Re: The French connection [Fwd: french?]

[Doug Loss <dloss@csrlink.net>]

Roger Dingledine wrote:
> 
> Thanks, Pete! It looks good (not that I know French, but...)
> 
I agree wholeheartedly.

> At this point, you should send them a quick note mentioning
> that you've done a translation
> (http://www.seul.org/archives/seul/edu/Dec-1998/msg00365.html)
> and you'd be happy to have them put it on their site or put it up
> on the seul site, if they approve.
> 
Pete, could you do this?  If not, I'll give it a go, but I suspect they
will be more receptive if the message was in French, a language in which
I am unfortunately deficient.

> I think they'd get a lot more responses if it were translated
> into English as well. On the other hand, maybe they're trying
> to decide French policy here, and so hearing from non-French
> people is useless. Maybe we should thank them for giving us a
> headstart with some questions, and post (similar) questions of
> our own, for non-French people?
> 
As these questions come from the Ministry of Education, I suspect the
French focus is important to them.  However, the offer should still be
made, respectfully of course.  And if the answer is no, they're really
only looking for French responses, we should request their permission to
post equivalent questions.  Possibly the information collected by both
sets could be collated into one set of responses.  Actually, this might
be a good place to start in our translation efforts.  These questions
could be translated into German, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, and whatever
other languages we have access to.  The responses could similarly be
translated into English for access by non-speakers of the language.

> It would be a good way to get people thinking about Linux (and
> free software in general) in education. But it's a project that
> doesn't "produce" anything, and we've got rather a lot of those
> going on as it is.
> 
I think we definitely need to get some actual production going on
something (Matt Wimer's gradebook and Micah Yoder's stock market sim
seem farthest along to me), but I think something like this would also
produce something useful--an idea of how and where Linux and logiciels
libres (I like that) are currently being used in education.  I would
suggest a fourth question (Pete, you may want to suggest this to the
Ministry) of, "Is there an educational application for which you would
like to use free software, but for which you haven't been able to find
appropriate software?  Would you be willing to invest time and effort in
developing such software?"

-- 
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