FOSS Advocacy in education in northern New England

Greg Rundlett greg.rundlett at gmail.com
Sun Jun 17 11:38:51 EDT 2007


On 6/16/07, Ted Roche <tedroche at tedroche.com> wrote:
> Just a quick tip 'o the fedora to those local folks who help FOSS
> Advocacy in northern New England with their efforts at FOSSEd (formerly
> NELS), this year being held three times: in Bethel, ME, Durham, NH and
> Washington, DC. Go team!
>
> New Hampshire's own Matt Oquist is heavily involved, GNHLUGgers Bill
> Sconce and Warren Lubkeman will be featured at the Gould Academy
> presentations next month. Bravo.
>
> Web Site: http://fossed.net/
> Agenda: http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dfvj9xq4_12d36hjz
>

I've been thoroughly impressed with the work Matt, Bill, and others
have been doing under the auspices of NELS (and like the new FOSSEd
name).  I've been working (pretty invisibly because it's been more of
a self-education effort) to bring FOSS to the local education system.
The local system, due mainly to budget problems, has been severely
impacted over the past 5 years.

I'm trying to propose FOSS in the local (Newburyport, MA) school
system in order to provide better technology with more reach and
impact on the education system with less dollar cost and greater human
participation.

I've been slowly putting together supporting information and an action
plan, however I at least have an updated website system capable of
hosting the effort.  The website runs Drupal and Mediawiki.

One aspect of the plan that I have is to introduce the idea of thin
clients in tandem with Edubuntu.  I even think it might be possible to
use the concept of a USB thumbdrive as the student 'computer', which
then could be used throughout the student's environment: home, school,
away.

This message is intended to get the word out that I'd love to get any
volunteers and/or guidance from those who want to see Linux and our
schools succeed together.  The timing of this message is somewhat
premature because I actually do have more content to post which will
both clarify the mission, and also offer an organized collection of
resources for all the stakeholders: school administration, educators,
tech personnel and advocacy groups.  At the same time, this message is
late because I need to act immediately to get the the right
information to the right people locally in order to have an impact on
the next school year.

Anyone who wants to help can have an account on the website to publish
to the CMS or the wiki  See http://freephile.com/cms and
http://freephile.com/wiki/index.php/Smart_computing and contact me on
list or privately


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