Dear all,
as you might know, the FSFE is involved in a project called SELF (Science, Education and Learning in Freedom), a projected funded by the European Commission for a period of two years, from summer 2006 to summer 2008.
The SELF project will develop a platform for the collaborative sharing and creation of free educational materials on Free Software and Open Standards. It will also try to fill this platform with some initial materials on Free Software and Open Standards.
The first half year of the SELF project has been spent primarily on analysis of the available free materials on Free Software and Open Standards, as well as a preliminary analysis of the areas where there are none or little free educational materials.
With the developers at the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education in Mumbai now starting the work on the technical implementation of the platform, the project will gradually shift into a more active mode of operation.
For this reason, I have just created a mailing list where we can coordinate the FSFE work in this project. If this project sounds interesting, please have a look at the SELF project web site;
And subscribe to the FSFE mailing list:
https://mail.fsfeurope.org/mailman/listinfo/self
You can also subscribe to the SELF general mailing list if you wish:
http://mail.selfproject.eu/mailman/listinfo/discussion
What we're soon going to start working on is the atomisation of the existing materials (basically turning the materials into SCORM format for later import into the SELF platform). Each partner is responsible for about nine materials, and the FSFE has been given the following materials to convert:
- AGNULA Tutorials - GNU Emacs Manual - GNU Emacs FAQ - GNU Octave Manual - The Gimp Documentation - GNU/Linux Command-Line Tools Summary - Bash Guide for Beginners - Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide - Network Administration
Needless so say, all of these are rather technical in detail, and we have already identified a gap in the available materials covering the general issues of Free Software and Open Standards. But we're sure there are other gaps that needs to be filled as well, which is why we should also work to organise a workshop to talk about what kinds of educational materials are needed for Free Software and Open Standards, though I'm not sure exactly when this should be done right now.
But please, if this sounds interesting to you, please join the mailing list, and contribute to the work!