[schoolforge] Thank you and agenda items

[David Bucknell <david@members.iteachnet.org>]

I apologize if you get this more than once. I sent it from the wrong address, 
and it appears to me to have bounced, but ... sorry if you get it more than 
two or three times ;-).

Dear Web Building Team,

I'd like to thank you for all the hard work and say that I think the site
is looking better and better.

I have especially enjoyed seeing how diverse the membership is and how it
continues to grow. I like the Les's Web form and Felipe's multilingual
press releases.Nice job.

I'd also like to thank William and Doug for doing most of the press
release work and for all the translators, whover you are. You have added a
great deal of credibility to the project.

Obviously, one unfortunate thing is that schoolforge was not picked up by
slashdot but that's a lesson for us. Despite lots of planning, we managed
to overlook
the fact that most of these news sites/orgs/papers do not take press
releases, but articles based on them. So, I think we might do well to try
for a press release a month announcing collective/individual achievements
and attempt to get articles written about those achievements. That way,
schoolforge itself wll garner weight as having begun to fulfill its
ambitions of fostering a cohesive and more
effective common effort for free and open "resources" in education.

By the way, where is the media contact list again? I may be duplicating. I
finally got EDTECH to post the announcment today and have sent to Edpage,
Benton Foundation, a bunch of edtech Webzines and the NYTimes (three
different editors in hopes one of them would find it interesting -- no
contact on their Web site for either education or technology).

Re this mailing list: any hopes of aliasing it to the schoolforge.net
domain?

What about having a schoolforge list that isn't restricted to member reps?

A couple of suggestions to start the next round of Web site revisions.

*My own "what is schoolforge" should be revised starting with changing the
"I" to "we";

*We should add the OSI (http://www.opensource.org) to the resource list --
especially since we've got the FSF (http://www.gnu.org) there already.

*We should ask of our members to make sure they've got one of the and the
link on their Web sites.

*I still think we should have a contact form, not just a mailto link; the
link is strange to me as I thought Felipe wanted to avoid spam; moreover,
a form is IMHO _much_ friendlier and more efficient.

*I know it should wait until there are more content revisions, but I was
so impressed by the power of the multilingual press releases, that I hope
we will soon
have the site in multiple languages. Of course, down the road, this could
mean considering mirror sites.

As for our tasks, I propose, in addition to a monthly press release, the
following "agenda" items:

*Should this discussion be taking place on the seul-edu list instead,
except for voting?

*PR: I hope we will work toward a common pr package that members and
supporters
can take with them to conferences. If of interest, then I suggest that we
discuss what this might consist of exactly.

*Training Recommendations: We could also come up with a common statement
and set of recommendations, and even alternative standards, for training
and proficiency goals for each of the normal positions in a school: sys
admin, tech faculty-student advisor/trainer (often called a "tech
coordinator in the US), school admin, teacher, student (at each level).
ISTE has done a great deal of this and we might be able to create an
addendum rather than undertake a complete alternative.

Extras for down the road:

*Software project hosting
You may remember my fixation on the sourceforge.net software. I think we
are missing an opportunity by not moving all hosting of educational apps
to schoolforge. It's what people expect.

*Curriculum/course project hosting
Likewise, you may remember my complaints and then submission to the wiki
as a course/curriculum building instrument. I do think that wiki (which
won't work from behind most MS-enabled-disabled firewalls because they
strangely disable 8080 ports as well as ssl) is useful, and it may be the
way, but I'm still stuck on setting up a matrix of common school format
and then asking people to set up projects to build opencontent parts, such
as geometry 1 for average high/secondary level students, or English for
7th graders/year 8's/13 year olds. In fact, I'm building it now. If you're
interested, let me know.