WordPress and other tools for education

Recently I have run both a general information day, and then a half day WordPress training event at the Presbyterian Ladies’ College in Sydney, for a class of year 6 girls (~12yr olds) and their teachers. I have been exceptionally impressed by the vision of Chris Waterman, the Director of ICT there, as he really understands that in modern society it is vital for children to have versatile (and safe) online skills.

If we show students how to … do all the cool brilliant things we know should be done with ICT, then we have started the revolution.

Chris Waterman from his blog post on the topic

The school is undergoing a wonderful project with the year 6 girls wherein they will be blogging as a normal part of their life and schoolwork, as well as incorporating one-to-one connectivity devices so the girls are able to create digital content and publishing anywhere, anytime.

Below are some of the resources around the tools I taught, as well as some documentation that may be useful for others.

I hope to see comments from some of the PLC students and teachers! Remember to always only use either your first name, or a nickname, and to not post any identifying information. The PLC student and teacher blog will be an internal project for a while so they can get used to the technology and be comfortable with the internet safety best practices.

Technical and general notes

  • Open Source Software Training: Technical Notes – includes information about finding, using and supporting FOSS applications for schools. pdf or odt
  • Open Source Software Training: General Notes – includes information for teachers and management. pdf or odt

Links to training, documentation and other information about WordPress and blogging

  • Main WordPress website – useful for general information.
  • Introduction to blogging – information about blogging and how to approach your own blog.
  • In your blog you can create blog posts, or static pages. Blog posts are for new stories, your homework, and other ongoing information. Static pages can be used for your favourite music, or links for your friends, or a page about your pets – ie, for information that isn’t changing.
  • Themes!! Find thousands of cool themes to customise your blog. I expect to see all the Year 6’s at PLC with awesome blogs that look great and are fun to read. Remember, if the theme isn’t in your “Appearance” section in your blog configuration section, then you just need to get the IT team to install your theme for you.
  • Check out the WordPress Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section if you run into issues.

Ideas for using blogging in the classroom

  1. Get the students to post their normal existing homework into their blogs as normal practise (rather than email or printing), and include as part of their homework the review and commenting on a few of their peers’ work. Get them to draw names so they are continually commenting on different students’ work.
  2. Have a series of questions for students to answer written up on the board in class, and direct the students to write the questions into their blogs in bold, with the answers in normal font. You could choose the post the questions on your teacher blog, and have the students either respond to your blog post in the comments with their answers, or post a link to their blog posts in your comments as a useful way to collate all the blog post answers to your homework.
  3. Have the students write an essay on their blog, along with photos, web links, video content and audio interviews.
  4. Encouage students to do their creative works on their blogs on a regular basis. Perhaps a weekly short story, artwork, or piece of music they have composed.
  5. You could have an “eportfolio” category, and students add posts they are particularly proud of to that category such that when browsing to the students blog, a person can select the eportfolio category of posts and get the best and most representative works by the student for a basic online portfolio.

Internet safety

I am not an expert in Internet safety for children, however the following links were kindly given by Concetta Gotlieb, an amazing teacher/blogger/researcher based in Sydney:

Animation and photo modification software

On the day I also briefly covered the following applications. Please make sure you look up “gimp tutorial” or “inkscape tutorial” on Youtube for more great information:

Quick thanks

A big thank you to the teachers, ICT team and the students who participated in the training. I know the girls will love blogging and using some of the Open Source tools we discussed. So good luck and have fun!

OLPC deployments – a global approach

Cross-posted from OLPC Friends.

I’ve been involved with a couple of OLPC XO deployments now, and the experiences have been extremely fun and satisfying. One of the issues I have faced was simply trying to connect with other deployments to share with and learn from for peer support. Late last year I suggested to some of the OLPC Boston community people that a weekly online get together of people doing deployments would be very useful. In typical community fashion it was suggested I start running the meetings 🙂

So, we’ve been running a weekly deployment meetup for the last 4 weeks, with excellent results! We’ve had people from deployments all around the world, from Peru, Oceania, Austria, Birmingham, Nepal, Boston, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Paraguay, Colombia, India and more! We also have people from Sugar Labs, OLPC Boston, Fedora, Ubuntu and other projects coming along. Every meeting thus far has had about 30-50 people, and we have tweaked the agenda such that each meeting will now feature a short “talk” by someone on their project or experiences. Then we do a general catch up on everyone’s projects before getting into general Q&A. All the IRC logs are publicly available, and we are trying to ensure we summarise and move information from the logs into the documentation below to make it helpful to others.

I think this format is perfect for community development around XO deployments, but I also think there are three four outcomes that will result from these meetings.

  1. Documentation improvements to the Deployment Guide and the establishment of a Deployment FAQ where we can make it easier for deployers to find information and plan successful projects. Currently we also have a Deployment Resources page, however that will likely be folded into the Deployment Guide.
  2. The creation of a Deployment Wishlist of features and projects that would really help us with actually putting XO’s in the field. Hopefully this wishlist will help inform the developer community about what we actually need in practise 🙂
  3. Knowledge sharing leading to the establishment of best practices and peer support. Perhaps even the establishment of a normal practice of participating in and leveraging the Support Gang infrastructure and knowledge-base for deployment support.
  4. The beginnings of a self-directed project-centric community coming together independent of but in collaboration with the various organisations (Sugar Labs, OLPC Boston, etc, etc).

Ultimately I see this as the beginning of an independent community-run project that will coordinate with all the organisations involved, including Sugar Labs, OLPC Boston, and the many smaller organisations popping up around the world. More information on that soon! 🙂

I’m a firm believer that getting educators involved in the vision is vital, however the deployment meetings are primarily for the people actually coordinating and supporting rollouts, and we discuss everything related to the implementation of an XO deployment including imaging, repairs, XO customisation (timezones, Activities, etc), the schoolserver (XS), logistics, networking, activation strategies, training, etc.

I think teachers and educators interested in pedagogy and such should be encouraged to participate in Sugar Labs, where their input will directly influence and improve Sugar, which is at the heart of the educational outcomes for children.

The weekly meetings are on every Tuesday at 1500 Boston time (Tuesday 2000 UTC time), on #olpc-deployment on Freenode (IRC). If you aren’t a regular IRC user, there are full instructions available for how to join the meeting through any normal web browser. I will try to blog/email a basic summary of each meeting for everyone’s interest. Please ensure you either follow the OLPC Friends blog or that you are subscribed to the OLPC Grassroots mailing list.

We will also be running a monthly FAQ-hack to get items from the minutes into the FAQ and Deployment Guide. This will be for a couple of hours after the first meeting in every month. Again, details are on the deployment meetup page.

So come along, share your experiences, spread the word to other deployments and we can create a strong deployment community so we can all better get opportunities for education out to children all over the world!

Quick thanks

A quick thank you to Michael Stone, a fantastic OLPC community guy and experienced consultant who has helped me push this forward and who has largely done the minutes and summaries to date. Thanks Michael! A big thankyou also to:

  • Chris Ball (cjb) for his hard work in slowly moving the XO release management into a more community-based model. The deployment community owes him for the 8.2.1 release, which totally rocks
  • Mel Chua (mchua) whose enthusiasm and drive has been awesome
  • Adam Holt (CanoeBerry) who has done such a great job establishing the amazing Support Gang, and whose knowledge and experience will really help with deployment community development
  • Samuel Klein (sj) who is doing great work trying to drive OLPC community development and better communications, and who has been a great sounding board
  • Walter Bender (walterbender) who is doing such amazing work with Sugar Labs, and is a constant voice of wisdom when it comes to actually getting things done, and in a community way
  • Seth Woodworth (isforinsects) – he has been constantly optimistic and collaborative, and has been a great participant in discussions. He’s also been a great sounding board
  • Ian Thomson and David Leeming – who are working so hard on Oceania XO deployments, and who are the inspiration to me suggesting a regular deployment meeting. Hopefully this will help more people like them  (and me) who are at the frontline trying to implement the vision of OLPC
  • James Cameron, John Ferlito, Stephen Thorne and of course Jeff – for all providing me with the support I’ve need in the trials I’ve worked in myself 🙂
  • All the people who have participated in the meetings to date, especially mstone, cjb, cjl, walterbender,  yamaplos, marcopg, NealS, dsd, aa, kevix, icarito, nubae, CanoeBerry, wadeb, hpachas-PE, anna-bham, tonya37 and everyone!

Anyway, I could thank people all day when it comes to amazing OLPC/Sugar related stuff, but these people have specifically helped with input to and assistance in deployments and in setting up the deployment meetings. Thanks all!

First test of OLPC XOs in remote Australian Indigenous community

Sokar Phillpot and Horatio Davis took several XO laptops into a remote Indigenous community called Pormpuraaw (Cape York Peninsula in Queensland, Australia) to see how the children would respond. They had some great results and the local community there are very excited about doing an actual trial. Check out their website below for the videos, photos and responses from the children. Great work Sokar and Horatio!

XO workshop at Pormpuraaw

Jeff – the potato chip!

Many of you will be familiar with Jeff‘s hackergotchi:

jdub - hackergotchi
jdub - hackergotchi

Well, First Dog on the Moon, a political and funny cartoonist in Australia has just created a shirt based on Jeff’s hackergotchi labelled “on the internet nobody knows you’re a potato chip”. Just awesome!

on the internet nobody knows
on the internet nobody knows

Get your potato chip shirt from the site linked to the image 🙂

Ada Lovelace Day – Blog about a geek woman you admire – 24th March

Ada Lovelace Day is coming up, and I’ve been meaning to blog about it for a while. Basically the day is about highlighting awesome women in tech, and the purpose is to provide great role models for young girls such that they might be inspired to get into IT for a career.

Recent research by psychologist Penelope Lockwood discovered that women need to see female role models more than men need to see male ones. That’s a relatively simple problem to begin to address. If women need female role models, let’s come together to highlight the women in technology that we look up to. Let’s create new role models and make sure that whenever the question “Who are the leading women in tech?” is asked, that we all have a list of candidates on the tips of our tongues.

So, think of an awesome tech woman you know, in particular the quiet accomplished geeks in the wings, and blog about her on Ada Lovelace Day. Sign the Ada Lovelave Pledge and let’s see if we can get a few thousand role model profiles. Would encourage you all to also link your blog post to the Geek Feminism Wikia site where I’ve added a new page for female geek role models, so add any other links you can think of that are useful.

Thanks everyone! Please also pass this information on to schools and teachers you know, who in turn can use the profiles as role models for students. Female geek role models are important for for young women and for young men, because if every new young geek already knows a few female geeks, then perhaps the assumption that we don’t exist won’t pervade 🙂 Plus it will encourage more girls into the industry which is awesome.

Being a woman sometimes sucks

Every so often I come across particular behaviours towards women that really make me feel uncomfortable, upset, frustrated or just plain angry. I just had a comment posted on an old blog post of mine about women in IT:

Wow-this iss uch a popular site.

Why is it however, that when you women do something that men have been doing for ages (without any fanfare or blowing our own trumpets), it’s such a massive acheivement????

Tht’a the problem these days-women are so up themselves, men don’t wamt to know them.Thats the REAL reason why women can’t find men..but of course, that’s not the womens fault…is it??

What a load of bitches.

The post was apparently from a “Hugh G. Rection”, which of course demonstrates the maturity and spinelessness of this particular individual. I was going to just ignore the comment, but it just irked me so I thought I’d write a blog post why.

The behaviour never ceases to surprise me, and in one way I hope I never cease to be surprised, because I would hate to think I’d ever just accept it.

I was talking to a male friend recently and he said he had accidentally offended a female geek by making a crass joke about “jugs”, and I spoke to him about how it isn’t about the crassness. I know many women (and I’m one of them) who can be very rude or crass at times. It is because things like my friend’s joke about jugs, or the comment on my blog above, or being avoided at geek conferences because I’m female, or the occasional death threats against women or women groups, or, or, or…. all these behaviours are constant reminders that I am a woman, when my gender really shouldn’t make any difference. This constant reminder of my gender is thrust upon me and most women I know in IT, and this differentiation unfortunately builds the foundations of some really negative (albeit much less common) behaviours towards women in IT. I am just another geek, the same as a male geek is just another geek. People will always have a reason to disagree about code, opinions, or whatever, but I am really sick of my gender being a reason to be targeted, something that has to be pointed out as being different or somehow weird.

I try to remain positive constantly, and am always saying that we can only improve the environment by coming together as a community to deal with negative behaviours (including sexism, racism, and any other antisocial and destructive perspectives). I usually try to live the change I want to see and I understand that a lot of sexism isn’t done with malicious intent and I myself try to refrain from sexist (or other negative) humour or perspectives. This isn’t a men vs women issue, in fact most men I know are wonderful people, and some are more upfront about smacking down sexism than a lot of women, for whom doing so would often enough incur unwanted attention. Ultimately there is a latent sexism in many parts of the world that I’ll have to deal with regardless, but I would like to ask the Free and Open Source community in particular to please be considerate of the people around you, and try to ensure that whatever project you are in, you are doing your best to make it an open and friendly environment for anyone to get involved. It is after all meant to be a meritocracy, meant to be about freedom and personal empowerment. Let’s try to minimise the impact of old world biases on our awesome community.

In response to the comment above, right now in many countries (including Australia) there is a mistaken perspective that there are no women in IT, that we’ve not really played much of a role, and as such IT is somehow a masculine thing to do. None of these perspectives are true, however the myths are turning many young people (and particularly young women) away from the industry. FOSS in particular is supposed to be a community where anyone can succeed according to their skill and effort. By allowing incorrect perspectives about the industry to flourish, we are not ever going to have a good cross-section of society participating in FOSS, and FOSS – like politics – needs to be openly participatory and representative. Also, we can see in various FOSS projects that gender, politics, religion and other potential barriers to personal interaction can be bridged through common base values and goals.

I believe until any person can participate in any FOSS project without their gender/race/religion being a thing of mockery, hatred, curiousity or any other differentiation, then we are not being true to the philosophies of software freedom or technocratic achievement. Being treated like a human being, and with some basic level of empathy and equality should be a reasonable base expectation for everyone 🙂

Antiquated ideas won’t save Australia

The recently released Venturous Australia report that this quote refers to is actually quite an interesting read. I found it refreshingly aware of the importance of opening up research and strengthening the ICT industry, and overall recommend it as a good read with some useful recommendations.

So today I was amused when I had an article pointed out to me today with the following gem:

The recommendation referring to “machine searchable repositories for scientific knowledge” together with the recommendation suggesting that “research funded by governments… should be made freely available over the internet as part of the global public commons” is of considerable concern.

These recommendations are commercially naïve and potentially damaging to Australia’s interests. Australia’s Asian neighbours, such as Malaysia and Taiwan, are currently implementing strategies to capture publicly funded intellectual property (IP) on a national scale so that governmen can assist with commercialisation policies and frameworks to exploit that IP to drive economic outcomes. The Malaysian government, for instance, is establishing a “Technomart” to trade and license IP; not to make it freely available unless it cannot be exploited commercially.

The old closed approach isn’t where the big innovations today are happening. Open access to research and Government data has been shown many times over to create much greater economic value than a single institution commercialising the research or data. A great example is GIS data. There was a great talk by Alan Smart about this space, and he mentioned that open access to GIS data in the US was shown to create something like 20 times the value than closed access to the data. Alan spoke at a very interesting event run by Senator Kate Lundy called the Foundations of Openness and all the recordings and slides are available.

Ideally public access to data like this allows innovative Australian companies to find and meet new market needs, to compete for work based on the quality of their service, and to innovate on quality data. It is more beneficial for our industry as a whole, and for the market because companies competing with services around open data/software are generally under constant pressure to be high quality, whereas when you purchase a proprietary application you are limited by what the provider of that application has time/resources/desire to deliver.

Collaboration and open access is key to being able to stand on the shoulders of giants and reach for the bleeding edge. Not this antiquated approach of isolated individuals hunkered down in caves reinventing the wheel and using it to beat up the competition. Competition is good! Collaboration is good! Bleeding edge development, research and new markets will not happen in isolation, and software patents are limiting rather than encouraging of innovation. Fact.

One thing that really annoys me is that this is the CEO of the Australian Insitute for Commercialisation, and where is the thought leadership? Commercialisation doesn’t have to be limited to IP protectionism, it can also include revenue/business models including support/integration services, development, hosting, analysis and many, many other options. When done well, opening access to your data and even potentially your software can often provide access to new markets, promotion avenues, and give you and your organisation a great reputation which is where you will find new business opportunities.

As an aside, Malaysia is one country that is embracing Open Source technologies and approaches quite strongly, including a massive push for Government uptake of Open Source, and Government development of Open Source. This is being driven from the Prime Ministers department, so I think the whole picture is not being presented 🙂