Using LAMP for Course Assignments

We used USB sticks again this year for student projects. The advantage is they allow the student to work anywhere, anytime and to get experience in systems work - installing, maintaining, and troubleshooting. The disadvantages are:

• some sticks are sloooooooow
• some sticks are not very durable
• some people do not make backups
  

You get what you pay for, so saving $4 on something that contains your term's work is not a good idea! Buy the best, biggest and fastest stick you can afford or even better yet - buy a USB external hard disk. Not necessarily too much faster but definitely more durable. Also, there are 2 kinds of people, those who make backups and those who wish they had...I believe they now call these things 'learning experiences'.

Actually, the whole thing worked ok - some difficulties with old, slow or unreliable sticks but overall not bad and we required nothing from the IT people. Students went away with a complete library system with MARC records and a custom dynamic web site - not a bad portfolio to show a prospective employer.

The dynamic web site project had been a stumbling block - how do you get them to turn in a database, some php files, a css file and some images so that you can run it and take a look? You could run a server but central IT takes a dim view of that. You could use a hosting service but then you are paying out of your pocket. The solution was simple:

Students installed xampp or xampplite or wamp on their computer or USB stick and then installed Joomla. They then developed their dynamic web site. When finished they burned the xampp, xampplite or wamp folder to a cd-rom or dvd-rom and handed it in. The student could even test if the burn was done correctly by copying the xampp or xampplite folder to their hard drive, starting the apache and mysql servers, and running a web browser (same procedure as i follow below).

All i had to do was to copy the xampp, xampplite or wamp folder to my c:\ drive and then run the xampp control panel to start the servers and goto http://localhost/joomla to view their creation. (the wamp control panel works as well). The only downside is that it takes a couple of minutes to copy the folder from optical disc to hard drive. But it works and you have a permanent record.

With USB 3.0 now becoming available, i am thinking we can make a requirement that students purchase an 8 gig stick for the course and install Ubuntu on it and then lamp and add Koha, Wordpress, Scriblio, mediawiki, joomla or drupal, phpBB etc and use this as their server throughout the term. The case could be they have been hired to replace the old static web site and ILS with with a new integrated library portal including porting of MARC records.