On 22/05/15 11:50AM, Kaio Duarte Costa wrote: > Hey Andrew Yu, > > First, I would like to say that I am very happy to see another high > school student, caring about spreading the free software philosophy. > Because I am also, and have been through it, I will suggest based on > this.
Hi! I've actually did this to Junior Middle School, but because of a difference in how the schools work, that didn't really work and probably won't work. > 1. In the article, make clear the importance of free software in > education; If they are a very reputable school, they possibly care about > fulfilling the main educational and social values, and free software > fulfills all of them. You can learn more about this at: > https://www.gnu.org/education/edu-why.en.html and > https://www.gnu.org/education/edu-schools.en.html Yeah, that's the entry point I want to bring to them. > 2. Collect opinions and comments about the current proprietary software > already used by other students in this institution; If other students, > have complaints about the proprietary software already in use, collect > them, and present them when handing in the article to the person > responsible for this (principal, supervisor or teacher). You can use > them as a basis for your paper as well, or mention them. I generally know what nonfree software people use here, but some parts of it would be harder to change, because ... I'd say they're more "integrated" into daily live of people here, like WeChat. But since I'm generally not a "normal 'netizen'", I don't know the specifics in how they use them, which is one of the things I need to quest about. > 3. In the article, cite example software that meets the school's demands > and point them out as replacements for proprietary software; it will be > easier to replace the current proprietary software if there is free > software compatible with everyone's demands, without losing any function > in it. For example, you can present LibreOffice Writer as a replacement > for Microsoft Word or Tux Paint as an alternative to Paintbrush. Yup, I think I have a few more specific software use-cases and some general suggestions regarding handing-in of homework: - Online classes and online meetings, if we have to be online due to COVID (Well, this is Shanghai, what do you expect...): BigBlueButton or Jitsi Meet would work well. In fact, it is preferred that the school could self-host it. Since students live in the general area of the school, hosting their own server would make things much faster and more stable. BigBlueButton is also specifically designed for schools as it has nice features like direct presentations (instead of silly screen shares), some fun whiteboard features, shared notes, better polling and more. While in terms of the technology itself, I dislike using Web brwosers for things like meetings; WebRTC is exceptionally bloated and I would vastly prefer a Mumble-like protocol. However at this point I prioritize free software and "usability to normies" to my own technical sanity. - From a technical side, I dislike word processors altogether, whether nonfree or free, though of course I'd dislike the nonfree with greater reason. What-you-see-is-what-you-get of word processors mess up everything because it is often hard to directly determine the formatting difference of formatted text to find inconsistencies by the visual eye. They also promote using physical instead of logical markup (many word processors have logical markup which makes things better but currently they seem really buggy). As far as I know, almost all document formatting programs and word processors are able to in some way output or have its output be converted to Portable Document Format. For most documents which don't really have to be mutable, this sounds like the best touch on this issue. It doesn't lock people into using specific types of free software, too. > 4. If available, cite success stories from your region in your article; > often, educational institutions rely on the example of others before > making any sudden changes to something. You can cite cases from > companies, schools (preferably), government agencies, and others in your > article. This shows that these changes have already been made somewhere, > and they worked! I'm afraid that the case we're talking about here is the first case in our region at least in education. Most governments are switching to a government-made distribution of GNU/Linux, but those internal government decisions that aren't really national or city policy and thus doesn't affect people too much aren't really transparent (which is a danger of its own, but meh). > 5. Be careful how you approach the subject in your article; not everyone > knows the free software philosophy, so any "aggressive writing" can make > them misunderstand you. Instead of writing "You must change this", "Stop > taking away our freedom" or any means to impose or pressure a change > abruptly, it needs to be replaced with a more calm and friendly way of > approaching free software, so you can do this process in a more calm and > friendly way. Yup, I do that a lot! > I hope that I've helped a little with this, and I hope that you can do > this. If you have any questions or other suggestions, you can contact me > about that too! > > Kindly, > > -- > Kaio Duarte Costa (Kaiod) Yeah, thanks :D Let's bring this over together :D
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