Re: [school-core] Educational Games Developers contacted

[Justin Riddiough <jriddiough@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Nov 23, 2011 at 4:27 AM, LM <lmemsm@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 22, 2011 at 12:24 PM, David Bucknell <david@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> wrote:
>>
>> I've written all (except for Charles, who is already on the list) of the
>> educational games developers -- several via contact forms on
>> sourceforge.net.  I've invited them to join the site, the mailing list and
>> to take charge of their projects' listings -- although I tried to soften
>> that blow by promising to help.  I hope we get some new, active members.

David, that's really great.  Hope it does bring more talent and
knowledge to our group.


> By the way, there's a very nice educational game that our Ed Tech department
> recommended at:
> http://freerice.com/
> However, it's strictly an online game.  Not sure how to work strictly online
> resources into schoolforge.net's educational recommendations pages.
>

Laura,

I've always turned down strictly online resources on the basis that
they don't meet our definition of FLOSS
https://schoolforge.net/free-libre-open-source-software and do not
provide the essential freedoms.  Projects *could* provide the source
under appropriate licencing for many of these resources if they chose
to.  I think if some organization wrote an educational tool with
Flash, and provided the flash interface on their website as well as a
section for source downloads with libre licenses - that would be
great.

I know you are familiar with these reasons and you've even expressed
them before.  I've just had to think it through because of email
requests to have projects included on the site in the past.  It is a
similar issue to vendor lock in, where the end user is dependent on
the service to be up and running to be able to access the resource,
instead of being able to run it on their own terms.

The flip side is that it's extremely convenient and a wonderful
service in some cases for someone to host a number of online resources
for education.  Maybe it should be part of our outreach to find some
way to connect with those services to nudge them to liberate their
resources so that we can encourage our site visitors to visit their
project.