Fwd: Buy a man a beer and he is idle for an hour...

[jelkner at divmod.com]

A lot of folks have joined this list, but there has been *very* little traffic (aside from the occasional posting asking why there isn't any traffic).

With the edubuntu summit only a few weeks away, we need to get things going.  I thought this message is a good place to start a discussion...

jeff elkner

Begin forwarded message:

> From: flint at flint.com
> Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2005 08:38:41 -0400 (EDT)
> To: Jane Weideman <janew at hbd.com>
> Subject: Buy a man a beer and he is idle for an hour...
> Reply-to: flint at flint.com
> 
> ...teach a man to brew and he is idle for a lifetime!
>
>Dear Jane,
>
>Hello all, just got back from visiting my daughter and sister at Rehoboth
>beach, now one very sunburn person however much important has been thought
>about in my absence...
>
>On Sun, 12 Jun 2005, Jane Weideman wrote:
>>
>> Oliver and I have also been discussing moving forward with the Edubuntu
>> release for October. We need to start looking at the various packages
>> available and evaluating them, as well as classifying them in 3-4
>> categories such as Junior Primary (6-8), Senior Primary (9-11), Junior
>> High (12-14) and Senior High (15-17) etc.
>>
>
>This process of evaluation is critical.  As a member of the Arlington
>County Public Schools Advisory Council on Instructional Technology, (ACI-
>Tech) this is the most discussed need for the educational change agent.
>
>My own feeling is that rather than looking for packages and evaluating
>them, it would be wiser and more effective to build a mechanism that
>allows all the educators out there to evaluate packages and our job
>becomes tabulating and displaying the evaluations.  This is a paramount
>importance to the educational community, basically because all they really
>do is to evaluate, it is the stuff of their daily lives (ever get a bad
>grade? :^).  Essentially, no evaluation methodology, no edubuntu.
>
>What we may need is a mechanism similar to what has been built to evaluate
>installs.  I talked some about this and I feel that this evaluation
>capability should be somewhat user intrusive, but should allow three
>general goals:
>
>1. You can tell it to buzz-off and you never see it again.
>2. You can tell it what you think on a casual user basis.
>3. You can get seriously medieval.
>
>The result can be a successful evaluation which is communicated in the
>same way as the install evaluations.  The same mechanism is used (actually
>re-used :^), to get this information back to the evaluation process which
>in turn updates the evaluation web site (and yadda-yadda).
>
>As a favor Jane, please consider placing this idea of evaluation software
>on the agenda.  This appears to be an extremely important user need.
>
>Kindest Regards,
>
>Paul Flint
>