On Friday 03 October 2003 23:10, N.Pauli wrote:
Dear All,
I was really looking forward to this, wanted to ask lots of practical questions (how do I go about getting someone to write linux software for an interactive board?) and now I find that it has been cancelled. What is more, there doesn't seem to be any reaction to this on this list.
I would just like to make some observations concerning this conference. Firstly the amount of notice about it was very short which does not help teachers in planning. Secondly it was planned in term-time which causes two problems: 1/ We are in a very small minority and in some cases totally misunderstood by SMT - why should they give us time off school? 2/ Money is so short at our school that all external Inset and conferences are prohibited, and I am sure that this is similar to other schools. We are interested in free software, I believe that any such conference should be as free to the participants as possible and planned when most of the expected audience will be available. We should not be using high profile, expensive venues. Most of us work in large buildings which become free at regular intervals throughout the year, should we not be investigating this further? On a personal note now. There are not many institutions in the UK that are actually teaching ICT throughout the school using open source tools. These are listed on certain websites as case studies, as is my school. I wonder if any of them were consulted about or personally invited to this conference - I know I wasn't. I am very concerned about this cancellation though and I think we all should be. kind regards garry saddington ICT co-ordinator, Skegness Grammar School