Re: [school-core] Educational Games Developers contacted

[David Bucknell <david@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Great points, both of you.
On the on-line resources, I think you've hit on a nice campaign
possibility: letting people know who's open and who's not -- and
rewarding those who do share with some kind of honor?

That is not to say we don't understand that they need to make a
living.  I don't think we should/could require anyone to share how
they put their tools on-line; we just need sources for someone's
desktop -- not for a competing on-line version.  Do you know what I
mean?

Also, you made me think that companies are slipping into closed source
without anyone calling them on it because they are using "Software as
a Service."  Part of the education program could be to teach people to
recognize what they're getting -- and to realize the consequences.

Between us, and thinking aloud: Google is certainly a case in point,
although it's difficult to say anything negative about such a huge
force.  I'm in the same old struggle, shades of ten years ago, with a
school's tech team, trying to get them to see that while it is now
stupid for a school not to take advantage of Google's tools, it is
just as stupid not to do so ... judiciously.  All the school's photos
need not be on Picassa; nor should all students' portfolios be on
Google servers.  Mentioning how easy the alternatives are to either of
these things has gotten me incredulous looks that remind me of the
first time I broached the topic of free and open sources.  The
politics have changed, but, in some ways, people are just as (willing
to be) ignorant as ever.  I don't know what happened to "consumer
education."
/end rant.

David

On Wed, Nov 23, 2011 at 8:45 PM, LM <lmemsm@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 23, 2011 at 8:26 AM, Justin Riddiough <jriddiough@xxxxxxxxx>
> wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>
>
> Agree, it's certainly not FLOSS unless they license their web pages under
> some type of libre license.
>
>>
>> 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.
>
>
>
> If we come up with some other pages, possibly for links to Creative Commons
> resources, we might want to consider another page just for free online
> educational resources.  We'd probably have to decide what we thought was too
> restrictive use-wise though.  Some sites require you join to use them.  Some
> only let you use their resources online, etc. For instance, does a
> dictionary/translation site give you a definition that is in the public
> domain that you can use in your own projects or is the definition
> copyrighted?  Am sure we'd get some recommendations from the
> schoolforge-discuss list of good online educational resources if we wanted
> to do this in the future.
>
> Sincerely,
> Laura
>



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