jeudi, juillet 02, 2009

eraser01: final report (english version) available

EducOOo Logo

This report is the fruit of the collaboration between Ecole Centrale Nantes(aka ECN) and OpenOffice.org Education Project.

Thanks to Olivier Girardot and Aude Quintana, students at ECN who sent me the english version of The Eraser.

* Link for downloading the .odt en-US version
* Link for downloading the .pdf en-US version
* Link for downloading the .pdf fr version

Another report "the Saving Machine", who was made for save the annotations made with the Impress feature is available.

* Link for downloading the french version of the Saving Machine

Many many thanks to the students from Ecole Centrale Nantes for their great work, to Morgan Magnin, their professor, and to Thorsten Behrens for his enormous contribution.

My conclusion of that, is I think it really worth to see more collaboration between OpenOffice.org Project and the Education world, and I'm proud to manage the Education Project, who exactly has the goal to create a strong bridge between both.

Last but not least, 2 presentations of this collaboration are scheduled at LSM 2009, but I'll say more about that very soon ;-)



"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
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 : , , , , , ,

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 : , , ,

dimanche, juillet 15, 2007

Japanese version of Aqua to be presented at Open Source Conference of Kyoto ( Japan )

Since the Aqua version of OpenOffice.org ( work in progress) is able to recognize Japanese fonts when they are in use ( for ex. when required by the Kotoeri input system) , Jean Christophe Helary, from OmegaT project, was so kind and proposed me to present a Japanese version of Aqua OpenOffice.org at Kyoto Japan 20 and 21th July.


This is extremely important to inform the Japanese community we are working to provide a working version for it, and show all the recent progress we did. This is mainly possible with Herbert duerr, Etsushi Kato and James Watson contributions.

Note : If I forgot somebody, please contact me and I'll rectify

During the conference, Jean-Christophe will hold two seminars to explain how to translate OpenOffice.org native file format (ODF) with OmegaT, while Mr Kamataki and the OpenOffice.org Japanese Native Lang Project will hold a seminar to show application development within OmegaT.


Thank you very much Jean-Christophe and Mr Kamataki !!




Want to help the Mac port ??

You can make donations at Cusoon ( paypal button)
Thanks to add a comment saying your donation is for Mac OS X porting project (we can provide receipts on demand )

Libellés : , ,