Educator's Exploration Overview

[Ralph deGennaro]

Hello everyone,

Okay, you work part of the weekend and like crazy on Monday, and then the
client says they entered the data by hand.  Gotta love corporate America!
No point in my saying this besides as an excuse for the lateness of this
email.

During our meeting last Thursday, we talked about events in general and in
particular Explorations.  The conversation ranged over a few different
points relating what's done in the past, what current resources & people we
have, and what we could pull off in the future.  Also, we talked briefly
about our role as a LoCo in the local community (not FOSS community and not
our goals).

As always, please add to what I'm putting here, and I will put this stuff up
on the wiki.

So in the end, we came to two conclusions.

   - That our roles should be communicators/relayors/translators of
   information about Ubuntu (and FOSS in general).
   - And for the next Exploration, to concentrate on one
   audience/industry/market would be best suit our group.

The audience would be educators.  In particular, we felt that K12 would be
good, and easier to have some impact.  There is some differences between
grade groupings (early learning vs. elem vs. middle vs. high) but that is
easier to deal with then "grade school" versus "higher education".

The format would be a mixture of talks/presentations & labs/hands-on
sessions.  With the potential to have discussion groups.  The latter is
different from a talk, in that it is more a group to be "self-guided" in
their talks.  More on that at the wiki.  We didn't discuss it, but my guess
is to keep this in a one or two day event on the weekend.  This could be
changed, as I'm sure we could come with tons of ideas, but probably depends
on practical availabilities (people/places/equipment).

The hardest part of the above is to figure out the topics of each.  We want
to bring topics to the audience that is important to them.  So in this we
need to find out from them what are their current itches that need
scratching.  And then figure out how Ubuntu (& Edubuntu) and FOSS in general
can be of use to them.