Hello all,
We just got back from the FLOSSIE conference, and it went very well.
Kudos to Ian Lynch for organizing it and making it happen. There were
about 50 attendees or so.
Simon Phipps kicked off the conf with an interesting presentation about
how open source is the natural result of a highly connected society.
Simon talked the "Participation Age". How we are moving into a world
where the general population are not mere consumers of content, but
active participants in creation of content. Perfect examples of this
being open source, blogs, etc.
The reason why I detail this is that, without being planned, this theme
set the stage for the rest of the conference. A lot of the subsequent
talks went back to the concept of paricipation. Someone gave a
presentation about Moodle, an open source Course Management System that
lets students be active participants in learning. This man setup a wiki
with a topic for a story and asked the kids to colaboratively develop
the story, wiki-style. Moodle has a chat room, pop quizes and activities
for the kids.
Ian of course talked about the INGOTs program, which is all about
learning through participation. Instead of reading something on a book
and answering an exam paper, in INGOTs kids have to demonstrate their
skills in practice. Furthermore, kids participate in assessment, and are
encouraged to self-assess as part of the learning process. So again, it
goes with the theme of participation.
Naturally, I talked about OOoAuthors. My emphasis was on what OOoAuthors
does to make it *easy* for people to participate. I talked about our
review process and how we use it as a way to let anyone, regardless of
level of expertise, to participate in the project. I also briefly showed
how we use technology (Plone) to make this review process easier.
The talks were very well received. There were three OOo volunteers
present: Ian Lynch, myself, and Iain Roberts from OOoAuthors. Speaking
of which, it was great meeting you Iain! :-) We also had help from
Mark, who works with Ian Lynch in The Learning Machine.
The talks were very well received, and we had a lot of positive
comments. We handed out several OOo CDs. We talked to several people
about INGOTs and they were interested. And a lot of people liked what
they saw on the OOoAuthors website.
All in all, it went very well. So kudos to Ian Lynch and SchoolForge for
making this happen, and thanks to the OOo community members Simon and
Iain for comming over. It would have been good to have a few more people
help out. Perhaps next year?
Cheers,
Daniel.
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