[education-wg] Introduction - Joel Fisler - Switzerland and Los Angeles

["Joël Fisler - Universität Zürich (MELS)"]

Hi there
I work for the University of Zurich (Switzerland) and we develop open  
source tools for e-learning. I currently live and work in Los Angeles  
for one year and would be happy to meet people from the area and  
participate at events to promote open source tools for education. I  
already tried to become active in the technology group in charter  
school that my son attends here but it seems as there is already a mac- 
company that has the monopoly for everything related to school- 
computers :-) From an outsiders perspective it seems that a lot of  
money is wasted on IT (which goes directly into the pocket of PC/Mac  
companies who take advantage of the schools ignorance) here in the LA  
school district and as an outsider I find this a bit awkward since  
California is in depts. So hopefully groups like this one could try to  
step in and help? Of course I know that free software is not free when  
used e.g. in a school but still... At least public money would go back  
to the public if e.g. the LAUSD would spend their budget investing in  
open source tools.

So that was a provocative introduction :-) Coming back to the  
University of Zurich, there is an open source policy at our university  
that states that open source tools should be used whenever possible  
and tools created at the university should be made available under an  
open source license if possible (sometimes copyright issues prevent  
this). But that of course is wishful thinking since professors and  
institutes have a lot of autonomy most of them end up with Microsoft  
and Apple products... Nevertheless we released our learning management  
system OLAT (see http://www.olat.org) as open source 5 years ago. Its  
a java based LMS comparable to Sakai (or maybe Moodle, which is  
PHP...) but we try to focus on Usability and Scalability. Another tool  
is called eLML, the eLesson Markup Language (http://www.elml.org) and  
is an XML-based content creation tool to create online learning  
lessons. Feel free to contact me if you are interested to collaborate...

That said, I am interested in meeting people here in Southern  
California working in the same field and I am happy to help wherever I  
can to promote open source tools in education, in schools etc.  
Therefore with great interest I try to follow this groups activities  
and would like to congratulate the founders that they started this  
project. I will be at the DevLearn conference in San Jose in three  
weeks and if you're interested join the open source group I created on  
their community-website and maybe we can organize something?
http://devlearn09live.com/wpmu/groups/open-source

Bye
Joël



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Joël Fisler
Universität Zürich - Informatikdienste (ID)
Multimedia & E-Learning Services (MELS)
Winterthurerstrasse 190 (Y12 F64)
CH-8057 Zürich

Phone: +41 44 63 55252 or "joelfisler" (Skype)
Mail: joel.fisler at id.uzh.ch
Web: http://www.id.uzh.ch/org/mels.html
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