Hello again, and some thoughts

[Doug Loss <dloss@csrlink.net>]

I haven't been terribly active on the mailing list of late (which
probably came as a relief to many of you), mostly due to the press of
daily responsibilities here at the university.  I suspect that many of
you who also work in the field of education could say the same thing.

   Our finals and semester are over in the next few weeks, so some of
the pressure will be lifted and I should be able to pay more attention
to seul-edu.  Again, I suspect that many of you are in similar
situations.

   As you may know, seul-edu has been in existence only since early
November of 1998.  I think that in our six months of existence we've
made some very good starts at moving toward our fairly fuzzy goal of
fostering educational applications for Linux.  We've slowed a bit in the
past month or so, at least on the surface, which isn't necessarily a bad
thing.  Such a slowdown can give people time to reflect on the ideas
thrown out in the previous high-volume posting phase.

   As the end of the semester approaches (is this a US-centric concept,
or do schools in many other places also run on the semester system?)
let's all resolve to pick an educational project for Linux and offer our
assistance.  We have a list of some projects on our projects page
<http://www.seul.org/edu/projects.html>.  Some of these projects are
currently single-person works; some probably wish to remain that way, at
least for the time being, but some would gratefully accept assistance. 
I know that Hilaire Fernandes and Miguel Sepulveda have both asked for
help at various times.  This help needn't be purely coding.  Testing
applications, evaluating their strong and weak points, and writing
documentation for them can be very helpful.  And when an application is
fully functional and usable, writing up lesson plans and exercise sheets
that use that application will be extremely important in getting it
accepted into the schools.

   I'd like to publically request that each of the listed project
leaders give us a report in the next few weeks on where they stand and
where they'd like some help.  I've made these requests privately in the
past, with a fairly good response.  However, some projects haven't been
heard from for a while and we're curious what their status is. 
Additionally, if anyone has a project that isn't listed on the projects
page and should be, let us all know.  I can think of one possibility off
the top of my head--Micah and Mauricio's work on a Derive-work-alike
math program.  We haven't added it yet because the last thing I'd heard
was that it needed a little more private development before they were
ready for anyone else to actually see it.

   That's about it from me.  Let's all think about how we can help
further one or more educational projects.  I'd really enjoy having a few
more of the seul-edu-associated projects make a public announcement of
availability before our one-year anniversary arrives.  And for those
that have already made such announcements, congratulations!  We need to
help them refine their applications and get to a point where we can make
Linux the most desirable OS for educational use!

-- 
Doug Loss                 A life spent making mistakes is not only
Data Network Coordinator  more honorable, but more useful than a
Bloomsburg University     life spent doing nothing.
dloss@bloomu.edu                G. B. Shaw