[K12OSN] Re: Introducing Fedora's Education SIG

[Mel Chua]

Hey, everyone! I've been lurking on this list, but I suppose now is as 
good a time as any to introduce myself. My name is Mel. I'm an engineer 
and an education geek, and (as Sebastian mentioned) helping him on the 
Fedora education spin (during "free time" when I'm not working on 
http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/POSSE_2009, teaching professors 
how to teach open source, as part of my day job at Red Hat with Greg).

> It basically includes a spin - a special flavor of Fedora - designed 
> especially for students and teachers, to provide them with an 
> encouraging experience to contribute to educational efforts.
> So this is about allowing you, your students, to better work with 
> upstream projects and even to contribute to them. So we're not providing 
> the perfect solution. We're making the tools to create it.

This is really important.

For the spin, we're *not* making (or packaging or providing) software 
that K-12 students can use to study - you won't find flash cards or 
astronomy charts or dictionaries or anything of the sort in here. The 
spin we're going to be releasing on July 19 is not intended for use in, 
say, a 4th grade classroom.

What we *are* making is a development environment for people who want to 
make things that K-12 students can use to study. Those people could 
definitely include the K-12 students themselves, and we hope it'll 
include you as well. We're pretty sure it will include at least some of 
the CS professors coming out to POSSE in July - they are professors 
teaching classes (not necessarily education classes) who want their 
students to contribute to open-source efforts as part of their 
coursework, and some of these groups are likely to have a strong 
interest in contributing to open-source *education* projects in 
particular. (So they might, for instance, assign one of their student 
teams to find a middle school science class and make a game to help them 
learn the topic they're studying. I'm making this particular example up, 
but you get the idea.)

Now, admittedly, there's a good amount of overlap between making things 
to help you learn, and learning. (Projects like Sugar Labs actually 
treat them as more or less the same thing.) But we're focused on the 
first for the next month. We're doing this, in part, because we want to 
build an ecosystem of great education packages - but in order to do 
that, it's got to be easy for people to help. So we're making the tools 
for that first.

Hopefully that makes sense - as Sebastian said, please ask questions and 
shout out ideas at any time, and we'll figure things out together as we 
go along.

Cheers!

--Mel