lundi, janvier 11, 2010

Welcome to new students joining the OpenOffice.org Education Project

EducOOo Logo

Morgan Magnin just advertised me today : two students from Ecole Centrale Nantes(aka ECN) will continue the effort this semester (january to june 2010) :-)

Welcome to Cyril le Mat and Arthur Bonnet!

It is planned to continue to improve the HP Tablet PC use with Impress.

The great news, is that this new project will start the third year of cooperation between OpenOffice.org Education Project and ECN.

Links: see the blog entry about the previous project just finished and screenshots about "Tablet PC and OpenOffice.org (french, sorry).





Are you student in computing, and want to learn code (mostly C++), fight with well defined and mentored projects ? or simply contribute to OpenOffice.org, instead of doing dumb internal projects ? Just find a teacher, as correspondant, and join the OpenOffice.org Education Project :-)


Contact : IRC
Channel : #education.openoffice.org
Server : irc.freenode.net




"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
Education Project on the wiki

EducOO.org blog (french)

OOo4Kids Project

Many thanks to Ben Bois , author of the EducOOo logo, dedicated to the OpenOffice.org Education Project
...

Libellés : , , , , , , , , , ,

mardi, octobre 28, 2008

FSOSS 2008 : saturday

The FSOSS is finished, but I'd like to mention a bunch of photos being taken by Nestor Chan, aka "BossaNesta" on #seneca channel. Nestor is doing LUX in Seneca@York, and his selected work for FSOSS 2008 is in flickr :

FSOSS 2008 - Slide Show View
FSOSS 2008 - Regular View

Enjoy !!

On saturday, the plane was scheduled at 17:40. For the last time, Fardad was my driver all the day, to help me to buy gifts for my family. We visited a lot of places, including an Apple store, where I bought a new battery, because the one in place was inflating and the exchange was not possible ( not an Apple original, but a True Power ).

Once back in France, I'll have to cry to my provider ( Macway for instance), who sold me such bad battery.

Was the time to return and Fardad put me at the airport. I must recognize, without him, my trip to Seneca College would have been more difficult ( Toronto public transportation is not that easy ).
The travel was without any glitch, glad to retrive my family at the airport, and sleep a bit :)

To conclude, I'd like to say one more time to Fardad Soleimanloo,David Humphrey, Chris Tyler, Franck Hecker, Mark Surman, and all the one who contributed to the nice trip I had in Toronto.

Looking forward to return :-)

Libellés : , , ,

lundi, octobre 27, 2008

FSOSS 2008 : Friday

Education Project Logo

After discovering Toronto and FSOSS 2008 : Thursday ,here is what I did during the second day of the event.

We arrived ( Fardad and me ) around 9:00 at Seneca, and I took my time to attend. The first presentation was Enabling Healthy Open Source Communities: Case study -- Thunderbird, where David Eaves (Negotiation Expert) and Dave Mosedale(CTO, Mozilla Messaging) presented the Thunderbird community, in sort of an interview made by David Eaves. Lot of relevant remarks, but better look at the videos for all the jokes inside :)

Next was the Mozilla and Mobile, with Stuart Parmenter, from Mozilla developers Team. I don't have any cell phone, and it was a discovery for me. AFAIK, there is nothing at all for mobiles in OpenOffice.org, and I'm afraid OpenOffice.org is far from such features. If ever Apple modifies it's NDA for true, maybe I'll try to play a day with the iPhone SDK, but after a noisy announce, nothing is still clear, and better wait.

Last presentation of the monring was JohnMaddog Hall (Executive Director of Linux International, CTO of Koolu ), who presented the Open Telephony. Indeed, we use to forget what can be free, and how things are less and less free every day. Quite interesting.

The afternoon started with something abt more boring: I didn't understand anything at the first presentation, so I prefer not say more about it :)

To make a break, we worked with Fardad on the configure thing, and the download of OOo sources through svn. Lucky man with a brand new Macbook pro :-)

Last conf was impressive: Greg de Koenigsberg (Community Development Manager, Red Hat Inc. ) is really a nice communicator: no need to slide, just everything in mind, and energy, a lot of energy. the figures about number of contributors / efficiency and bugs was interesting. It was question of the interaction between Fedora and Red Hat, and how to improve the community. I can only applaude he explained, that if things are discussed behind the doors, contributors go away.

But that's not the end : I was lucky to meet Catherine Leung (Professor at Seneca College) at the speakers dinner, and she promised me to make a demo of JavaScript 3D. She did : nice demo, and very promising stuff.

Last, I'd like to give two awards to Mark Surman (Executive Director, Mozilla Foundation) for his energy and creativity (always brainstorming everything :) ), and David Crow - Web Evangelist, from Microsoft Canada (yes Microsoft) for his humour.

End of the conf, but not th end of the day: Fardad and his wife, invited me at the restaurant, and it was fantastic. Was very good, and I sincirely expect to return, and invite my hosts this time.

Back at hotel around 22:00 (maybe 23:00 , I don't remember exactly :-)

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
Education Project on the wiki

EducOO.org blog (french)

Many thanks to Ben Bois , author of the Education Project Logo

Libellés : , , , ,

samedi, octobre 25, 2008

FSOSS 2008 : Thursday

Education Project Logo

After Fardad Soleimanloo picked me up at the Hotel, I discovered Seneca College. Nice school. The conditions for students seems to be excellent. Lucky students :-)

Very kind welcome, where I met Rose Saliba, Chris Tyler, and David Humphrey for true (IRC is .. different :) ). Time to start :) Everything has been recorded, and videos will soon be available.

Our topic was : Teaching Open Source. Seneca College Professors invited me to participate to "The Professor's perspective" topic, scheduled after the studen'ts perspective.
The Student's perspective was incredibly interesting. Animated by Mark Surman (from the Mozilla Foundation staff), we have heard very good students, who explained their experience, and what they really think about the Open Source teaching. What is good, what is not. I noticed carefully Armen Zambrano (who contributed to the Mozilla unit test server) gold remark : "if you prepare yourself for teaching/learning Open Source, don't expect to be ready: you'll never be".

That's so true : this is a continuous challenge, where everybody learns for himself, and from the other.

Then it was our turn. The debate was animated by David Eaves. We previously commonly agreed to not use slides, or 3 only if ever. So I just prepared notes, about what is the most important for me, about teaching Open Source. The video contains everything, but what I'll retain is, all the people around the table arguments, show they do it for true: most of the points we discussed, are shared, because this is just the reality.

For example, all the students are different, and ask the same questions, in a different order. And if you want to attract them, this is extremely time consuming, and you must have 1) dedicated IRC channel for that, and 2) dedicated people to welcome them, and doing the intermediate, e.g. connecting them to the right devs.

Another interesting point was : what about the difficulty ? Is the teacher always able to solve the problem itself ? or not ? Answers differed. From my side, I try to always propose subjects I could work on myself, with a correct chance to complete, but I agree the fact, nobody can know/do everything, and sometimes, doing the task you have to face difficulties discovered at the begining.

Last, the role of the teacher is more to welcome, teach methodology, what are the rules in a community project, and connect to the core developper, when it's time, but not before.

Nevertheless, the common denominator of everything, is everybody is more motivated when the task is usefull (I mean to all the "fake" projects student do every year, just to obtain their credits).

And like it is described (French, sorry) there, the purpose of Education is not to make the sweet edges of a bitter cup, but rather to make the bitter edge of a cup sugar, i.e. systematically proposing that is great and difficult, having just graduated care of the problem throughout the year.

Next was the Institution perspective. Greg De Koenigsberg ( Community Development Manager, Red Hat Inc. ) was great. I noticed there are resources, but what cares is more how to be sure the prof does the right thing, and how to correctly evaluate the students.

I don't remember how the topic cames on that, but the bad thing is, yet another time, people admitted OpenOffice.org has a low acceptance in Educational system. I proposed people to send me feedback, including the two most important reasons they know.

Time to lunch : even during lunch, was a brainstorming (I think real motivated people never stop thinking to that :) ).

Afternoon was about the community perspective. Was interesting, and was a new brainstorming in little groups, about Apprentice and Teaching Models, Prof incentive and skills, What can we do together. Was followed by a dring, and the speakers Dinner. Back to the Hotel early ( Jet lag killed me).

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
Education Project on the wiki

EducOO.org blog (french)

Many thanks to Ben Bois , author of the Education Project Logo

Libellés : , , ,

mardi, octobre 07, 2008

OpenOffice.org Education Project invited at FSOSS 2008 ( Toronto, Canada)

... and Ben Bois created yet another pretty logo ! (please look carefully the details)

Golden Gate Bridge

I was very surprised when one proposed me ...

As a simple volunteer, even not a professional, I must admit, I'm proud and honored to represent the project at such an event like the FSOSS 2008 ( Toronto, Canada).

Many many thanks to Frank Hecker, from the staff of the Mozilla Foundation, for the invitation, and the help he provided for attending.

I'm impatient to meet for true Fardad, David, Chris, all professors at Seneca College, Rose Saliba, and all the one I only know the (nick) name on the IRC channel, and to meet all these students who are learning Open Source.

The idea is to propose the students an application based on a real bug, or missing feature, and write code for OpenOffice.org. Thus, simply find new developers.

My presentation will describe an European point of view of our experience, explain what works, what does not, what could be done, and how we could work together. In one word, propose some tracks to cooperate and improve what already exists with the Open Source Community.


Off : David told me he's using a Mac, and we already have nice ideas for students interested to contribute for the Mac port ;-)

To be continued ...

"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
Education Project on the wiki

EducOO.org blog (french)

Many thanks to Ben Bois , author of the Education Project Logo

Libellés : , , , ,