Contents

1. Quality Assurance Expert Group to be established
2. SELF / CFP 7th Regional Free Software Conference, Argentina
3. Looking for SELF Testers
4. Agenda
5. About

1. Quality Assurance Expert Group to be established

Not all educational materials are of good quality. Moreover, the quality of materials that are constructed openly, in a collaborative fashion, evolves over time. The Quality Assurance Expert Group's task is to design mechanisms that will enable users to identify materials that are of good enough quality to be used in courses, as well as materials that still need their contribution to get better.

The quality assessment of materials from a very wide-ranging, rapidly changing technical field, which are themselves in constant change, is an insurmountable challenge if approached with the standard quality assurance mindset. The QAEG will design novel ways of combining technical tools such as revision control systems with on-line questionnaires and analysis of social dynamics to infer the relative quality of materials throughout their lifecycle.

The QAEG will advise the development team, exploring different approaches of appraising learning material's quality without imposing rigid structure to the material's creation process. It will apply those mechanisms to materials in the project, and experiment with different ways of interpreting social dynamics and weight assignment to different criteria. It will identify different dimensions in which a material can be evaluated, such as technical accuracy, pedagogical usefulness, popularity, etc., and find ways to combine them into an aggregate quality rating. It will interact with the SELF community to collaboratively evaluate the results of the appraisal, and find ways to make them match general quality perception as closely as possible.

More information

Contribution by Federico Heinz, FVL

2. SELF / CFP: 7th Regional Free Software Conference, Argentina

On August 9th to 11th, the seventh Regional Free Software Conference will be held in Cordoba, Argentina.

The conference is organised by Fundacion Via Libre, one of the founding partners of the SELF Project, together with the Free Software Users Group of Cordoba (GrULiC) and the Nacional University of Cordoba.

The Call for Papers is now open. Possible topics for submission to the various sessions include, but are not limited to:

• Society
• Education
• Technology
• Business

Within these themes the conference aims to cover topics as diverse as Free Software in the state, NGOs, businesses, science and education; the challenge of gender in Free Software; topics related to the community, philosophy and politics; technical topics (programming, administration, security, etc.); art, communication, and culture.

The intention is to include a broad offering of talks of a basic and introductory level as we believe that a smaller quantity of this level of talks works against the main objective of the event, which is promoting Free Software. Therefore we ask that members of our community, in addition to the excellent talks to which we are accustomed, free up a bit of time to prepare talks on simple topics, such as "free email clients and how to use them", or "how to browse the web with free software" and similar.

The papers will be reviewed by an international committee of renowned members of our community. The acceptance of the talk will depend on this evaluation, and on logistical and technical capacity.

• the title of the talk,
• a brief description (about 50 words) of the talk, to be included in promotional material,
• an abstract of the talk (between 200 and 300 words), explaining the content of your talk,
• and a small curriculum of the speaker (between 100 and 250 words)

to charlas[at]grulic.org.ar

The deadline for submitting your proposal is May 3rd, 2007.

As the SELF Consortium Partners will hold their 6-monthly board meeting in semi-conjunction with the conference, already confirmed spreakers are Wouter Tebbens, ISOC Netherlands, David Megias, Universitat Oberta Catalunya, Spain, Mathias Klang, University of Goteburg, Sweden, Dessi Pefeva, ISOC Bulgaria, Nagarjuna G., Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education and Free Software Foundation India; and Federico Heinz and Beatriz Busaniche, Fundacion Via Libre Argentina.

Closing, we take the opportunity to send a message to LUGs and other groups within our community: if you want a space in the community sector, please send an email to comunidad@grulic.org.ar so we keep you a spot. Thank you.

More information

Contribution by Beatriz Busaniche, FVL

3. Looking for SELF Testers

The SELF Platform is a web-based platform where users can go and find information and educational materials on Free Software and Open Standards, while at the same time it is a collaborative production environment for the creation of new materials, as well as and improvement and translation of existing materials.

The educational materials will be offered through a central point of access in the SELF Platform but also created, adapted and translated. Users of the Platform can harvest or collect existing educational materials from external sources and link them into the SELF Platform. They can create new materials and combine them with existing ones. And they can translate materials. Several quality assessment mechanisms will provide the users with several quality indicators, such as the popularity of the material, review and quality feedback loops. The resulting materials can be accessed in different ways: directly through the web interface of the SELF Platform, through downloaded materials reproduced in Computer Assisted Instruction environments (CAI, VLE or LMS) from educational institutes, books printed by interested publishers, or on CD or DVD as stand-alone distribution.

Currently the Platform is in its developmental phase; the first version will be released in the summer 2007. The usability interface and accessibility are very important in this phase of the project. Naturally, the SELF Platform needs to be used by anyone interested in an easy, user-friendly way. We pay attention to the interface, the use of standards (of course), and possible problems due to personal disabilities, language, and hard- and software problems in general.

Before the first version will be launched, we ask people from different communities and expertise groups to become a SELF Tester, share their experiences and test the Platform in order to provide the development team with enough time and space to readjust, refine and improve the Platform.

The SELF Team calls for as many participants to subscribe to the test list gaining access to the initial platform (which is already online). Subscribe through http://mail.selfproject.eu/mailman/listinfo/selftest or send an email to self[at]selfproject.eu! General comments relating to the definitions of the Platform are welcome as well.

More information

Dutch article in Livre

4. Agenda

Open Educational Resources for lifelong learning

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
  

NIOC Congress

17-18 April, 2007, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
NIOC is a forum for ICT in Education. The theme of the NIOC Congres
2007 is 'Learning in all stages' with subthemes
- ICT as independent speciality
- ICT in other disciplines
- Continuous learning curves
- Formats of ICT education

• During the congress Hinde ten Berge and Cees Segers, ISOC.nl, will give a workshop on the SELF Project.

7th Regional Free Software Conference

9-11 August, 2007, Cordoba, Argentina
On Free Software in relation to Society, Education, Technology and Business

• Speakers include members of the SELF Consortium

5. About

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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