Re: [school-discuss] Possible Schoolforge Project

Great idea. It's time to update the existing Web site from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8, and this could be an excellent opportunity to reconceive its categories, flow, and functionality (for starters).

As Laura says, it would be great to share ideas on the topics she has raised. If you agree, as I do, that she is on the right issue, then how do we express it, explain it, and respond to it? This is not easy.

The Free Software Foundation has been morphing in response to these changes and we may or may not discover that they provide useful guidance for schools. Let's investigate.

Thanks for starting us off, Laura.

-- David

On Fri, Feb 17, 2017 at 2:44 AM, LM <lmemsm@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I'm noticing that a lot of schools, teachers and students are using
more and more mobile apps on phones and tablets. They're not as
concerned with issues of "free" versus "Free". If an app is available
for free, why worry about whether the source is available? The whole
mobile ecosystem is very proprietary and tries to lock you into a
particular brand and especially a particular app store. Cloud based
computing and tablets and notebooks designed to encourage cloud
applications and discourage use of locally installed programs are also
cutting down on the number of Open Source applications people might
use. Instead of LibreOffice, many are using Google Docs and Microsoft
Office 365 online. Google may allow you to change data formats and
move it to other applications easily, but a lot of their online tools
are not Open Source.

There are some Open Source alternatives to proprietary mobile and
cloud applications and proprietary app stores. However, I don't see
them catching on the way the proprietary options are. It might be
helpful if our Schoolforge group helped document Open Source
alternatives to proprietary mobile and cloud solutions and shared
reviews and case studies for some of these alternatives. Some Open
Source alternative examples are http://www.android-x86.org/ and
https://marketplace.firefox.com/ and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emscripten It would be nice to add more
mobile and cloud projects to our Schoolforge Education Software list
and some pages on topics such as how to bypass proprietary app stores
and get the applications you want on your mobile devices, why it's
important to use FLOSS as opposed to free software and detailing
alternatives to proprietary apps and software.

If anyone has any ideas, software suggestions, would like to help
volunteer their knowledge on this subject or volunteer to write some
articles, reviews and/or case studies or anything else related to this
topic, please let us know.

Thanks.
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