FOSS.IN/2005/BoFs/Education

On Day 2 FOSS.IN 11 of us met up on H1 of FOSS vilage and discussed various issues on Education (There was another parellel BoF going on in the Indic Computing BoF too). We had Sandesh Barve (Retired Principal of Nasic Engineering college), Sandesh Kamath, Vikas (both from SJCE Mysore), Shanker Balan, Philip tellis, Swaroop CH (from Yahoo!), Ragavan Srinivasan, myself(Hewlett Packard), Venky (Redhat), Aneesh, Michael.

The first suggestion was to make printed books available on FOSS tools in education. People are so accustomed to printed form of documentation (lack of internet penetration is one reason) so that making the online content available in the printed format is an important part. Suggestion in implimentation was to contact Universities for publishing.

Venky pointed out the lack of awareness of foss materials like edu.kde.org, schoolforge.net... in the teacher community is a big probelem. He suggested a '3a' method to spread foss in education

• awareness
• appreciation
• adoption

Shanker Balan was of the opinion that giving the foss tools in product for defeats the purpose of teching the new technology. He used his experience as an example, when he taught linux 5.2 to many and showed them a different version, they were not ready to accept it.

We had to make a choce whtherto target Teachers or students in this initiative