Contents

1. SELF Advisory Board established
2. The creation of Learning Materials
3. Free Software and Education in Bulgaria
4. SELF Presentation at FLOSSWorld Workshop in Brussels
5. SELF developers receive Google Summer of Code stipends
6. Agenda
7. About

1. SELF Advisory Board established

As many of you have already read, a group of renowned professionals agreed to support the SELF Project with their expertise and networks. The international SELF Advisory Board consists of Susan D'Antoni (UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning), Elmar Geese (Open Document Foundation), Heather Ford (iCommons), Masayuki Ida (Graduate School of International Management), Lawrence Liang (Alternative Law Forum), Anne Oestergaard (GNOME Foundation) and Susy Struble (Sun Microsystems).

They will play a key role in the development and implementation of the SELF Platform. The new Advisory Board strengthens links with the target groups who should benefit from the SELF Platform and helps with generating ideas to make the SELF project become self-sustainable. The members of the SELF Advisory Board will participate at a strategic level, bringing together communities and knowledge as well as raising awareness.

More information

2. The creation of Learning Materials

We are in the process of building a community and are setting up different teams where people can get involved and contribute in various ways. At this moment, help is needed in the Learning Materials Creation Team for coordination, authoring, translation, content testing, proofreading and many other tasks.

This team contributes to the SELF Project by providing learning materials, checking existing ones and working to improve them. Members can also build learning trajectories with existing materials, providing new ones or sharing their own experience on using them in pedagogical activities with each other.

It can be in any areas of your interest, and indeed SELF benefits most if you do something that you are good at and that helps you in your other activities. If you want to become a part of SELF from the very beginning, please follow this steps:

1. Subscribe to the general Learning Materials mailing list and post a message presenting yourself. Tell us about yourself, a project you have in mind or your areas of interest.
   
2. Review the active projects and see if there is already a team working on the kind of project you have in mind. Until the SELF Platform is functional, LM Creation is hosted in ATutor.
3. Join an existing team in ATutor or propose in the general LM-list about the creation of a new team, so that other participants can guide and possibly join your initiative. You'll have to register at ATutor to get started in the Learning Materials creation space. In the second part of 2007 we will migrate all materials and working space to the SELF Platform, while ATutor remains a valuable tool for creation and for electronic learning space.
4. Communicate about the progress through the ATutor forum of your project, the SELF website (community-wiki), on the SELF mailinglists and with the help of the COM team through external channels.

General note regarding authoring: all activities on SELF follow the Founding Principles. In particular, authorship will be attributed to all relevant contributions.

3. Free Software and Education in Bulgaria

On April, 31st, Dessi Pefeva of the SELF Project participated at the “Second workshop in South-Eastern Europe on FLOSSWorld: worldwide impact study on Free and Open source Software”. The workshop was held in Sofia, Bulgaria on 30/03 and 31/03 this year. The participants of the workshop were representatives from the Balkan countries and Western Europe which were involved in the policy, education and Free Software development. Dessi Pefeva presented the SELF Project during the education round table panel, in an informal talk with the Bulgarian Free software community. Dessi explained the general aim and goals of the SELF Project, focussing on the platform usage and the potential benefits from it. She presented the progress from the beginning of the project to the current status.

Significant interest was shown by a representative from the Open Projects Foundation (OPF), who is working on the idea of the development of educational materials and a national Linux educational programme for high schools in Bulgaria. The OPF is now working on a manual of the programme, which they are planning to propose to the Ministry of Education for adoption. The main obstacle for the wider adoption of Free Software products in the educational sector in Bulgaria is the lack of alternatives for the MS programme for the ICT classes at high schools. The idea of this project is to provide each high school with the possibility to decide whether they teach students on Linux based systems, or on Microsoft ones. Their materials will be released under Creative Commons licenses and will be freely available at the wiki of the Linux for Bulgarians portal.

SELF flyers were spread around the workshop. As a result of the SELF popularisation, the biggest portal of the Bulgarian Free Software community – Linux for Bulgarians published a news article about the SELF Project, and appealed the community to get involved.

More information (in Bulgarian):

4. SELF Presentation at FLOSSWorld Workshop in Brussels

The FLOSSWorld project aims to strengthen Europe's leadership in research into Free Software and Open Standards, building a global constituency with partners from Argentina, Brazil, Bulgaria, China, Croatia, India, Malaysia and South Africa. Fundacion Via Libre and Internet Society Bulgaria are both partner in FLOSSWorld and in SELF. The project is designed around three research tracks, each providing insights and gathering empirical evidence on important aspects of Free Software usage and development:

Where FLOSSWorld performs much needed research on the adoption of Free Software and Open Standards, SELF provides the much needed training platform in order to facilitate that adoption. That is why SELF has been invited to give a presentation in their workshop on May 10-11th in Brussels. The SELF project will be presented by Wouter Tebbens and Federico Heinz.

International Workshop Free Registration

Contribution by Wouter Tebbens, ISOC.nl

5. SELF developers receive Google Summer of Code stipends

We are pleased to know that Debarshi Ray and Rakesh Pandit, two developers of GNOWSYS and the SELF Platform, have been selected in Google Summer of Code this year. The Google Summer of Code is a programme that offers student developers a stipend to write code for various Free Software projects.

Debarshi will be working on developing an offline package management utility under the tutelage of The Fedora Project. Under auspices of Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay, he will develop an enhancement to Pirut that will enable users, who do not have the necessary bandwidth to download packages from the Internet, to install and update from packages downloaded on a different machine having better connectivity. This is inspired from one of last year's accepted proposals mentored by Ubuntu.

The entire text is available online.

Read the entire proposal.

6. Agenda

16-17 April, 2007, Salzburg, Austria
3rd EduMedia Conference of Salzburg Research

• 17 April, 2007, 15:00 - 15:30 SELF Project, presented by Wouter Tebbens, ISOC.nl

• 18 April 2007, 15:15-16:00 Cees Segers and Hinde ten Berge, ISOC.nl, will give a workshop on the SELF Project and the use of Free Software and Open Standards in Education

SELF News is a monthly newsletter about the SELF Project and related issues. SELF aims to be the central platform with high quality educational and training materials about Free Software and Open Standards. It is based on world-class Free Software technologies that permit both reading and publishing free materials, and is driven by a worldwide community.

Information about SELF:
http://selfproject.eu/

Consortium Partners:

• Internet Society Netherlands
• Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
• Free Software Foundation Europe
• Gothenburg University
• Internet Society Bulgaria
• Fundación Vía Libre
• Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education

Newsletter editor:
Hinde ten Berge

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