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Re: [school-discuss] FOSS-Related Curricula
Yes.
Maybe it's a serious publishing job, but the thought just occured to me this might be a way to fund F/OS/S efforts. What I gather Joel's suggesting is scope&sequence integration: How would an app like OpenFX integrate with GIMP &/or Blender 3D?
OK, I'm a believer in community effort & free stuff, but seems to me what is needed a self-funding mechanism. That is, foundation grants are great, but they come more often when there's already a working project that's on-going but needs help on attaining already demonstrable goals & outcomes.
The opportunity here is enabling thru commercial/nonprofit/for-profit publishing. Free apps for schools, portable apps as well, ability to use apps at school & home but a foundation publishes the curricula (teacher & student manuals, CD's, DVD's...).
The FOSS software authors/community could make money (also getting royalties on their lesson plans), the foundation makes money (the %age
skim), the schools save money (there must be school districts that actually care & are trying to stem the flood of warez), the students get to take the apps home & keep 'em & can use them forever. It'd become something of a self-generating legacy effort, since more kids would get exposed to quality F/OSS, a broader community grows around the apps, the F/OSS projects could get additional funding for their T&E, etc.
One of the problems w/ F/OSS is distribution. It's there for the getting, but the venues for getting it aren't that readily found and ofttimes elusive.
Mabye this is another potential starter, the idea is setting up shop as a "freeware" publisher that gives away the freeware (as a redistribution clearinghouse) but *sells* "proprietary" content that focuses on the F/OSS apps:
1. Development templates for the F/OSS writers/community to follow
2. A tiered royalty agreement system for developing the scope&sequence,
teacher guides, rubrics & lesson plans
3. Editorial staff assists lesson plan developers w/ content, look & feel, etc.
4. Tiered free/paid content available at centralized website. There'd be some free content available (samples or focused on just one topic), but not all of it.
5. Home-school, per-seat, per-lab, per-school, per-district pricing. The DV training, train the trainer, teacher guides & lesson plans would price accordingly. All would be downloadable or available as hard-media (for extra $, start w/ micropublished just-in-time). Option: Delivering content in secure e-book format?
6. Paid support
Portal features:
1. Free software .. either redistribution or links (need to get agreements w/ some freeware authors for redistrib...)
2. Best Practices (need content authors)
3. Discussion fora
4. Community content
5. Kits: USB Flash Drive apps, CD-ROM set-up kits, remote file synchronization tools, LTSP,
VPN, Karoshi ... a suite of free server-side stuff (one simple thing I think is missing at the moment is a K-12 equivalent of the cyber-cafe ZoneCD).
Some Foundation features:
1. Provides funding grants for ongoing or nascent development efforts
2. Pays content authors
3. Distributes stuff
4. Promotes best practices
5. Facilitates the trend via advocacy
6. R&D / research / development
Problems:
1. Visibility/marketing
2. start-up funding
3. royalty tracking & checks, all the usual money-pump problems.
4. support
5. indemnification
Which leaves me with one thought: You've already got some visibility w/ School Forge. It's a "groovy" name & AFAIK has been a "starter" in the past.
If this is a starter what is then needed is a 501(c)3 (if you don't already have it), a charter & a board of directors. Oh, and a plan.
Gifts in Kind & TechSoup come to mind as non-profits that already do some
of this, TechSoup especially has a good F/OSS section that could use further development.
Just my $.02.
Thoughts?
/lee
Joel Kahn <jj2kk4@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: Lee Rodgers wrote:
>All these neat apps... Blender, OpenFx ...
>it'd be great to get each app's community
>on board in writing lessons/curricula for
>digital media -- screenshot workflow how-to's...
We could also work on curricula in which students
are encouraged to find relationships between
different programs and see how they can work
together to produce more than the sum of the parts.
Joel
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