[education-wg] getting started

[Mike]

A couple of people have asked some good questions about the strategy 
group. Let me try to explain why I think this is an important part of 
making progress on this list.

There is *no difference* between the overall list and the expected 
outcomes of the strategies group. I feel that in the beginning we did 
not clearly delineate a strategy for moving forward. As chair of the 
list I take much of the blame for that. A number of things happened, 
including a short hospital stay for me, that kept me from being as 
active as I needed to be for moving things forward.

The strategies group is totally in line with the current effort of this 
education work group. Its purpose is to more clearly delineate 
approaches and directions that we may want to take which will include 
publications, technical reviews, input sources, and other things.

One of the questions has to do with defining the format through which we 
determine in this case the strategies and later the publications and 
other products. It is my opinion that all products must be “open”. My 
reason for suggesting small working groups to come up with formatted 
strategy statements and ideas, is simply that many of the issues are too 
technical for list members. In no way will the small groups supersede 
the authority of the overall group And all content developed will be 
opened in terms of copyright and in terms of implementation/change.

It is my experience that many people who belong to lists do so because 
of an interest in the topic at hand; In this case the implementation of 
open-source software in K-12 schools. The broader membership that we can 
attain in this group the more we gain in terms of support, content 
development, and appropriate evaluation methodology. I am hopeful that 
we will be able to attract several teachers and others who have used 
open source in various environments.

I hope this clarifies the intent of the strategies group and other 
groups that may become a part of this list.

Mike

*Mike Huffman* mhuffman at comcast.net

On 4/4/2010 3:08 PM, James Salsman wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 4, 2010 at 8:25 AM, Mike<mhuffman at comcast.net>  wrote:
>    
>> Let's get started by forming the strategies group. Who would like to work on
>> developing strategies for the education workgroup. Please e-mail me if
>> you're interested in participating.
>>      
> Mike, I am, but I have a question about your specification: "This
> group will be responsible for identifying strategies that can work
> with open source software as well as prioritizing how this gets put
> together. Most of the strategy discussions will be public on the
> listserv and everyone's input will be required. However a smaller
> group will refine the focus and determine which strategies need to be
> addressed first."
>
> Is anyone opposed to using IETF-style "rough consensus and running
> code" decision making, which precludes the absolute authority of a
> smaller group with decision making authority?  We should have rules
> requiring interoperable implementations and open source code, free
> from both copyright and patent restrictions.  Does anyone object to
> placing rules such as those at
> http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2026#page-13 and Section 11 of
> http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html as being paramount above any
> group or person?  Even against years of unanimous opposition?
>
> Those requirements are the reasons why I've recommended the use of
> http://microformats.org/wiki/gift for a textual assessment standard
> (GPL-licensed Moodle can import and export it) and BSD-licensed CMU
> Sphinx II for the pronunciation and reading analog described at
> http://tinyurl.com/osl08 -- and I must insist that we remain congruent
> with our underlying mission to provide open educational resources.
> Giving a subset of the group decision making power greater than the
> whole makes sense for day-to-day work and subdivision of labor, but I
> hope we will have some rules for educational resources, whether they
> are code or data or both, human-readable or otherwise, that we all
> have to abide by.
>
> Best regards,
> James Salsman
>
>
>    
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