After last year’s edu-team report, here is a brief summary of what the Edu-Team did in 2012. I’ve tried to keep it as short as possible at the risk that some things might not be clear. Please point me to these cases that I can explain them sufficiently.
Talks and similar activities
The edu-team members conducted the following talks or workshops during the last year:
- Sebastian gave a talk on FS in schools on MNU-conference, Berlin-Brandenburg
- Bernhard Reiter and I gave a talk in Hildesheim for a of a group of “media advisors”, explained what FS is and why it is good for education.
- talk by Wolf-Dieter at Linuxtag in Berlin: “sustainable education – only with Free Software”. Sebastian attended the same conference and wrote a blog post about the talk.
- Wolf-Dieter Workshop at FROSCON in St. Augustin: “Presenting – but skilful”
- Aarnio Elias conducted a webinar about the thin client solution schools are using in Greece and Finland.
- I visited FSCONS again and attended the workshop for educational software
The folowing blogposts were published:
in English:
- A few month before the workshop in Murrhardt took place (see below), Bernd had talked about freedroidz and Free Software in education in the Fellowship interview.
- the before mentioned Edu-Team summary 2011
- Guido: Skolelinux pilot in Rhineland Palatinate – Lessons learned
in German:
- by Sebastian:
- OS Democracy and school
- Open formats for open educational materials
- OER and Apple
- Recording of the talk “Daily routine of Ubuntu in school”
- Media critical education in school (Blogpost about Wolf-Dieter’s talk at Linuxtag)
- A Ubuntu school in Lubeck
- by Guido
- by Peter
- see Liechtenstein
publications in print media (both German)
- Seitz, Sebastian (2012): Lernen wie die Kleinen. Lernsoftware für Grundschulkinder, Ubuntu User 02/2012, Linux New Media AG, München
- Seitz, Sebastian (2012): Gut und günstig. Hochwertige, freie Software für den Einsatz im Unterricht, Grundschule 3/2012, Westermann, Braunschweig
Wolf-Dieter is busy working on his website netzwerkbildung.net
This website got a new CMS during 2012 and is also now available in English. Wolf-Dieter is currently collecting and testing LIVE-Systems for USB-Sticks. If you have any input on that, please drop him a note!
UK curriculum input to consultation
The edu-team worked hard to get its input ready for the UK ICT curriculum consultation. We submitted our official position on the UK Department of Education proposal to “Unlocking education, for growth without limits” (launched late 2011) continued vigorously in the first few months of 2012, but as two key players had to cut down their time for it, this campaign somewhat stalled due to lack of dutch (speaking) activists. Feel free to pick up the ball or tell
anybody who might want to finish the job!
Germany Internet Enquete-Kommission
We worked together to provide Matthias some input to the educational part in the Enquete commission of the German parliarment (German). For further info (also in German), read
Matthias’ blog post about his work and its results.
election touch stones Germany
The edu-team provided some related input to the election touchstones in Germany, namely:
Freedroidz
There was another Freedroidz workshop in Murrhardt. I traveled to this nice little town in the south of Germany to attend the first workshop with youths, not only adults like my first one 😉
Unfortunately, this is the only workshop I got aware of. Quite a few had to be canceled for various reasons. But there is more good news to report: The Freedroidz project is also working on becoming a German “Verein” (Club – charity) to become independet of the generous sponsor so far, the tarent company.
Liechtenstein
Peter made some progress in Liechtenstein. He sent a letter to the editor of vaterland.li
in response to an article about an iPad project. The letter was published and let to a response of a teacher in Liechtenstein as well.
Edu Leaflets
The edu leaflet is now also available in Danish thanks to our fellow Kenneth. (List of all available leaflets)
work on FSFE edu pages
We started thinking about renewing the edu pages on fsfe.org. It would be great if you could tell us what information you would like to find there.
RMS and copyleft (cc-by-nc-sa/2.0/br)
edu material
As a response to the last yearly summary, we learned about a short video explaining FS to kids. We also learned that there used to be subtitles for various languages available, but t
hey seem to be lost. (I found only one(Youtube flash)) If you have any idea where they might be found, please let us know!
We are in general always interested in any material that explains FS to a younger audience to offer it teachers as material they can use in class. If you see something, please let us know as well!
Other stuff
Of course, there were many other things we did throughout the year. Like
- improved our relationship with other organisations and groups
- conversations and interactions with other groups and many individuals
- contacted politicians and administrations in Baden Württemberg after this inquiry about the state of Free Software in higher education.
- other internal discussions about various subjects
Here is what we plan for 2013
- redoing the edu pages on fsfe.org
- continue discussion on OER and our stake on it
- follow up with all pending issues 🙂
- reach out to more teachers, maybe at edu events
And as always, there were many things like inquiries for workshops or talks, meetings and actions that, at the end, didn’t work out. They don’t appear here in the posting, but such things took time and resources as well. Thus, a lot of things had to be left undone for 2013! If you want to help us with them, please join us!
Or if you just want to discuss our work with us, the next chance to meet me in person is probably FOSDEM. Just drop me a note!