[seul-edu] Re: Moving forward... - RE: Who do we contact?

[Doug Loss <drloss@home.com>]

Paul Nelson wrote:
> 
> Michael Williams and I have been talking about bringing together the
> K12Linux server solutions and workstation efforts to produce a single
> point of information site that will gather howto's, guides, on-line
> tutorials, software and lesson plans you can use with your students.
> 
> We'll also go out of our way to bring together the many  folks out there
> already working with open source projects in schools. See the list later
> on in this post and forward to anyone I missed.
> 
This is a great idea.  It's so great an idea that it's already being
done.  See the discussion at
<http://www.seul.org/archives/seul/edu/Nov-2001/maillist.html>, starting
about message 127
<http://www.seul.org/archives/seul/edu/Nov-2001/msg00127.html> and
continuing through today.

[major snip]

> There are other K12Linux listservs out there. My hope is that
> OpenSourceNow will help us consolidate the lists.
> 
As you'll see in the discussion on the seul-edu list, we're talking
about just that sort of thing in a Linux educational coalition.

> Here's a first draft at how we can start consolidating Linux in schools
> efforts:

[snip some very good ideas]

> The opensourceschools.org site
> linked below is really cool. It's really more like a /. for schools. We
> need to either have David Bucknell come on board or use his software or
> something. He's really off to a good start.
> 
Umm, David is one of the movers in the effort going on over the seul-edu
mailing list.

> We need to get the folks from the other main OpenSource education sites
> to join us. The vision here is consolidation...

I agree with you.  However, I think that this is one of those ideas
whose time has clearly come, and it would be at best ironic and at worst
disruptive for two (or more) groups to be competing to form a coalition
of Linux in education sites.  I suggest that you all use the seul-edu
mailing list as a discussion site for this idea, as the discussion is
already going on there.  After all, a coalition means all of us working
together.

> SUPPORT VIA TRAINING:
> I'd like to have us all get together. Who wants to come to Oregon this
> summer? We have nice weather, a volcano to visit and my superintendent
> says we can use the school. (He's a happy LTSP user by the way...) ;-)
> 
> What would it take for us to host a one week conference that would
> provide hands on training for teachers just starting to use Linux in
> their schools? We will host this event. Who's up for it? I can handle 15
> on my own. If we get 6 more leaders we can invite 100 teachers.
> 
This soulds like a wonderful idea, at least for the North American
members.  I'm sure we'll all fully support it.

BTW, we've contacted RedHat, Mandrake, SuSE, Conectiva, Turbolinux,
Debian, and Slackware about supporting whatever Linux in education
coalition we come up with.  So far we've only heard back from RedHat,
which is monitoring our discussions to see what comes of them, but the
requests for support only went out late last week.  We'll see what comes
of them.  We see this as a world-wide effort, which is why we're trying
to get support from European, South American, and Asian distributions as
well as the major ones in the US.

Doug Loss
dloss@seul.org