I'm getting ready to fly off to The Netherlands for the "Open Source for Education in Europe: Research and Practice" conference, which is the third conference I've done in a month, and the last conference I'm planning on to be attending until we have a student information system to show off. I'm excited about this conference because it is the first one I've attended where SchoolTool is right in the center of the topic. Usually I feel a little peripheral, either an open source person at an ed conference or an ed person at an open source conference. http://www.openconference.net/index.php?cf=3
A couple weeks ago I flew out to Colorado for a very brief visit to the T+L2 Conference. This is the second biggest national ed-tech conference in the US, sponsored by the National School Boards Association. There has historically been less of an open source presence at this conference. I was offered a booth at the "Educational Excellence Fair," which was kind of a pain, since I had to come up with stuff to put in a booth instead of just doing a presentation. I roped my sister into helping make some posters, which will come in handy in the future. I wouldn't have bothered flying out and doing this, except I figure it will help me get a better slot next year. I also determined that next year I should probably just propose a "What is free software?" talk, since basic understanding of FOSS seemed quitel low, which is especially perverse given the fact that the conference is sponsored by school boards, who are presumably particularly interested in finding ways to keep their budgets in balance. http://www.nsba.org/t+l/ Last week I drove up to the Ubuntu developers' summit in Montreal. I didn't have any official duties, but it was a good time to catch up with both the Canonical folks and the core of the US K-12 open source community (Eric Harrison, David Trask, Jeff Elkner. Matt Oquist We're still a tiny faction). --Tom _______________________________________________ Schooltool mailing list [email protected] http://lists.schooltool.org/mailman/listinfo/schooltool
