Re: my thoughts (long)

On Fri, 27 Dec 2002 18:31:17 -0600
Susan Stewart <[email protected]> wrote:

[...]

> First is a set of guides for teachers and other education-related folks 
> (school administrators, volunteers, etc.) that focus on the role of computer 
> technology in a school setting, and the GNU/Linux resources available to get 
> the job done.  This will be user-level reading, aimed at the education side 
> of things rather than the technical stuff.  My goal is to make GNU/Linux look 
> approachable from an end-user's standpoint, and to introduce folks to the 
> community that surrounds this kind of software.

Also it will be very valuable to have feedback from pedagogical use
takeing place with free software. This could help both the end-user
teachers and the developpers of that free software.

For some time I have tried to gather teachers around DrGenius -- a GNU
interactive geometry software developped by OFSET -- but I have been
unsuccessfull until now to construct an user community around the
software, such a community could work on pedagogical added value (for
example teacher/student documents). May be it's still to early...


> The second thing I'd like to do (this is not nearly as well thought-out as my 
> last idea... it's more of a vague notion at this point)  is to start growing 
> some kind of online community for teachers who use free software or want to 
> learn more about it.  As with online documentation, internet forums regarding 
> free software tend to be geared toward developers, system administrators, and 
> tinkerers rather than typical end-users.  The most appropriate thing that 
> springs to mind is getting a moderated newsgroup going on usenet (AFAIK, none 
> currently exists for this purpose).  I would be happy to volunteer as a 
> moderator, though as I've never moderated on USENET before, let alone 
> undertaken the writing of an RFD and all those happy formalities, I would 
> need the help of someone more experienced.  The only catch I see is getting 
> enough posters together initially to make the group interesting enough to 
> keep everyone reading.  Once the group has an established readership, I think 
> it would grow quite nicely, but how do we come up with that readership to 
> start the group with?

I will vote for such a USENET group :)

Hilaire

-- 
OFSET - http://www.ofset.org
Free the teacher with the Freeduc-cd -
http://www.ofset.org/projects/edusoft/edusoft.html

_______________________________________________
European "Free Software in Education" mailing list
[email protected]
http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-eu

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.1 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQE+Dct8SAvrR6lz6PQRAlOLAJ4k8YFhVFr4uhsetNvhwo+2iUzd3QCfRkeB
voaV2RmmY+oJ1UWtjguZFC0=
=Yz05
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----