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"Learning the Open Source Way" Toolkit

This toolkit should assist others who want to create or adapt their educational courses using the principles found in FLOSS communities.

It is aimed at providing information about learning in an open source manner.

Since experiencing something is the best way to understand it, we would like to create the toolkit in an open source manner. We hope that the summer university will appeal to two main user groups:

• open source programmers who have some experience of developing software in open source communities and want to see if this experience can be extended to other areas of learning.
• educators who have knowledge of the principles in educational theory and pedagogy and are interested in seeing how the open source approach can be applied to education.

We developed a set of questions that should be answered and completed first.

By doing this we all should gain the experience necessary to develop the toolkit.

This set of questions should act as a resource we can all use in developing the toolkit.

So how could a toolkit look like that helps others to apply some open source principles in education?

Well, it might be a mixture of manuals, How-To guides, practical examples and exercises, or videos and presentations. It might also be supported by some software applications that are “around” and might fit in.

Below you find some links to “toolkits” that were designed by others to have an idea on what a toolkit might include.

However, we do not say that “our toolkit” should look exactly the same. We hope that all together we will identify how it should look like and what it will need.

Example toolkits:

http://www.un.org.kh/undp/ict4dtoolkit/education%20training.htm

http://www.nsba.org/sbot/toolkit/

http://www.wikieducator.org/OER_Workshop_Toolkit

http://www.ictinedtoolkit.org/usere/login.php

http://www.nsba.org/sbot/toolkit

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/05/google_releases.html

Issues you might like to cover in the Toolkit are:

1. How to structure courses, lessons, activities, etc. in education
2. What technologies should you use and how should you use them?
3. How to get the peer support network functioning
4. How might an individual be assessed or evaluated?
5. How should the content be created?
6. What roles are important?
7. What does the educator do?

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