Hi all,
I'm going to share an idea and would love to work a bit on this. It's almost the end of August and School will start soon. If you look into a High School, you will find already some enthusiasts, some people which are curious and eventually a lot of potential future professionals and contributors.
I believe it is important to start building a presence amongst this teenagers and establish a bond with them. We are talking of people from 15 to 18 years old (based on the Portuguese Educational System).
Many of this students already have some interest in coding, networking and other aspects and I'm pretty sure that the vast majority of them has already heard about GNU/Linux and Free Software. In fact most of them probably have a laptop sponsored by the governament with dual boot, featuring Caixa Mágica (Mandriva based Portuguese Linux distribution; it started actually as being based on SuSE Linux).
I have some connection I can explore, within the City Hall and also the Director of the local high school is someone I know very well (she was my teacher and we both shared some initiatives in the past). I also know Pedro Piedade, which I believe it is still the coordinator for IT and IT teacher there. I know is all fond of Ubuntu and stuff, but it doesn't matter.
If there is possibility of me, or anyone else, or even me and other volunteer to give them a small 10 hour crash course on how to jump into openSUSE and explore possibilities with a group of students... Would anyone be interested in developing the contents for a 10 hour event with students ?
Has someone done this before or has anything we can use? Anyone can share some experiences on this field ?
Would you mind that I would make this happen around openSUSE ?
Going further into this and supposing it does happen... We need to take some info out of it... in a way, we need to look into a process that we can evaluate the initiative and gather some feedback. I can make and hand over some questionnaires... This is actually far easier than a market study... but this wouldn't probably be much in the way of 'open source' as the whole process would be depending on me and most likely people wouldn't be able to follow it, just read a report provided by me, which doesn't help.
Thinking on the future, since it has been developed it should also be available for anyone else who wants to try it out or who conducts a similar event. In this case and also using something openSUSE has done in the past, we could probably use LimeSurvey to build the questionaire and then present the results to the community.
This results may be used later to improve.
What would be the steps that one would take inside the openSUSE community to prepare a crash program to present to 'new users' on openSUSE. How would we split the topics and fit them... for example:
- 1 theoretical group -- The open source vision -- Value and Deployment -- The openSUSE values and Community -- the openSUSE resources to the community -- Ramp into openSUSE enrollment - 1 practical group -- Installing openSUSE Linux -- Configuration openSUSE Linux / YaST -- Repository management / info -- Software Groups -- Basic Service Configuration (popular stuff: apache, mysql, postfix, etc)
I might be forgetting things that are important, but this is pretty much a mockup of a potential 'service plan'.
Where physically can we develop such document and such concept so that we can provide it to anyone who wants to make small field initiatives.
If this is developed correctly we can have a good thing here. For example Fedora does this on a more specific conditions, but their enrollment with the Allegeny University has been pretty much a success, and a lot of stuff was created by their students to Fedora 13 in terms of contents. This is not a copy-cat initiative though. This should be a part of a possible 'Ambassador cook book'.
This is just a concept which I am ready to help develop and document for later application. I can also run a test pilot on the field on the local high school or through the City Hall which far more resources.
As always, comments, suggestions and everything else is welcome.
nelson
[My previous reply was sent out with a non-subscribed email. Sending again...]
Hi,
On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 6:31 PM, Nelson Marques nmo.marques@gmail.com wrote:
If there is possibility of me, or anyone else, or even me and other volunteer to give them a small 10 hour crash course on how to jump into openSUSE and explore possibilities with a group of students... Would anyone be interested in developing the contents for a 10 hour event with students ?
That's a great idea. Usually people just give talks up to 45 minutes and most of the time is spent on non-technical aspects which are what people typically are not interested in.
Count me in on whatever you may need to organize these crash courses in Portugal.
Has someone done this before or has anything we can use? Anyone can share some experiences on this field ?
I've seen lately some activity around this topic on PlanetSUSE, but can't find right now the blog posts I saw the other day with a class room full of people learning on how to use openSUSE, etc.
Would you mind that I would make this happen around openSUSE ?
I'm pretty confident that the anyone's opinion is "Go for it! Thanks!" ;-)
What would be the steps that one would take inside the openSUSE community to prepare a crash program to present to 'new users' on openSUSE. How would we split the topics and fit them... for example:
- 1 theoretical group -- The open source vision -- Value and Deployment -- The openSUSE values and Community -- the openSUSE resources to the community -- Ramp into openSUSE enrollment - 1 practical group -- Installing openSUSE Linux -- Configuration openSUSE Linux / YaST -- Repository management / info -- Software Groups -- Basic Service Configuration (popular stuff: apache, mysql, postfix, etc)
I might be forgetting things that are important, but this is pretty much a mockup of a potential 'service plan'.
As said above, people don't pay much attention on theory because it's bored (most of it is, we must admit it) and as so I truly recommend only to spend, say, 1/10 of the crash course time on theoretical stuff.
Keep up the good work!
Carlos Gonçalves
On Friday 20 August 2010 19:31:57 Nelson Marques wrote:
Hi all,
I'm going to share an idea and would love to work a bit on this.
<snip-snap>
If there is possibility of me, or anyone else, or even me and other volunteer to give them a small 10 hour crash course on how to jump into openSUSE and explore possibilities with a group of students... Would anyone be interested in developing the contents for a 10 hour event with students ?
Hmmm. It would be interesting. I've seen a few pretty good hackers come into FOSS at that age. They do need a lot of support, but if they have what it takes - they can make a big difference.
Has someone done this before or has anything we can use? Anyone can share some experiences on this field ?
I have given talks to highschool students a few times, but that was rather generic. We've did an openSUSE install at some point and played with a few things - but I must say the majority (even while those were volunteers) weren't too enthousiastic - few were, though.
Anyway. While my experience is limited, I am willing to help with some stuff. In general, I'd recommend to use as much existing material as possible - so I hope someone else on this list knows of anything.
There surely must be generic 'what is FOSS' talks aimed at kids this age. Finding those and adapting them would make for a fine start. The openSUSE values and community we can explain.
The biggest challenge would be to keep it interesting for the kids, sounds like a fun thing to try and do - maybe the ppl working on edu are interested to help out. When you need writers, don't forget to ask on their mailinlist!
Would you mind that I would make this happen around openSUSE ?
Of course not...
<snip-snap>
Thinking on the future, since it has been developed it should also be available for anyone else who wants to try it out or who conducts a similar event. In this case and also using something openSUSE has done in the past, we could probably use LimeSurvey to build the questionaire and then present the results to the community.
This results may be used later to improve.
Sounds good. Also, it's future, let's ignore what mom said when we were young and act before we think ;-)
What would be the steps that one would take inside the openSUSE community to prepare a crash program to present to 'new users' on openSUSE.
<snip-snap>
I might be forgetting things that are important, but this is pretty much a mockup of a potential 'service plan'.
Sounds good. Besides, once you're creating it you'll change it anyway ;-)
Where physically can we develop such document and such concept so that we can provide it to anyone who wants to make small field initiatives.
I would do the following: Set up an etherpad (piratepad) with the index you just wrote, and put other piratepad addresses with each chaptor behind the index. (create those, obviously, as well).
Then just announce it. Ask ppl to first find content on the web for each of those. Is there an installation guide on installing openSUSE? Trow in the link in that piratepad. Once we have a few, we can use the content to write for the course.
If this is developed correctly we can have a good thing here. For example Fedora does this on a more specific conditions, but their enrollment with the Allegeny University has been pretty much a success, and a lot of stuff was created by their students to Fedora 13 in terms of contents. This is not a copy-cat initiative though. This should be a part of a possible 'Ambassador cook book'.
Yep. Besides, I don't mind copying, what's wrong with that? Ain't it under a free license? Is't sharing and copying how humanity has progressed from the stoneage to now? ;-)
IOW let's copy as much content from them as we can, saves us time. Once we've made it into a good course, maybe they'll be interested to borrow things back from us... Good for us, good for them. Don't you love Free Software?
This is just a concept which I am ready to help develop and document for later application. I can also run a test pilot on the field on the local high school or through the City Hall which far more resources.
Sounds great. You try and manage this, keep an eye on progress. That means (as I'm sure you're well aware off): be a stubborn idiot. Push people, keep talking about this, keep asking for help until we're all so annoyed we help you write it.
Being stubbornly focussed on getting something done is the only bad habbit we allow in openSUSE :D (note that also stubborn drinking, dancing or karaoke during confrences is allowed. However, being stubbornly annoying about something YOU don't want to work on is frowned upon - as is putting down others on what they do, no matter how useless you think it is. So if anyone wants to make geeko-powered deadly robots to foce the world to use openSUSE, I won't stop you)
As always, comments, suggestions and everything else is welcome.
First of all, that is one heck of a plan. Elaborate and well thought out.
As I wrote, stop thinking after you've got two more replys and just get going with the etherpads so we can get to work ;-)
nelson
Hugs, Jos
PS something tells me I responded with too many to an email which was way to long in the first place. I hereby apologize to anyone who made it through this huge mail :(
Well, a little bit off topic, though...
(2010/08/22 23:22), Jos Poortvliet wrote:
I would do the following: Set up an etherpad (piratepad) with the index you just wrote, and put other piratepad addresses with each chaptor behind the index. (create those, obviously, as well).
Then just announce it. Ask ppl to first find content on the web for each of those. Is there an installation guide on installing openSUSE? Trow in the link in that piratepad. Once we have a few, we can use the content to write for the course.
Hmmm, Jos seems to like EtherPad. So do I. ;-)
Since EtherPad itself was bought by Google and the source code has been opened, many EtherPad clone sites have been replicated. Among those clones, I'd recommend iEtherPad. http://ietherpad.com/
Unlike other EtherPad clones, iEtherPad allows you to create your own team site, like *opensuse-foo.ietherpad.com*. Besides, you can create a pad and give it the name you want (on most of the other EtherPad clone sites, a random pad name is generated by the system when you create a new pad and you have to use it anyway).
We, openSUSE Weekly News Japanese Translation team, are now using iEtherPad for translating OWN. The name of the team site is ownja.ietherpad.com (ownja = *o*penSUSE *W*eekly *N*ews *Ja*panese) and you can see for example our work on iEtherPad at: http://ownja.ietherpad.com/136 # This is the pad for translating OWN issue 136 into Japanese.
Although iEthrePad is run by an individual and has some minor problems, these advantages are tempting. If you like EtherPad and haven't tried iEtherPad yet, I strongly recommend you to use it. ;-)
Best,
On Mon, 2010-08-23 at 10:30 +0900, Satoru Matsumoto wrote:
Well, a little bit off topic, though...
(2010/08/22 23:22), Jos Poortvliet wrote:
I would do the following: Set up an etherpad (piratepad) with the index you just wrote, and put other piratepad addresses with each chaptor behind the index. (create those, obviously, as well).
Then just announce it. Ask ppl to first find content on the web for each of those. Is there an installation guide on installing openSUSE? Trow in the link in that piratepad. Once we have a few, we can use the content to write for the course.
Hmmm, Jos seems to like EtherPad. So do I. ;-)
Since EtherPad itself was bought by Google and the source code has been opened, many EtherPad clone sites have been replicated. Among those clones, I'd recommend iEtherPad. http://ietherpad.com/
Unlike other EtherPad clones, iEtherPad allows you to create your own team site, like *opensuse-foo.ietherpad.com*. Besides, you can create a pad and give it the name you want (on most of the other EtherPad clone sites, a random pad name is generated by the system when you create a new pad and you have to use it anyway).
We, openSUSE Weekly News Japanese Translation team, are now using iEtherPad for translating OWN. The name of the team site is ownja.ietherpad.com (ownja = *o*penSUSE *W*eekly *N*ews *Ja*panese) and you can see for example our work on iEtherPad at: http://ownja.ietherpad.com/136 # This is the pad for translating OWN issue 136 into Japanese.
Although iEthrePad is run by an individual and has some minor problems, these advantages are tempting. If you like EtherPad and haven't tried iEtherPad yet, I strongly recommend you to use it. ;-)
The "run by an individual" gives me pause. But overall, I'd like to see some team consolidation thing going on for these services. Jos has surely thrown quite a few etherpads and piratepads at me and frankly, as cool as the tool is for collaboration, it's getting dicey keeping track of them all. I just don't know how that Jos genius does it. :-)
Best,
-- _/_/ Satoru Matsumoto - openSUSE Member - Japan _/_/ _/_/ Marketing/Weekly News/openFATE Screening Team _/_/ _/_/ mail: helios_reds_at_gmx.net / irc: HeliosReds _/_/ _/_/ http://blog.zaq.ne.jp/opensuse/ _/_/
On Mon, 2010-08-23 at 00:20 -0500, Bryen M. Yunashko wrote:
On Mon, 2010-08-23 at 10:30 +0900, Satoru Matsumoto wrote:
Well, a little bit off topic, though...
(2010/08/22 23:22), Jos Poortvliet wrote:
I would do the following: Set up an etherpad (piratepad) with the index you just wrote, and put other piratepad addresses with each chaptor behind the index. (create those, obviously, as well).
Then just announce it. Ask ppl to first find content on the web for each of those. Is there an installation guide on installing openSUSE? Trow in the link in that piratepad. Once we have a few, we can use the content to write for the course.
Hmmm, Jos seems to like EtherPad. So do I. ;-)
Since EtherPad itself was bought by Google and the source code has been opened, many EtherPad clone sites have been replicated. Among those clones, I'd recommend iEtherPad. http://ietherpad.com/
Unlike other EtherPad clones, iEtherPad allows you to create your own team site, like *opensuse-foo.ietherpad.com*. Besides, you can create a pad and give it the name you want (on most of the other EtherPad clone sites, a random pad name is generated by the system when you create a new pad and you have to use it anyway).
We, openSUSE Weekly News Japanese Translation team, are now using iEtherPad for translating OWN. The name of the team site is ownja.ietherpad.com (ownja = *o*penSUSE *W*eekly *N*ews *Ja*panese) and you can see for example our work on iEtherPad at: http://ownja.ietherpad.com/136 # This is the pad for translating OWN issue 136 into Japanese.
Although iEthrePad is run by an individual and has some minor problems, these advantages are tempting. If you like EtherPad and haven't tried iEtherPad yet, I strongly recommend you to use it. ;-)
The "run by an individual" gives me pause. But overall, I'd like to see some team consolidation thing going on for these services. Jos has surely thrown quite a few etherpads and piratepads at me and frankly, as cool as the tool is for collaboration, it's getting dicey keeping track of them all. I just don't know how that Jos genius does it. :-)
I was used to gobby for this collaborative stuff.
Pirate pads will do, the interface is nearly the same :)
nelson
Best,
-- _/_/ Satoru Matsumoto - openSUSE Member - Japan _/_/ _/_/ Marketing/Weekly News/openFATE Screening Team _/_/ _/_/ mail: helios_reds_at_gmx.net / irc: HeliosReds _/_/ _/_/ http://blog.zaq.ne.jp/opensuse/ _/_/
On Sun, 2010-08-22 at 16:22 +0200, Jos Poortvliet wrote:
On Friday 20 August 2010 19:31:57 Nelson Marques wrote:
Hi all,
I'm going to share an idea and would love to work a bit on this.
<snip-snap>
If there is possibility of me, or anyone else, or even me and other volunteer to give them a small 10 hour crash course on how to jump into openSUSE and explore possibilities with a group of students... Would anyone be interested in developing the contents for a 10 hour event with students ?
Hmmm. It would be interesting. I've seen a few pretty good hackers come into FOSS at that age. They do need a lot of support, but if they have what it takes - they can make a big difference.
I knew a few very young hackers on KDE. It would be nice to get people that young enrolled, but the main point is that if they start getting used to openSUSE in the early beginning and if we get good representation amongst them, we win in many fields:
- we can get more ambassadors to spread the word on academical environments. - we will have the opportunity of fidelizing people at earlier ages, the more they understand about openSUSE, the harder will be later for them to change into other distro's. - we can prove that not only Ubuntu is around. - we can create interest around opensource.
Has someone done this before or has anything we can use? Anyone can share some experiences on this field ?
I have given talks to highschool students a few times, but that was rather generic. We've did an openSUSE install at some point and played with a few things - but I must say the majority (even while those were volunteers) weren't too enthousiastic - few were, though.
Anyway. While my experience is limited, I am willing to help with some stuff. In general, I'd recommend to use as much existing material as possible - so I hope someone else on this list knows of anything.
There surely must be generic 'what is FOSS' talks aimed at kids this age. Finding those and adapting them would make for a fine start. The openSUSE values and community we can explain.
The biggest challenge would be to keep it interesting for the kids, sounds like a fun thing to try and do - maybe the ppl working on edu are interested to help out. When you need writers, don't forget to ask on their mailinlist!
Segmentation of Audience. Only going for IT students. I believe that here is a good place to do it. Aveiro is the capital of Telecommunications in Portugal.
Would you mind that I would make this happen around openSUSE ?
Of course not...
<snip-snap>
Thinking on the future, since it has been developed it should also be available for anyone else who wants to try it out or who conducts a similar event. In this case and also using something openSUSE has done in the past, we could probably use LimeSurvey to build the questionaire and then present the results to the community.
This results may be used later to improve.
Sounds good. Also, it's future, let's ignore what mom said when we were young and act before we think ;-)
Well, installing and configuring is cake, the only problem we had on Fedora was lack of experient manpower for it's packaging according to rules, specially with tcpdf.
What would be the steps that one would take inside the openSUSE community to prepare a crash program to present to 'new users' on openSUSE.
<snip-snap>
I might be forgetting things that are important, but this is pretty much a mockup of a potential 'service plan'.
Sounds good. Besides, once you're creating it you'll change it anyway ;-)
50 heads usually think better than one ;)
Where physically can we develop such document and such concept so that we can provide it to anyone who wants to make small field initiatives.
I would do the following: Set up an etherpad (piratepad) with the index you just wrote, and put other piratepad addresses with each chaptor behind the index. (create those, obviously, as well).
Then just announce it. Ask ppl to first find content on the web for each of those. Is there an installation guide on installing openSUSE? Trow in the link in that piratepad. Once we have a few, we can use the content to write for the course.
iEtherpad will do for now. Will soon look into it.
If this is developed correctly we can have a good thing here. For example Fedora does this on a more specific conditions, but their enrollment with the Allegeny University has been pretty much a success, and a lot of stuff was created by their students to Fedora 13 in terms of contents. This is not a copy-cat initiative though. This should be a part of a possible 'Ambassador cook book'.
Yep. Besides, I don't mind copying, what's wrong with that? Ain't it under a free license? Is't sharing and copying how humanity has progressed from the stoneage to now? ;-)
IOW let's copy as much content from them as we can, saves us time. Once we've made it into a good course, maybe they'll be interested to borrow things back from us... Good for us, good for them. Don't you love Free Software?
I don't need to copy anything. If I look into the Portuguese Education System, I see no resemblance with the Northern American Education System.
This is just a concept which I am ready to help develop and document for later application. I can also run a test pilot on the field on the local high school or through the City Hall which far more resources.
Sounds great. You try and manage this, keep an eye on progress. That means (as I'm sure you're well aware off): be a stubborn idiot. Push people, keep talking about this, keep asking for help until we're all so annoyed we help you write it.
Being stubbornly focussed on getting something done is the only bad habbit we allow in openSUSE :D (note that also stubborn drinking, dancing or karaoke during confrences is allowed. However, being stubbornly annoying about something YOU don't want to work on is frowned upon - as is putting down others on what they do, no matter how useless you think it is. So if anyone wants to make geeko-powered deadly robots to foce the world to use openSUSE, I won't stop you)
As always, comments, suggestions and everything else is welcome.
First of all, that is one heck of a plan. Elaborate and well thought out.
As I wrote, stop thinking after you've got two more replys and just get going with the etherpads so we can get to work ;-)
nelson
Hugs, Jos
PS something tells me I responded with too many to an email which was way to long in the first place. I hereby apologize to anyone who made it through this huge mail :(
On Monday 23 August 2010 07:20:19 Bryen M. Yunashko wrote:
On Mon, 2010-08-23 at 10:30 +0900, Satoru Matsumoto wrote:
Well, a little bit off topic, though...
(2010/08/22 23:22), Jos Poortvliet wrote:
I would do the following: Set up an etherpad (piratepad) with the index you just wrote, and put other piratepad addresses with each chaptor behind the index. (create those, obviously, as well).
Then just announce it. Ask ppl to first find content on the web for each of those. Is there an installation guide on installing openSUSE? Trow in the link in that piratepad. Once we have a few, we can use the content to write for the course.
Hmmm, Jos seems to like EtherPad. So do I. ;-)
Since EtherPad itself was bought by Google and the source code has been opened, many EtherPad clone sites have been replicated. Among those clones, I'd recommend iEtherPad. http://ietherpad.com/
Unlike other EtherPad clones, iEtherPad allows you to create your own team site, like *opensuse-foo.ietherpad.com*. Besides, you can create a pad and give it the name you want (on most of the other EtherPad clone sites, a random pad name is generated by the system when you create a new pad and you have to use it anyway).
We, openSUSE Weekly News Japanese Translation team, are now using iEtherPad for translating OWN. The name of the team site is ownja.ietherpad.com (ownja = *o*penSUSE *W*eekly *N*ews *Ja*panese) and you can see for example our work on iEtherPad at: http://ownja.ietherpad.com/136 # This is the pad for translating OWN issue 136 into Japanese.
Although iEthrePad is run by an individual and has some minor problems, these advantages are tempting. If you like EtherPad and haven't tried iEtherPad yet, I strongly recommend you to use it. ;-)
The "run by an individual" gives me pause. But overall, I'd like to see some team consolidation thing going on for these services. Jos has surely thrown quite a few etherpads and piratepads at me and frankly, as cool as the tool is for collaboration, it's getting dicey keeping track of them all. I just don't know how that Jos genius does it. :-)
Unfortunately I'm not as smart as you think I am, which is why I'm trying to convince somebody to set up an etherpad server @ opensuse. This will give us a nice list of open pads, you can give them names and you have some access control. In other words - much better for Bryen's and similar animals.
Best,
-
Bryen M. Yunashko -
Carlos Gonçalves -
Jos Poortvliet -
Nelson Marques -
Satoru Matsumoto