Walter, Thank you for this!
I noticed my name, so feel need to reply (below): On 03/25/2016 04:30 PM, Walter Bender wrote: > It occured to me afterwards that one simple call to action would be > for every member of the Free/Libre Software community to adopt a > teacher (or be open to being adopted, e.g., Devin, a music teacher, > has adopted me). We need to make our voices heard. I do not know "who adopted who". I have been telling everyone it is a "collaboration" to suggest that we are on equal footing. Yes, I am music teacher. I found out about Software Libre because my computer stopped working for me (in an obvious and blatant way -- I understand now that it was hardly ever "working for me"), which initiated my research into other options. This research led me to discover for myself the GNU project and the free/libre software movement. These projects started with a question with profound implications: "How do we address the new set of moral and ethical responsibilities implicated by software technologies?" For GNU and FSF, the response to this question is Free/Libre Software: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html I will admit that the benefits of this solution was not particularly obvious at first. However, what was obvious to me was that my computer was programmed to tell /me/ what to do, and what I would expect from my technology was /exactly the opposite/. So, I pursued free/libre software further as a possible alternative. Fast forward to today (and after much research), I am now completely confident that free/libre software is the only decent choice for education. As developers, please understand the power that is currently in your hands. Please find teachers in your area and find ways of working with them. It should be fun to collaborate, too! Teachers may not understand the reasoning for free/libre immediately, but they will certainly be excited by the idea of working together with you to build software that does what they /really want it to do/. Also, if you have trouble finding teachers in public schools, I recommend freelance artists and music teachers -- many have a lot of flex time that public school teachers do not. This is also helpful resource for sharing with teachers: https://www.gnu.org/education/education.html I hope that this helps! Let us know when you have found someone to collaborate with. Devin
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