On Wed 14 April 2010 12:44:04 am Mel Chua wrote: [snip] > Why are *you* here?
I've been idling in the IRC channel for a while trying to get my feel of things, so I guess I should finally poke y head out of the bunker and say hi :) My story is the other side of the coin from Mel's. I find that high schools, at least the schools I have been exposed to, are not helpful in spreading open source software and culture. The high schools that I have seen and been to stifle the belief that collaboration and openness and believe it is a Good Thing, and I believe this only hurts us in the long run. Sure, university is a different experience, far more open, far more, should I say, understanding, of what it is we are trying to do. But I think students need to be exposed to these things in high school, while they are still able to really grok it. I am lucky enough to have found the open source community myself, and have instilled in myself many of the beliefs and ideas of the culture we have, but most, I'd say in the upper ninety percentile, really haven't the slightest clue. I guess I'm here to try to make an impact in that. :) My days as a high school student are numbered somewhere in the twenties at this point, but I still feel that there is a good chance that I _can_ impact high school students and that we can. I've been of the belief that to get students involved in FOSS it needs to take two different directions: Student exposure (students sharing and showing each other the FOSS community) and being exposed by teachers and professors as well. Most students have no reason to use FOSS if their teachers require the to turn their assignments in in Office format, or to collaborate in a community fashion such as ours without some outside force. By planting the seeds both within peers and mentors, we become far more effective. My involvement in Fedora's Campus Ambassadors Program is to eventually lay the groundwork for those peers that are already involved in our communities to impress it upon their peers, just as TOS is laying the groundwork for professors and teachers. > --Mel Ryan -- Ryan Rix == http://hackersramblings.wordpress.com | http://rix.si/ ==
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
_______________________________________________ tos mailing list tos@teachingopensource.org http://teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos
