Our First National Unconference
Why pay for software that does what suppliers think you want, when you can have free software that could do exactly what you want it to?
Teachers and technical staff who use, or are interested in, open source software are invitied to participate in a friendly, informal day of sharing enthusiasm, experience, and expertise at NCSL's Conference Centre in Nottingham, 10:00-16:00, Monday 20th July. Places are free for all school and local authority staff.
We hope as many delegates as possible will be willing to offer presentations or facilitate discussions.
Topics are likely to include: Moodle, Open Source netbooks, design software, teaching programming, management information systems, and whatever you would like to talk about!
What is an unconference?
Unconferences are faciliated, participant driven gatherings centred around a particular theme. Typically they avoid some of the less appealing features of traditional conferences or CPD events, such as high fees, lack of interactivity and sponsored presentations, relying instead on as many attendees as possible taking an active role in presenting, faciliating or discussing. An unconference is what its participants, not its organizers make it.
About the venue
The National College of School Leadership's Learning and Conference Centre is a purpose built, state of the art building, designed to encourage learning and inspire leadership.
We've booked the main conference room and a few break-out rooms, for the two keynotes and the parallel sessions. These have a full AV rig, including projectors and interactive whiteboards, and there's a video link for the main room if you'd like to join in but can't come in person.
Registration
To attend the conference, you need to create an account on this site, making sure you tick the Unconference 09 box on the registration form when you do. If you've already registered, simply join the Unconference 09 group.
We hope that as many as possible who attend will be able to present on an open source topic or project that they've been using in school or otherwise involved with, or perhaps just facilitate a discussion on a subject of interest. Unconferences rely on their participants to make them a success. If you'd like to be involved in this way, simply create a new session proposal, or see this page for more ideas.
Places are free for school and local authority staff and those presenting. Other places cost £55; do go ahead and register but please contact us to arrange payment. In the event of registered delegates not attending, and not cancelling their place at least a week before the event, we reserve the right to charge £55 to cover our costs.
Keynote Presentations
Whilst unconferences rely on the contributions of all their participants, we're delighted to announce that we have two outstanding keynote presenters to top and tail the day, providing inspiration and provoking discussion.
George Auckland, Head of Learning Innovation, BBC Learning. George's experience and expertise spans the original ‘open source’ education computer, the BBC Micro, and the most recent BBC open source project, BBC Open Lab.
Graham Attwell, Director of Pontydysgu, is well known in the field of technology-enhanced teaching and learning. Graham's recent work focuses on new applications and approaches to e-Portfolios and Personal Learning Environments and use of social software for learning and knowledge development.
Session proposals (see below)
Unconferences are what their particpants make them.
We'd like as many particpants as possible to use this opportunity to share something of their expertise, enthusiasm and experience with like-minded teachers and techies, or just those interested in finding out more.
So, how do you use open source? Sessions could be...
- About classroom practice: open source software that you use with students, within or beyond the ICT curriculum, maybe even a demonstration lesson?
- About policy and strategy: big picture issues for school leaders and policymakers
- Technical stuff: getting things to work, getting pieces to fit together, innovation and reliability
- Development work: open source projects you're participating in: what does it do? what's the road map? how can those in schools help?
- Anything else with a connection to UK schools and open source software!
Open source software philosophy... now enshrined in law?
Have people seen this?
There has now been a case where green beliefs given same status as religion under the anti-discrimination laws.
School Closures
I'm working with quite a number of schools on http://myschoolclosures.com
The idea behind the project is that parents and teachers can be notified in the case of a closure, registration can be done from inside of a school learning platform/website and all school info is available using the api.
Wikipedia in Schools at the unconference
Thank you to everyone who came along to the Wikipedia session today at the Open Source unConference - hope you found it useful and interesting.
I've uploaded my slides to the Wikimedia Meta website [1] - please feel free to reuse these - they are licensed under CC-BY-SA except for the copyrighted logos or screenprints which are fair use or used with permission.
Further copies of the Schools Wikipedia DVD which I gave out can be ordered from their website [2] or it can be downloaded straight from there.
Live coverage of the Unconference
Twitter updates at http://search.twitter.com/search?q=osschools
The live stream from the main room is at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/mirandamod2-bett1
We're hoping to have flashmeeting in due course...
How can BBC Open Lab best support open source software in schools?
BBC Open Lab aims to bring developers and teachers together to create simple open source software.
We plan to run a number of small projects over the next couple of years to help get people started, and it would be great to hear from people with experience in the field what support would be most useful.
The discussion will likely focus on what sort of projects we should focus on; how to foster communication between developers and people in education and what methods we should use to encourage people to get involved. Any other questions or suggestions are very welcome.
Green Computing
 |
Green ComputingRussell Dyas - EduGeek.net |
Green computing is becoming all the rage and over the next 12 months will become more important.
As this BBC article points out most of us do not know what targets we need to meet.
- We talk about what you need to know.
- If you need to meet any targets.
- What we can do with IT to help.
- How opensource software can help the green agenda.
- As a final bonus we can tell you how you convince you head to replace all your CRT monitors.
Blending open-source development with constructionist learning
A perceived advantage of open source development of educational software is that it potentially allows teachers to make their own adaptations. This link between making software and learning is echoed in a constructionist approach, as proposed by Seymour Papert and pioneered through the use of Logo in schools, in which model-building activity is seen as the medium for developing domain understanding.
Open Source Ideas
Open Source Ideas:
- Designed for Hackability
- Small Pieces Loosely Joined
- Some Rights Reserved
- Perpetual Beta
- etc
Conversation is a fault tolerant medium for the storage of ideas
Hanging on to ideas below the coasian floor is a pyrrhic victory
Social media is an enzyme eating away at the cell walls of silos
Information wants to be free
etc etc
Wikipedia in Schools
Wikipedia and its sister projects have a large amount of content that can be useful for teachers. This session could cover:
- using Wikipedia content in class notes etc - what's available and how should I cite?
- encouraging your students to use Wikipedia for their homework
- help! My school's access to Wikipedia is blocked - what should I do?
- child-friendly static offline versions of Wikipedia
- anything else the participants would like
Unconference Programme
We've been delighted by the response to the Unconference, with over 100 participants signed up and 25 session proposals.
There are still a few participant places available, so if you'd like to join us on 20th July at NCSL in Nottingham for what promises to be a really interesting day of sharing expertise, experience and challenges, please do register!
Moodle Mathematics
Ian Wild is author of the popular manual for teachers "Moodle Course Conversion: Beginner's Guide" and is currently writing a book on teaching mathematics online using Moodle.
Moodle is an open source e-learning tool that is very popular in schools and colleges. But selecting, installing and using the tools to make teaching mathematics in Moodle fast, fun and engaging is not child’s play.
Building Schools for the Future. The context for OSS
The BSF program promises schools "The IT Systems that they want". How do we ensure that this happens?
What practical experience of BSF can delegates bring to a discussion.
What action can OSS users take to ensure that the LA, IT consultants and designers deliver effectively?
Brian Lockwood
Engaging Young People in Technology
A Presentation with lots of scope for Open Discussion.
Hosted by Digital Freedom in Education and Youth, a group of technologically adept young people, this session will cover getting technically adept young people into the real world technology industry, how schools can help technologically adept young people develop their skills, how free software can help young people and what Digital Freedom in Education and Youth is all about.
Mahara e portfolio for schools
Presented by Glenys Bradbury of TDM, an official Mahara partner
Introduction: I am proposing a session on presenting Mahara as an an eportfolios for schools. I will briefly introduce the background to the open source mahara project, the links with the open source VLE Moodle project before looking at some of the features.
A plugins ecosystem for schools Management Information Systems
Writing a complete, monolithic Management Information System (MIS) for a school is a large undertaking. MIS' are the very definition of "enterprise software" - the dull but neccesary applications that take up the bulk of programming effort worldwide. Replacing an existing MIS would take time and programming effort.