Re: [Fsedu-developers] FreeSoftwareInEducation

[James Michael DuPont]

--- Stephen Compall <address@hidden> wrote:

> mdupont says explanations of free software, rather various aspects
thereof, are  needed, rather help understanding what free software
means in the context of its use in general, and I agree with him.

What do you think of a first course called "Free Software Licensing for
Educators". This will be a tutorial on how to read and evaluate free
software and creative commons license. And how to understand the
licensing issues of non-free software. It should be at most 30 pages
and be something that we can distribute to all the schools all over the
world. 

*We* need to educate people in the topic of free software, and we need
to enable other *free software teachers* to educate them in free
software, and then allow *the teacher* to educate *students* with free
software. 

That would be something that would get us publicity. We need to address
all the pros and cons of free software in education and present an
overview of what is available at the time. 

Something like that would be the maximum that a project that is so
understaffed and underresourced could bear at the moment.

We also need to jump onto the firefox/openoffice bandwagon. Firefox is
the only free software that people can relate to and it the #1 most
successful product. If we can ride that wave, we can ride it right it
the schools. 

What about a course, how to make firefox plugins, how to use it, etc?
There must be such things, but what we should do is start compiling a
list of all educators who see courses and all people who provide
information. 

I am thinking of a database here to start with, in RDF of course. I
have a major breakthrough in the speed of the rdf processing and should
be able to whip togreather a RDF converter for our wiki quickly.

mike

=====
James Michael DuPont
http://introspector.sourceforge.net/