Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-edu (26 mails)

[Ian Lynch <ian.lynch@xxxxxxxx>]

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

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