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Software Freedom Day is this coming Saturday. Everything is coming together nicely, and I'd like to thank everyone who has helped so far. Again, it's been mostly carried by the committee; we put up a forum and requested comment on it, as well as announcing it at meetings and on the mailing list, but other than a couple of people signing up on the wiki page, not much traction from the general membership. I hope you all make up for this by coming down to see us on the day!

Hmm, I did make an offer on the forum

http://forums.wlug.org.nz/viewtopic.php?t=35&sid=fc863db5f803ce886e4a8204dfb f9a17

but was ignored. It's difficult to build enthusiasm when the communication is only one way.

Fair point; I'm not the best at keeping track of detail on forums (I replied to the post underneath). We have machines arranged - we wish to demo Ubuntu on the desktops because that is what is being given away, and have decided to have four machines, two running Windows, two running Linux. Thank you for your offer though, and we might take it up in future as we are hoping to run some training courses next year. Regards Craig

zcat wrote:

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We have machines arranged - we wish to demo Ubuntu on the desktops because that is what is being given away, and have decided to have four machines, two running Windows, two running Linux. Thank you for your offer though, and we might take it up in future as we are hoping to run some training courses next year.

I'm currently doing the Certificate in Computing at Te Wananga (I was bored, and I get a fairly decent computer to play with :) It's totally MS-centered and there is quite a lot of material (videos, interactive tests) which I don't think INGOTS has any equivalent of.

INGOTs isn't a test. It's a Skills Assessment Certification, so no we don't have any and nor do we want any, although we would be happy to make it available from our resources repository. I'll try to explain a little below.

I would be quite interested in recreating the entire course around OOo and other free software, with the same unit-standards structure and reusing the INGOTS material where appropriate, but I think I'm going to need a bit of help and a good video camera. Who do I talk to?

Simple answer - me! :) I might even have a video Camera that I can lay hands on! However, remember that INGOTs is simply a series of assessment goalposts, not a course. How a Teacher or Tutor structures a course to achieve those goals is up to the individual Teacher. INGOTs is designed to hand the teaching back to the teacher in the classroom. It's also designed to be Self and Peer Assessed with moderation by an Assessor. They are designed to leverage the power of the group learning situation. From a pedagogical point of view, courses done purely on a computer can be useful, but they don't cater well to all learning styles, rather they are another tool in the kit. It should be pointed out that a teacher is not always necessary where a group is gathered to achieve a common learning goal, facilitation is more important than Up Front teaching. For instance *this* group is an excellent example of peer group learning and that achieved without an actual defined goal. The goals are there without being held up in the spot light. For instance: Be able to install a Linux distro. Then small standards after that: Customise a Desktop, do stuff on the command line, Administer a home network and so on. These are unwritten units yet the Wiki is proof of the power of Peer Group Learning. It's the power of FOSS as well. For instance, I'm pretty sure I could do assessments and as a result, Certificate many of the active members of this list as INGOTs Assessors and Assessor Trainers. Did these people set out to do that? No of course not, but the common group interest and hence learning has brought them all to a point beyond the assessment standard. However having said all that, any tool that an INGOTs Assessor can have at their disposal is appreciated. Certificates can only be awarded by INGOTs Assessors and this in itself can create problems especially given that INGOTs is very new in NZ (Whereas in the UK it is an accredited body for creating of Assessments and Examinations in ICT for the UK version of NZQA. In other words they Create the Unit Standards) Even though becoming a Bronze Assessor isn't that Onerous. A way to get around this, would be the creation of a series of tasks that would require a Student to use all the skills required in the Assessment Criteria. So for instance it could be a document formatted in a certain way with various objects and graphics that had to be created in other apps inserted in the body of that Document. Such a project could be a Gold INGOT project and a Gold INGOT holder can become a Silver Level Assessor (Or Silver: Bronze). Task based assessment such as this are much more useful than "tick the box-answer this" tests. In other words A person could simply take the task home and once a result was achieved that fitted within the goals of the task, they would have ticked all the boxes in the assessment criteria. Then it's simply a matter of dropping a handy Assessor an email and getting together over a computer and a coffee. Even better if there is a peer group working together toward the same goal. On a completely different note I would like to get the INGOTs translated into Maori. I'm also working with the Maori Language Commission at the moment to get a Maori NLP (Native Language Project) going at OOo. So if you come across any Geeks at the Wa, fluent in Te Reo, I would be very interested to hear from them. The Commission has already had a translation done for MS. While the MS language packs don't work in OOo, the commission has retained the word lists. (As a note of interest; the MS translation was done at Waikato Uni. ) Cheers GL -- "GET LEGAL - GET OPENOFFICE.ORG" http://why.openoffice.org ISO 26300 compliant Graham Lauder, OpenOffice.org MarCon (Marketing Contact) NZ http://marketing.openoffice.org/contacts.html INGOTs Moderator for New Zealand INGOTs Assessor Trainer (International Grades in Office Technologies) www.theingots.org.nz graham(a)theingots.org.nz