[freecooperation] Wanted -- Freeware/ Open Source Demoers (fwd)

From: Frederick Noronha (FN) (fred_at_bytesforall.org)
Date: 03/10/04

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    Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2004 02:01:51 CST

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    Hi,

    This is Paul Vanouse and Trebor.

    THE BELOW ROUND TABLE DEMO IS SEEKING INTERESTED DEMOERS-- PLEASE READ AND
    ADD YOUR NAME ON THE WIKI IF INTERESTED:

    http://www.molodiez.org/wiki/moin.cgi/SoftwareForPedagogy or contact Paul
    Vanouse <vanouse@buffalo.edu>

    The aim of this round table discussion is to provide an overview of
    software options for digital media educators that solve some of the
    problems of teaching with "Big" commercial software. Big-software is
    headed in the wrong direction for students for several reasons that I?ll
    group under the headings "exclusive" and "aggressive". Exclusive contains
    trends toward higher costs, trends toward higher end processor needs,
    trends toward proprietary output formats, while aggressive entails the
    increasing amount of piracy-protection that frequently bogs down students
    in labs even when they are using "legal" software. Furthermore, the
    increasing scale of big-software programs is itself a problem in education
    as it distracts students with the sprawl of widgets at the expense of
    their understanding basic of principles of computational
    media--essentially, big-software emphasizes procedural task learning
    (job-training) in opposition to cognitive principle learning (education).

    Within the open source movement, server and operating system work has for
    several good reasons moved quickly and had enthusiastic support of sys
    admins. Open-source, shareware and freeware software packages have been
    slower to emerge as competition to that produced by big-software. This
    panel seeks to demonstrate and promote interesting software programs that
    could replace big-software programs in educational settings--simple tools
    for image processing, web-design, sound processing and experimentation,
    3-d animation, graphical layout, etc. Expanding use and availability of
    simple shareware/freeware tools will reduce skyrocketing software costs,
    cumbersome installation and registration procedures, and the amount of
    time teaching how to use software,

    Most student labs are either Mac or PC based--seldom both. Thus the
    format of the roundtable tech skill exchange should be back-to-back
    sessions for each--probably one hour each. In each session,
    demonstrator/participants should plan to give a 5-10 minute demonstration
    and discussion of a specific program. This discussion should
    pragmatically address questions such as "what does it do better and worse
    than its big-software rivals?" "What are some known bugs?" "How intuitive
    is it to use?" "What i/o formats does it include?" After each
    presentation a link will be added to an online resource to facilitate
    post-conference use. Demonstrators will be solicited prior to the
    conference from the list of attendees. Non-demonstrators are of course
    also encouraged to attend and participate in discussion.

    Personal disclaimer: I am neither an expert nor an authority on many
    non-exclusive, non-aggressive software programs. While I plan to demo one
    Mac-based program, my primary role in this roundtable would be that of a
    facilitator. I am hoping to reduce the dependency on big-software within
    my department over the next year and I assume that other attendees are
    seeking similar goals or perhaps even promoting their own independent
    software productions.

    ------------------------------
    http://freecooperation.org

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