Here’s what we collected in September. If you come accross anything that might be worth mentioning in this series, please drop me a note, dump it in this pad or send it on the edu-eu mailinglist!
FSFE Edu-Team activities
- As usual, more work on the edu pages on fsfe.org. A first draft is now online on the test instance. If you want to help, more infos on how to contribute to FSFE web pages are avaialble or just send us a note!
- Call for participation on codeweek.eu and reach out to some of the Young Advisors with quite some feed-back and discussion on the edu-eu mailinglist.
- As our sister organisation announced the Bring the FSF to your campus! campaign, we are considering to offer the same service.
- started preparations for our first meeting next year in Brussels around FOSDEM
- We gained a new edu-team member: Rok Papež
- answered a few inquiries on how to get active locally
- got word that the upcomming Document Freedom Day will have Sience and Education as a focus. So, we’ll be involved as well
- discussion on how to convey FS ideals to kids on the FSFE discussion mailinglist. Please join!
Community
- Along Software Freedom Day, there were a bunch of education related activities, like
- CoderDojo in Richmond, UK
- The Python Conference in UK with a dedicated education track
- event in the Technological Educational Institute of West Macedonia, Greece
- conference about Free software in schools in Tallinn
- Also somewhat related to SFD, a Fellow started some FS activities at the university in Dresden. It is being considered to put leaflets and stickers for the “Ersti-Beutel” (a bag full of info material for first-year students). Great idea, right? By the way: anyone can request material from FSFE to spread the word like this!
- Aldebaran announced the NAO challenge again. The NAO Challenge this year is offered in 5 European countries:France, Denmark, Italy, Germany and the UK. All schools can participate in the challenge whether they have a NAO or not. Tests are prepared on a free simulated software and go from September 2014 to the finals in May 2015 in each country.
- Missed last time: Getting hooked on programming with YRS project ‘Hook’
- Post by Phil Shapiro on The personality of a Linux-loving teen
- Students power Penn Manor High School with Free Software (by Charlie Reisinger)
- How students get involved in FS development at Seneca college
- How teaching FS changed Steve Burge’s life when he stopped teaching to the tests. My favorite quote: “We’re now living in a world where our next job may not even have been invented yet.”
- Robert Pogson on Students As IT-techs
- and another post by him on Linus On GNU/Linux And Computers In Education
- How Emiel Brok lobbied for Free Software in Schools in Belgium and the Netherlands
Government
- The education ministry in Peru celebrates 20.000 SUGAR users. Congratulations!
Edu software
- eXe learning 2.0 released
- eXe Learning 2.0. Manual – Tutorial released
- 3 Drupal education distros reviewed: Julio, Open Academy and Opigno LMS
- Soft robotics toolkit released. From their website:
“The Soft Robotics Toolkit is a collection of shared resources to support the design, fabrication, modeling, characterization, and control of soft robotic devices. The toolkit was developed as part of educational research being undertaken in the Harvard Biodesign Lab. The ultimate aim of the toolkit is to advance the field of soft robotics by allowing designers and researchers to build upon each other’s work. The toolkit includes an open source fluidic control board, detailed design documentation describing a wide range of soft robotic components (including actuators and sensors), and related files that can be downloaded and used in the design, manufacture, and operation of soft robots.”
Pretty cool stuff…
- The XPrize Foundation announced a competition that challenges teams from around the world to develop Free software scalable software solution that will enable children in developing countries to teach themselves basic reading, writing and arithmetic. They will spend 15 million US$ for it. Interested?
Distro news
Other news
- Kano Ships Its First 18,000 Learn-To-Code Computer Kits, Fueled By $1.5M Kickstarter
- I saw at least seven Free Software projects listed on the Top 100 edu tools from an annual online survey: WordPress, Moodle, Wikipedia, Audacity, Mahara, OpenOffice and Firefox. I have to say that I don’t know most of the other items on the list and didn’t bother to check which of them might be Free Software as well.
Future events
- Oct 11 – 17, 2014: CodeWeek.eu Something like SFD or DFD for learning to code. An initiative by the Young Advisors and the EC,
- Oct 17, 2014: Richard Stallman will talk about Free Software and education in New York
- Oct 17 – 19, 2014: OLPC San Francisco Community Summit – online participation possible
- Oct 25, 2014: not really FS related, but still: OER Cologne
- Nov 8-9 , 2014: There will be more FrogLabs workshops at the OpenRheinRuhr, Germany
- Nov 17, 2014: Digital learning event by Wikimedia Germany. Registration required, attendance is free
- Dec 3-5, 2014: Online EDUCA Berlin, Germany