As we ramp-up Mozilla Education, I also wanted to make you aware of another effort that’s happening in parallel. My colleague, Chris Tyler (Seneca and Fedora), has recently launched teachingopensource.org in order to to provide a neutral connection point between all the various open source-education projects (schools and open source companies/projects) that are active in this space.
If you’ve spent any amount of time working in open source and education you’ll know what I mean when I say that there is currently too much duplication of effort: everyone has their own mailing list, wiki, planet, etc (I’m registered on about a dozen). This makes it hard for us all to “meet” and work on things together. Wouldn’t it be better if we had a light-weight hub so we could all see one another and share ideas? We think so.
The goal of TeachingOpenSource.org is to provide a meta-community, not to compete with existing open source-education projects (e.g., I help lead Mozilla Education and the Centre for Development of Open Technology at Seneca, both of which remain distinct but benefit from greater connectivity/visibility through TeachingOpenSource.org). TeachingOpenSource.org is not run by or hosted at Seneca.
I encourage you to join your work/communities to TeachingOpenSource.org so that we can better leverage the various smaller discussions happening around open source and education on the web. Specifically:
- Add your name to the Roll Call so others know about you working in this space. Educators, developers, community leaders, etc. are all welcome.
- Join the mailing list (currently a good discussion about how to address peer reviewed journals and open source).
- Join the irc channel.
- Watch for details about a regular public conference call.
- Let others know who should join us.
We hope that by creating a neutral, de-branded space where schools, communities, and companies can connect that we will be able to support one another much better.
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I’ll be in Toronto visiting Mozilla’s offices the week of May 25 – would love to get time with you to hear about how your open source education programs have been coming along. Keep up the terrific work.
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[...] efforts around open source education. Why do we need another open source advocacy site? Like David Humphrey says, If you’ve spent any amount of time working in open source and education you’ll know [...]
[...] 13, 2009 · No Comments David Humphrey on his blog Bread and Circuits reports on the launch of TeachingOpenSource.org. The site is meant to be a place where educators in [...]
[...] Humphrey on his blog Bread and Circuits reports on the launch of TeachingOpenSource.org. The site is meant to be a place where educators in [...]