[education-wg] Hi education-wg

[Bryant Patten]

Hello Fellow Members,

How about another introduction...

My name is Bryant Patten and I currently wear a couple of hats in the  
Open Source and Education space.

On the non-profit side, I am the Executive Director of the National  
Center for Open Source and Education ( http://www.ncose.org ).  It is  
a 501 (c) (3) with a mission to increase the awareness and use of Open  
Source software in schools.  Via the Center, I help run a variety of  
conferences (FOSSVT in Vermont, FOSSED in Maine, co-chair of Open  
Minds 2008 along with Steve Hargadon) and I have  spoken on FOSS and  
K-12 at many conferences (NECC, OSCON, Free Technology in Barcelona).

The second hat is that I also run a small, for-profit consulting  
company (White Nitro, LLC) to help schools implement FOSS solutions.

To follow up on one topic on this list from Don about a FOSS for  
schools repository:  I was just in Australia last week giving the  
keynote at Australia's first Open Source and Education conference  
(OpenEdge)  and spent a chunk of time discussing the Free Software  
Catalog ( http://www.ncose.org/node/3 ) with the co-author, Donna  
Benjamin of Open Source Victoria.  The catalog is woefully out of date  
and we would appreciate any  suggestions for new software to include  
and greatly appreciate any help with entering new items into the  
catalog.  We are currently moving the catalog online so updating will  
be easier and we would also like to add a reviewing (or star rating)  
system so people can read comments from actual educators about how the  
software performs for them in schools

One interesting discussion that came from the Australian crowd at  
OpenEdge was how our community was working with our government to get  
more Open Source used in U.S. schools.  So the timing of this Open  
Source for America Education group is perfect because I didn't have a  
lot of information to share with them.

Bryant