This sounds so, so cool: Mozilla Drumbeat Festival. "Join us in Barcelona for three days of making, teaching, hacking, inventing and shaping the future of education and the web."
Three days in the middle of the week, in another country, it's unlikely I'll be able to go, but damn... I'll certainly follow closely.
I happily went along to the August meetup of Python Ireland last Wednesday, where as I expected the community talk was very interesting. Kevin showed us the results of the surveys he sent out after PyCon Ireland (survey says: 100% satisfaction!), and a second one to understand the Irish Python community better -- mostly, "who we are" since we don't really know! Some people show up at meetups, or events, many many more are on the mailing list. Vicky posted up her notes of the talk for an idea of what the survey touched on. I was interested in the results although they are to be taken with a grain of salt: not everyone filled out the survey, and perhaps some questions could have been phrased differently as I found myself realising a couple of times that I completely misunderstood the question as Kevin was explaining "we asked about blah blah blah". Oops! I'm sure the data is mostly valid still :o)
An important section of the survey and thus of the talk was about what we we could -- and wanted to -- do as a community to raise Python's profile and reach in Ireland. The survey had many cool ideas, asking non-anonymously what people would be willing to *actually* help out with. Likely subgroups of 5 people or so will be formed to follow up on some of these ideas, with people with not as much time welcome to chime in if they're interested.
The Redis presentation got cancelled, but Brian gave us a quick tour of the highlights of EuroPycon. I've never been, but from what I understand despite being quite good it was not as good as the previous years.
We headed out to the pub afterwards, where we promptly tried the concept of "topics" that Kevin had brought up in his talk. Basically you divide people/tables by topics and interested people can gather around and discuss and/or make progress on something. I'm not sure whether that kind of structure can really work in a pub context, it tends to be more ad-hoc. You start something along and then you call people over you know would be interested. It was a bit difficult to get started but based on the interesting conversations that ensued I'd be willing and curious to try it again.
If someone dangles a piece of paper with "Education" written on it there's no way I can *not* pay attention so I broke from my current conversation to sit at the table.
We basically divided the group of people we could reach out to ("educate" I guess) into 4 groups: secondary level, third level, professionals and hobbyists, kinda merging the 2 latter as the discussion progressed. For some reason I just don't care about reaching out to professionals, or about certifications. Those topics are plain uninteresting to me. Ah well. Teaching high school students and somehow getting through to college students is a lot more interesting, and we agreed transition year students were really the best target for the secondary level cause. I want to look into this again once I'm done with my adult course.
There were suggestions of training secondary level teachers so they can teach how to program, which struck me first as a bit unfair. If there are interested teachers though, that's very very cool and I'm more than willing to help out! But I wonder how realistic that would be. The few teachers I met seemed either overwhelmed or stoically accepting of how much more knowledgeable and comfortable their students are with computers. On the other hand I was never asked any particularly complex questions by my teenage students during my short course, so it might very well be worthwhile to focus on teaching the basics of programming to teachers instead. They would certainly have a better reach.
Third level outreach would be about giving more perspective and teach an additional language to students, who tend to be only exposed to Java through college years. That's the strange relationship between employers and Universities, employers want graduates they can put to work instantly, Universities would like to teach computer science, and students would like to learn something that will get them a job. So I understand why students might limit themselves to Java initially, but still if we present Python correctly, as an alternative it would be very worthwhile. There was the idea of helping students through their homework, using Python to solve the problems. I wonder if it would attract the right kind of students but it sounds worth a try. Outside of the meetup I had also talked about this with Cheryl who suggested I might try to teach an introduction to programming (using Python) to college students before their course begins. Particularly targeting women to help even the playing field a little (see this link about meritocracy & third level computing courses) though of course open to everyone.
Alan and Kevin should be posting their notes from the evening and the various "what we can do" for each target group. What I'm transcribing here is a mix of the actual conversation and my bubbling thoughts :)
I left as the group kind of disbanded to crash the "website / online presence" table topic, as this came up many times while we were talking: we should highlight what companies are using Python, and link to resources for people looking to get started with the language. From the response to my course, people in Ireland definitely have an interest in learning!
Currently learning and messing around with pyGTK. Pretty cool stuff! :)
Urgh, I've been desperately trying to get back on top of my inbox since studying for the exam. I think this week-end I might win the fight!
In the meantime, 2 interesting links on education & technology:
I discovered Three cups of tea when an article in OLPC news used it as a comparison against OLPC's goals and the lessons OLPC could/should have learnt from Greg Mortenson's work. This is the story of a man who is building schools in Pakistan. I'm nearly tempted to stop here because, if that doesn't intrigue you then probably the book wouldn't interest you either. I was sold at the "building schools" bit, and the fact that this occurs in Central Asia, mostly Pakistan and Afghanistan makes the story even more extraordinary and interesting. Along the way you'll learn bits and tidbits about Tanzania, climbing, famous climbers, Islam, Pakistan's cultures and geography, madrassas... The story begins in 1993, which makes as well for an interesting perspective on September 11th 2001 and the months that followed, given that Mortenson actually was around that part of the world at the time.
The book is very inspiring, the story and challenges incredible and the writing pleasant and well-paced... Heartily recommended read.
This blog post by a teacher who's migrating his school IT system to an open-source infrastructure just came up on the Ubuntu-ie mailing list. It's happening in Northern Ireland but still goes on the list of "Irish schools using open-source" :)
That's really cool. The comments promise a follow-up post, I hope it will include advice on how the author got not only the students but also the school staff to be excited about the migration. That seems to be a major pain point within the case studies I've come across.
Today I started looking around for more research on schools using or migrating to open-source solutions and I'm finding quite an overwhelming amount of case studies (it's great! but difficult to review and digest) at all sorts of level (country-wide policies, city-wide, single school, county , district, area, state...)
Trying to keep to the data that relates to the UK and Ireland will not only be useful but simply make the search more manageable. It's still great to know all this is out there and I hope I'll find a way to benefit from it without having my head explode along the way. I think for the stories of failures I'll keep the net wider as well, I saw very few and there's a lot to learn from them (I found one).
Along the way I came across this fantastic letter from Peruvian Congressman David Villanueva Nuñez, written in answer to a letter from Microsoft Peru who was offended by a Bill enforcing the use of free (libre) open-source software in government bodies, back in 2002. The letter is available here. I wish I could be so eloquent, this is beautifully written and well-worth a read, the argument is rock solid.
Back to the topic of open-source in schools, here's what comes out of today's reading with regard to problems encountered.
The counter-points: Teachers already have to retrain and update their course material with every upgrade of Microsoft products (that is usually accompanied by a license cost, if not a hardware upgrade when the OS needs to be upgraded as well).
Students should be taught to use software in general, not a particular branded product. Moving from OpenOffice to Microsoft Word and vice-versa shouldn't be difficult. Because it's in Microsoft's interest to release new versions regularly, the interface will change anyway so being versatile is important.
With regard to guarantees, I'll turn to the awesome Peruvian letter cited above, for a description of how the guarantees of open-source software and proprietary products are the same, if you pay attention to the EULA of the latter. Provided "AS IS." Support is necessary in both cases as well, open-source software usually lets you pick from a wider range of suppliers.
For #2 I haven't seen any specific software mentioned yet so it's hard to explore the problem more deeply. I need more information.
In the Peruvian letter, Microsoft highlights that similar initiatives have failed before, citing Mexico Red Escolar project. Dr Villanueva Nuñez answers that the main issue with their approach was that they only focused on the monetary savings and failed to account for implementation and maintenance cost. It's very interesting in the context of the letter because Microsoft themselves say that licence cost only accounts for 8% of the cost of purchasing software.
I really want to learn more about that Red Escolar project. I think the name has been reused for an education portal since then and it makes it difficult to find information about that particular initiative. So far in English I've only been able to find reports on the announcement circa 1998, 1999 but no follow-up. I probably will have to brush up on my Spanish and go look around the source websites :)
I'm going to try to keep the information ordered neatly in a file or page, in addition to this blog. This will force me to stay organised and keep my sources straight. Today's findings started from a BBC article found through LWN, but I'm sure I missed a few references along my clicking and reading of the day. Writing this up properly as I go along will be very interesting (and right in line with my goal of writing more!)
In the midst of reports on what happened at Linux.conf.au I saw this link:
NZ school ditches Microsoft and goes totally open source
The story itself is interesting but the background it provides on the deals between the government and Microsoft for education is particularly eye-opening. I was surprised, because I remembered that Mahara was funded partially by the Ministry of Education and so I thought NZ was way ahead of other countries in that regard.
I hope the LCA session on that school was recorded, I'd love to hear more about their process with regard to OSS, and get tidbits on the non-traditional pedagogy they're using and how the tech supports it.
Just found an awesome link about open-source in schools: http://opensourceschools.org.uk, thanks to the Ubuntu education mailing-list. I haven't had enough time yet to explore everything but this is exactly the kind of things I'm looking for, the case studies are really interesting -- and there's one based in Ireland as well!
I've been talking to people interested in bringing open-source and/or Ubuntu to schools, usually because of budget reasons. I think it's a fantastic idea and I'm happy to help wherever I can, and at the moment I'm looking for case studies on schools that did migrate to understand better the pain points and whether the outcome was worth it.
The first question people have been asking me is "Do you know of any Irish school that did this?" so in the hope of building a solid answer to that, although I do keep my eyes open for research from anywhere I'm trying to focus on finding local case studies first if they exist. I think it's reassuring to know that a school just like yours, a county down the road made the switch too.
