Here’s what I collected in October. If you come accross anything that might be worth mentioning in this series, please drop me a note or, even better: drop it on the edu-eu mailinglist!
Edu-Team
- Peter blogged about FS edu again
- Elias blogged about why using US clould services in school is against the law (finnish).
Community
- University course trades textbook for Raspberry Pi
- Sally Ann Moore presents a few Free Software LMS on checkpoint.elearning
- Another SUGAR digest by Walter Bender
- The Swiss Open Systems User Group (/ch/open) critizies Microsofts proceedings to give their products to students at no cost (German).
- A 15 year old girl and a 13 year old boy win German Python programming contest using Blender.
- Session “educating together” in Sahún, Spain. José Luis Murillo García made a nice leaflet for it, sadly under a NC license…
- Nicole C. Engard put a collection of”Free Software programs to get more kids to code” together.
- Interview with Burr Sutter (Red Hat): “Why children should learn to code, even if they don’t have a future in IT“
all of my children have wanted and continue to want computers, laptops, smartphones, and tablets. I have always made the point that those items are not toys, but tools that require the user to learn something. Another way to say it is, if you can not use the tool properly (e.g fix problems when they occur) then you should just not have the tool.
Other news
Department of Basic Education bans Free Software in South Africa Schools in contradiction of government’s own policy
Upcoming Events
The “TheyDontWantYou.To” Campaign just started and will go on for a while. Please participate as much as you can! I may come up with a separate blog post about it. The basic idea was already mentioned in the latest Newsletter:
Get active: They don’t want you to – but what do you want?
As explained above we do not want people to accept all the restrictions on our devices. To gain more transparency we want an easy way to inform a wider audience about those restrictions, and especially give younger people a way to show that they do not agree with it. On the 4th of November we go live with TheyDontWantYou.To and together with our partner organisations we start distributing short microblog messages, highlighting different restrictions using the #theydontwantyouto hashtag.
Help us to distribute the messages, send the messages to your friends, write about them in your blog, use our stickers to raise awareness, and to let us know about restrictions you encounter in your daily life.
- Linux-Informationstage Oldenburg (Germany) Nov 15/16 2013 (Skolelinux will be there, too)
- An Edu workshop taking place on Nov 16 in Ivrea, Italy
- Squeaker Meeting On December 7 in Potsdam (Germany)
- /ch/open educational conference in March 2014 (Switzerland)
- Robocup German Open April 3-5, 2014 (Germany)
As always, if you have any infos on news or events that might be of interest to Free Software activists in education, please let me know or dump it on the edu-eu mailinglist!