On Tue, 2007-03-20 at 15:49 +0000, Paul Taylor wrote:
On Tuesday 20 March 2007 15:40:36 Rainer Brinkmann wrote:
On Tuesday 20 March 2007 13:34:22 Phil Thane wrote:
However we have to keep on trying. OpenSuSE-edu, Schoolforge, and anyone else in the FLOSSIE movement should support INGOTs
Hallo together, please let me, an german opensuse-user, know what does FLOSSIE and INGOT mean. For us foreigner it isn't as easy as needed to understand these shortens. With regards Rainer Brinkmann
Hi Rainer:
Apologies for the UK centredness. FLOSSIE is (Free as in Libre Open Source Software in Education), and INGOTs are (International Grades in Office Technologies).
I am still on the list but just got back from Poland where I have been doing some teacher training on UK education and the INGOTs. There is a lot of interest there. Just a quick INGOT update. We have two EU projects planned with partners in Germany, Turkey, Romania, Portugal and Poland. I'm going to South Africa on Saturday to get things going there with the help of the Shuttleworth Foundation and there is an arrangement to get me to talk to their qualifications regulators in Jo-burg. We also have partners in the USA and Australia/New Zealand. QCA have agreed all the details and the certificates have gone to be finally accredited so from next month we will be counting as points towards league tables and eligible for LSC funding in FE. Daniel is using Ajax to add a facility for on-line marks for teachers which should be as responsive as the desktop. Btw, Rainer, if you are interested in INGOTs in Germany, I can put you in touch with Manfred Reiter who is using INGOTs in his vocational school and is a member of the EU projects. At the moment we are just about breaking even from INGOT subscriptions and costs. This should become much more profitable with formal government recognition and initially we will use any additional money to help spread INGOTs in other countries. Eventually when we have surplus cash we will commission developers to produce open source applications to support education. So the idea is we teach students and their teachers about open source and open systems as wells as basic ICT skills, we give students credit through certification for contributing digital resources to the community as part of their learning and we generate an income stream that enables us to further open source development in education. If we could become a global standard for schools IT we would easily have the resources to fund many major projects but it will take a few years to get to that point. Still we have made a lot of progress with government recognition a big milestone. All I need now is 3 lifetimes to run concurrently :-) Ian -- www.theINGOTS.org www.schoolforge.org.uk www.opendocumentfellowship.org -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-edu+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-edu+help@opensuse.org