TeachingOpenSource.org

As we ramp-up Mozilla Education, I also wanted to make you aware of another effort that's happening in parallel.  My colleague, Chris Tyler (Seneca and Fedora), has recently launched teachingopensource.org in order to to provide a neutral connection point between all the various open source-education projects (schools and open source companies/projects) that are active in this space.

If you've spent any amount of time working in open source and education you'll know what I mean when I say that there is currently too much duplication of effort: everyone has their own mailing list, wiki, planet, etc (I'm registered on about a dozen).  This makes it hard for us all to "meet" and work on things together.  Wouldn't it be better if we had a light-weight hub so we could all see one another and share ideas?  We think so.

The goal of TeachingOpenSource.org is to provide a meta-community, not to compete with existing open source-education projects (e.g., I help lead Mozilla Education and the Centre for Development of Open Technology at Seneca, both of which remain distinct but benefit from greater connectivity/visibility through TeachingOpenSource.org).  TeachingOpenSource.org is not run by or hosted at Seneca.

I encourage you to join your work/communities to TeachingOpenSource.org so that we can better leverage the various smaller discussions happening around open source and education on the web.  Specifically:

  • Add your name to the Roll Call so others know about you working in this space.  Educators, developers, community leaders, etc. are all welcome.

  • Join the mailing list (currently a good discussion about how to address peer reviewed journals and open source).

  • Read and join the blog planet.

  • Join the irc channel.

  • Watch for details about a regular public conference call.

  • Let others know who should join us.
    We hope that by creating a neutral, de-branded space where schools, communities, and companies can connect that we will be able to support one another much better.