Teachers and Edubuntu and more

[David Groos]

Thanks to so many for your detailed responses.  I'd like to respond to the
many ideas, evaluations and occasional apparent misunderstanding... AND
let's start a new thread if we want to continue this discussion--this e-mail
is getting too complex for me!

On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 7:45 PM, Scott Balneaves <sbalneav at legalaid.mb.ca>wrote:

>
> >    1. The first issue is that teachers are mainly present in the
> community
> >    as consumers of resources *in the current communication channels of
> the
> >    community.* in other words, it is rare that programmers 'see' the
> >    hundreds, the thousands of students in the classes who benefit from
> what
> >    they have made!
>
> This is, of course, one of the perennial problems of Free Software.  People
> want a tool that they can use.  They don't want to become part of a
> "movement"
> or a "community", they just want something that can help them teach.
>

My main point in the text you quoted was that, programmers invest a lot of
their time creating code and helping teachers use software.  I'm guessing
that this is more than motivated by the joy of coding, but also by the
desire to help students grow and become better educated.  And, I'm thinking
programmers don't get a chance to see the fruits of their labor in action,
that is, in classrooms with all the big and little cherubs ;)  THEREFORE, I
was saying that perhaps programmers might be happy/feel joy from success
stories, shared by teachers, so as to more directly 'see' how their labor
produces fruits in the end.

>
> Anything that we can do to convince educators to invest this time is a good
> thing.
>

Agreed

I think Frog and Owl at http://frogandowl.org/ (Plug for HedgeMage) is
> trying
> to solve this problem.
>
Looks cool!  This looks like it would be a great place to coordinate open
source software and education, at least I think that's one of its/their
goals.  Thanks for pointing it out. More info on this project than on that
page?

>
> >    1. a new irc eg "#edubuntu-in-action",
>
> ... if the people in
> #edubuntu want to hear from #edubuntu-in-action, and the people in
> #edubuntu-in-action want the help of the people in #edubuntu, why not all
> just
> hang out in the same channel.
>

Steves got a good point...
A separate mailing list for 'Edubuntu in action' sounds like a good
idea, and if that's already there with ubuntu-education all well and
good.  Looking back a little on it's archives it looks like the place a
teacher would go.  Who "oversees" this list?  I would think to make it
effective for what I'm imagining all tech related queries would have to
be directed to another list to encourage this one to remain focused on
the education aspect.
I add my concern that this discussion/chatter might dilute the focus of the
productive chats about creating and improving and getting edubuntu to work.
Have you ever hung out with a bunch of teachers and they get started talking
shop?  You hear stories about this student, that lesson, computers,
analogies to teach plant reproduction, practical restrictions trying to do
labs in a 46 minute period, material management, traffic flow patterns
within a classroom, formative vs
summative<http://groosd.blogspot.com/search?q=formative>assessment,
habits
of mind <http://groosd.blogspot.com/search?q=habits>,
standards<http://groosd.blogspot.com/2009/07/gcos-pd-day-3.html>,
rubrics, behavioral vs cognitive outcomes,
constructivism<http://groosd.blogspot.com/search?q=constructivism>,
connectivism, and correcting papers etc etc (you don't want me to keep
going!).  I don't know if these discussions would, in general, be of
interest or use to programmers.

Additionally, I know I read a few days ago irc and it was about tons of
stuff I didn't understand nor did it inform my effort (however, the
next-day's discussion was about user-admin tool and I found it quite
interesting).  However, I sure was glad that someone was dealing with those
details :D *AND* it's good to see the quantity and depth of specialized work
required to build and maintain the software I use with my students.

In other words, I do see there needs to be much dialog between these 2
communities.  And, while much of what each profession discusses isn't of
immediate need to the other, I was massively persuaded by so many reasons
for all of to...
oli said:
why not widening the purpose of the existing channel and make that
purpose clear through a proper description on the wiki, website etc ...

And lots of others said this as well, and he also echoed numerous other
people's ideas when saying:
on a sidenote i think its better to link the communities of users and
developers closer together, developers need to learn what their users
want and also need to learn what their users dont understand to improve
their software in a usability oriented way, you will only reach that
target if you join the two communities instead of tearing them apart.

*...huddle around the same fire :).  So, forget I mentioned creating another
irc channel!!!*

>

> >    3. and an already existent community resource where lesson ideas can
> be
> >    created, co-developed, and reused ie http://LeMill.net<
> http://lemill.net/>
>
> Even better would be to develop some lessons underneath moodle, or the
> like,
> and actually DISTRIBUTE this stuff on the edubuntu dvd.
>

Actually, lemill is a content management system (built on Python/Zope/Plone)
especially created to do just this.  Moodle (which I use some) is a powerful
'swiss army knife' that can be used to do almost anything in education, but
and thus it is missing many of the affordances for this job that are present
in Lemill. Take a look at LeMill.net and I think you will agree with me that
it is an excellent community/series of tools to meet the specific need of
authoring, sharing and finding learning objects.  It is also open source
software, developed at http://lemill.org.

>
> > I recently saw a comment on #edubuntu: "I love publicly funded [software]
> > development!"  I've also seen it said on the list-serves that, when major
> > leadership of the Edubuntu community was provided by a financially-based
> > enterprise (Canonical), the leadership and participation by volunteers
> > atrophied.
>
> No offense to Ollie, but he was really fighting a losing battle.
>  Impossible to
> acheive and unrealistic goals were placed on him, and what we have today
> is,
> quite frankly, largly due to Ollie's herculean efforts.
>
> Thanks for further, elaborated-upon history, Scott.

>
> > So, I've really got no idea how public software development
> > monies could be positively infused into our community
>

I think it would be quite easy, but I think you've got to be realistic about
outcomes.  Small amounts of cash for, say, bounties

Cool, I'll take your word for it.  When the time comes...

 I see much possible synergy between
> > researchers and the current Edubuntu community.,
> > Should we seek to
> > invite educational researchers into our community?
>
> Getting more teachers would be awesome.
>
Cool.  Yes.   And what do you think about education researchers ie PhD
scientists whose field of research is education?  I'm not speaking of
teachers here...

Scott later says:
...When we get to the point where there's 50 teachers in there working on
lesson
plans, and 50 developers all talking, and we're stepping on each others
toes,
THEN we can think about two channels.  For now, that's not the case. :)
This makes sense to me.

And Scott adds...
David's other suggestion about lesson plans is a good one.  I'd love us to
be
able to ship some content.

And Jordan E. added...
This is crucial from my point of view. Teachers don't give a $&#! about
the technology, a lot of them don't even use computers (even when
they're available). There needs to be a real motive for teachers to want
to work with this stuff, and if we ship actual content ready to go, then
they don't have to worry about mastering all aspects of the programs
they want to use (which I'd say, the majority would never want to do in
the first place). Content is most likely the 'killer app' for education
and the best way we could get more people to start using Edubuntu.

And Scott adds...
Sooooo..... Who's going to produce us some content? :)
Is there already standard content out there with moodle/whatever we could
ship?
Can someone create some content for us?

And Jordan E. rejoins:
Teachers have content..might not be in moodle/whatever, but I'm sure I
could learn Moodle and start doing some translating/importing. I've been
trying to figure out a new/better way to be involved with the project,
and this sounds like it'd be fun...so, me, and whoever else wants to
help me out and speed up the effort!

I'm going to push a new paradigm on this one.  In my 21 years of teaching
I've come to NOT be too big a fan of 90% of lesson plans I see published,
for lots of reasons. It might not include some important concept that I
could leverage in my lesson that my students know because we just visited
that concept or because of my students, 'home knowledge'.  In the same way,
many lessons have info concepts assumed in them to which my students aren't
privy.  Or, I might not have certain materials, or I need to add additional
learning outcomes, or the social language is different from what my students
speak.  Or I need it for teaching my class which has students from 5
different language groups who recently arrived to the USA.

I need some easily adjustable, easily searchable, constantly updating lesson
materials that are built by components eg specific Activities, Methods,
Tools.  If you are interested in this, please spend some time checking out
(I'm repeating my self) this site: http://lemill.net or the software
development site: http://lemill.org. This project is funded by a coalition
of European nations. These people are so far ahead of where most of
education is currently at.  We want to not try and catch up to some text
books, but to leap frog, as it were, beyond the kind of education happening
today and bring teachers into the future.  I think this topic deserves more
thought/talk.  It certainly is quite near and dear to my heart...

And Steve mentioned:
I think packaging the Moodle training courses in with Moodle in Edubuntu
might be worth while.  Then I would think pointing to this and trying to
help out there might be most effective?

I support this as well.  This is more a series of lessons directed at the
teacher.  Is this something that frogandowl might be interesting in
coordinating?

Then Jonathan added:
Since we're on the topic, what are we going to do with the
ubuntu-education list? Should we just merge it with edubuntu-users,
leave it as it is or repurpose it?

And Steve adds...
A separate mailing list for 'Edubuntu in action' sounds like a good
idea, and if that's already there with ubuntu-education all well and
good.  Looking back a little on it's archives it looks like the place a
teacher would go.  Who "oversees" this list?  I would think to make it
effective for what I'm imagining all tech related queries would have to
be directed to another list to encourage this one to remain focused on
the education aspect.

That's a great idea.  What would that involve?

Thanks All for so many great thoughts--together we're smarter and any one or
few of us...
David
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