Re: Open Book

[Doug Loss <dloss@csrlink.net>]

Robert Hopcroft wrote:
> 
> This is
> why I don't like the idea of restricting things to K12.  Participating
> teachers and students could structure their school work so that it
> became part of the project. Students looking for term papers or thesis
> work could pick something that would contribute to the project thus
> accomplishing something satisfying while fulfilling their school
> requirements. Students learning a second language could translate while
> they're learning.

I agree that this could be a powerful and useful infusion of energy into
our project.  You may not know it, but at least one of our gradebook
projects (the one now sadly defunct) was started as a college class
assignment.  The reason I wanted to concentrate on pre-college education
is that at the university level there seems to be much less use of
specifically "educational" software.  Most of what's used is the same
software used everywhere else: wordprocessors, spreadsheets, programming
languages, image and audio editors, etc.  For those specialized areas
(astronomy, mathematics, the sciences in general), Linux already has a
fair amount of software.  But the specifically educational software for
pre-college education is nearly totally lacking.

Since we aren't one year old yet and have somewhat limited resources, it
seemed like a good idea to concentrate on an area that's been quite
neglected rather than try to cover everything.  I'd like to see us get
into home use "edutainment" software, but that's also for the future. 
So, I agree with you that we shouldn't restrict our purview to just
pre-college education, but I think that for now that's a good place to
use our limited resources.

> Somebody just asked about  the idea
> of people wanting a particular piece of software contributing to a pool
> of programers to write it for them. Such a program is mentioned in the
> August Linux Journal page 100, see http://www.cosource.com.

I looked at this and think it's interesting.  I'm not sure how we would
or should make use of it.  Could the rest of you take a look here and
see which of our ongoing projects and todo list projects should be
registered here?

-- 
Doug Loss                 The difference between the right word and
Data Network Coordinator  the almost right word is the difference
Bloomsburg University     between lightning and a lightning bug.
dloss@bloomu.edu                Mark Twain