Hi Aaron,
Down the road, a project like that could be really interesting once
I'm more established. However, for the first year or so I need to work
with what I can do with more or less just me and a very small budget.
I'm already expecting to do an awful amount.
Although there
are definitely issues with GitHub, privacy, and consuming open source
technologies for closed source gain, I was just looking at some of the
learning materials on GitHub and I think there may be funding or
technical support available from Microsoft to create such a
project.Obviously we need to make sure that the objective is learning
code, not learning to use GitHub, and promoting open source software,
not maximizing profit to the determent of society.
I'd be very cautious about this, to be honest. The idea that free software is
an ethical imperative is really important to me, and I don't want to encourage
anyone to use non-free software or give the impression I endorse it.
am connected to both the education and engineering departments at
UMass in Massachusetts, USA and will put feelers out for potential
collaborators. Do you have a website/other documents with more info on
the framework?
Thank you!
I don't have anything I can give you immediately (what I have contains a lot
of sensitive information), but you're very welcome to pass my e-mail address
along. I'm delighted to answer questions.
It might help to know I'm taking a really broad approach to who belongs in
free software. I don't just want to attract future programmers (although they're
very important!!). It's also important for me to bring in teens that might be
interested in learning other skills like technical writing or UX design, as
well as
young people in general that are just interested in how technology affects them
and
society. There are many ways to be interested in technology, and they're all
valuable.
I want my community to be a welcoming place for people who love computers in
all sorts of unique ways.
- Carmen
Date: Wed, 4 Dec 2024 11:23:24 -0500
From: Aaron E-J <the@otherrealm.org>
To: libreplanet-discuss@libreplanet.org
Subject: Re: Introducing a new project for teenagers in free software
(and how you can help!)
Message-ID: <4aa8dd31-7342-4ac0-b6e4-47c51a4b00ee@otherrealm.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"; Format="flowed"
I have thought that the idea of working on open source projects as
learning tools would be a great win-win-win opportunity to advance
education.I am coming in the context of the college level, but I think
we need to start students down the path towards free software as early
as possible.The name for the project I was thinking of is called "World
Piece" or "World Pieces" and it is a play on the notion of breaking
learning goals into code tasks.Basically how I was thinking this would
work is, given a topic to be learnt, there is some auto-curation of open
source git repositories with open tasks to be completed.Although there
are definitely issues with GitHub, privacy, and consuming open source
technologies for closed source gain, I was just looking at some of the
learning materials on GitHub and I think there may be funding or
technical support available from Microsoft to create such a
project.Obviously we need to make sure that the objective is learning
code, not learning to use GitHub, and promoting open source software,
not maximizing profit to the determent of society.However, I think the
general concept of integrating open project issues into learning tasks
is a far more efficacious means of teaching than having students work on
meaningless one-off homework that has no larger purpose.There could even
be the chance to get industry funding for students to earn money based
on completion of sponsored tasks, although again, we need to be careful
to not turn this into an exploitative means of getting cheap labor.
I am connected to both the education and engineering departments at
UMass in Massachusetts, USA and will put feelers out for potential
collaborators.Do you have a website/other documents with more info on
the framework?Do you think my idea and yours can be melded into some
sort of larger plan?
Aaron E-J
The Other Realm
http://otherrealm.org
http://theotherrealm.org (Blog)
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