Pilot/Education
In the short-term, the Pilot Fish project is about finding and supporting educators and institutions in the mold of David Humphrey and Seneca.
In the long-term, the project is focused on helping to make active participation in online Open Source communities a part of the modern educational curriculum.
DRAFT
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Contents
Initial Goals and Milestones
The first stages of the project are designed to:
- quickly develop our understanding of what is currently happening in the intersecting space between participatory online projects, open source and education
- develop a list of the critical success factors for electronic frontier education projects
- identify the key participants, thought leaders and potential early adopters in the space
Budget
The early budget consists of Mozilla Foundation staff time.
Process
Our first pass at this is meant to be lightweight and quick. We'll improve the process and define our goals more clearly once we understand the space better.
Research
Most of the early research is focused on building a good understanding of the state of electronic frontier education. A key first step is cataloging the people and organizations who are (or have been) working in the area.
Key Deliverable: Light-weight Case Studies of Electronic Frontier Education Projects
Key Deliverable: Catalog of Electronic Frontier Education Individuals, Initiatives and Organizations
Identify Critical Success Factors
As we gather information on the state of electronic frontier education, we will also analyze a small group of successful projects such as Seneca College's Free and Open Source Software education initiative and the innovative course at Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research where the course students organize the GNUnify conference.
From these projects, we want to identify the key success factors for running a successful electronic frontier education program.
Key Deliverable: Critical Success for Successful Electronic Frontier Education Programs
Next Steps
After we finish the tasks above, we want to:
- Get (more) external participants engaged
- Set concrete, measurable goals
- Further planning
- Get busy helping educators develop successful electronic frontier education programs
Ideas
- Survey Brainstorm - Run a set of surveys to gather information about the state of electronic frontier education and to build awareness of the Pilot Fish project.
- Write a field guide to help educators successfully pitch, design, develop and deliver electronic frontier education programs.
Resources
- Challenges for Educators - a set of notes outlining how online participatory projects differ from a standard educational environment. Based on part on Chris Tyler's A Model for Sustainable Student Involvement in Open Source paper.
- CSci 193 - Development of Open-Source Software - taught at George Washington University by Mozilla veteran Mike Pinkerton; includes creating Firefox extensions as part of the course.
Notes
- We need to find a good term to describe the communities that we want to help students and educators engage with. Electronic Frontier is too vague and loaded. Open Source is too specific. The term needs to encompass the key aspects of distributed, participatory, generative projects - they are several different things welded together - a community of practice, a decentralized mass collaboration effort and ...
View or edit tasks for the page at Talk:Pilot/Education/Todo
