago. Now Bristol Wireless have a large number of Toshiba Satellite portables. There may be 50 of them apparently. At least 20 are here and in working order. There is a large server somewhere in the van. They are all cabled up and there is mains electricity from the toilet block. There is wi-fi as well for people who turn up.

The web access is from satellite so this bit is as before. From what I remember about the Big Green, electricity came from sunpower or a bicycle and all networking was wireless. Still, once you know wireless works it can be just an option.

It will be interesting to see what use people make of this. There are talks and meetings throughout the week and a lot of learning activity. There is no library but this could be a campus. There is a priority for web access and no doubt about the web. So this is different ot a lot of places where there are still reasons apparently not to move in this direction.