This is a great article, thanks for posting it! I'm copying the opensource.com education channel authors list; I'm sure it'd make a great addition there.
--s On Mon, Oct 31, 2011 at 12:53 PM, Ivaylo Ganchev <ivaylo.ganc...@univ-paris8.fr> wrote: > Hello, > > I was the last week in Lyon (France) where I assisted at the annual Fossa > conference. The first panel was Education and it had 5 presentations. I > will try to give you a brief feed-back of the this panel. > > It started with a presentation usually held by Roberto Di Cosmo, but he > couldn't came and it was presented by his colleague Albert Cohen. The > presentation was about a tool developed by Roberto and colleagues called > Mancoosi that deals with the complexity of the package management in > modern operating systems. More about it over here : > http://www.mancoosi.org/. > > Albert also gave a brief overview of the activity of Research and > Innovation Initiative on Free Software (Initiative pour la Recherche et > l'Innovation sur le Logiciel Libre http://www.irill.org). It is a project > between the Universities of Paris 7, Paris 6 and Inria. It's main goal is > to bring together researchers that do work on subjects close to the > free/open source world. > > After this talk, a talk by Benjamin Nguyen from Inria was given. He spoke > about the experience in training high school CS teachers at the university > UVSQ (http://www.uvsq.fr). This initiatives was a consequence of the > decision of the French education administration to create a CS class in > the last year in the science grade in high-schools in France. Due to the > lack of teachers in CS, some universities offered such a training for the > wanna-be CS teachers. > > Benjamin discussed the difficulties that they had during the training > (organizational, methodological etc...) and spoke a bit about the > continuation of the program. He was a bit skeptic about the way it is > organized and about the final benefice for the teachers. The > administration decided for the next year to substitute the (around) 240 > hours of training with a 60 hours online training. For Benjamin it was > quiet scarce -- he sad that this year in 240H they just managed to give > them the absolutely necessary basics and that with less than that, the > success of such a training is highly suspicious. > > The next talk was one by Thierry Stoehr. He is involved with the promotion > of Free Software technologies in his university (Paris 7). He is also a > CEO of the Center for Free Software Training (Centre de Formation aux > Logiciels Libres -- CF2L), a public structure which goal is to provide > training on FLOSS technologies to the employees of the universities of the > Paris region -- > administrative workers and teachers/researchers. The center is open for > more than a year now and offers training courses in different technologies > -- Mozilla (Firefox, Thunderbird), Libre/Open Office, LaTeX, Gimp, > Inkscape etc... They also offer on demand training if sufficient number of > people want to be trained on given technology. > > His speech was mainly on the FLOSS technologies used in his university. > > The next one was a talk by Olivier Ricou -- a member of the EPITA, on of > the famous "Ecole d'ingénieurs" in France. He gave us a feed-back of his > involvement with the Francophone Open School (Ecole ouverte Francophone -- > EOF) and the OpenSE program. > > Finally Albert Cohen put an end of the Educational panel with a > presentation of his experience on an Android teaching and his idea to > create a Semester of Code program (SoC) inspired by the Google's Summer of > Code. His main wish is to have > more students involved in FLOSS development. His proposition is to > organize a Semester of Code in two flavors. For those who would like to > work on a FLOSS project and thus validate a course it would be possible to > choose a not-so-difficult projects from a list. Otherwise for students > that wish to spend a whole semester to code on a full-time basis on FLOSS > they can do it > instead of their internship (mandatory in the last 3 years in French > universities). > > The efforts of Albert for now are focused in finding people to work with > him on this initiative, to find companies that would like to provide some > grants to students that wish to work on FLOSS projects and to create a > web-site that would list FLOSS projects available to students. > > You can find more information about the FOSSa conference on their web > site: http://fossa.inria.fr > > For now not much of the slides are online, but I hope that more of them > would be made available. > > Best Regards, > Ivaylo Ganchev > > _______________________________________________ > tos mailing list > tos@teachingopensource.org > http://lists.teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos > _______________________________________________ tos mailing list tos@teachingopensource.org http://lists.teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos
