Education and FOSS

[Jon maddog Hall]

Hi,

Last year I attended David Trask and Matt Quist's New England Symposium up
at Gould Academy.  This is an event for educators to show them how to use
FOSS in education.  It was not only an educational event, but a good time.

It occurred to me that it was a shame that not more educators got to go to
this event to really take the time to see how FOSS can be used in schools,
but also to feel the excitment and the electricity of this event.

Then I started thinking about how we might leverage this event to influence more
education to use FOSS.  After all, the voters of Merrimack voted to shelve
their town library expansion, yet still upgreade their school computers
while the government of Norway said that FOSS and thin clients could reduce
computer hardware and software costs by 60%.

Maybe what we need to do is get some influential state educators and/or
a newspaper person to go up there for one day or better yet attend the whole
session just to see what FOSS is really all about.

Unfortunately there are costs that have to be borne.  The Gould sessions are
$465. including housing and meals.  So I was wondering if we could:

	o identify KEY people in State Government
	o identify KEY newspeople (David Brooks of the Nashua Telegraph comes
	  to mind)

to invite to these events (either Gould or UNH) to experience this first hand.

If we identified a few people we could raise funds to give them a scholarship
to either event.  I would opt for UNH, since it is a NH institution, not as
far as Gould, and July is a bit later for planning than June.

I would be willing to donate $100. to a fund for educating the educators.

Comments?

md
-- 
Jon "maddog" Hall
Executive Director           Linux International(R)
email: maddog at li.org         80 Amherst St. 
Voice: +1.603.672.4557       Amherst, N.H. 03031-3032 U.S.A.
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