ubuntu-learning team mailing list archive

[Matthew Lye <matthew.lye@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Where are we now
Its been a long time coming but a few good things have happened
today. Firstly as you may have noticed we now have a mailing list,
ubuntu-learning@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx. This list is open to anyone interested in
the project and I encourage you all to get people to sign up (and to sign up
yourselves). It will be the default form of communication with the launchpad
list to be disabled in the coming weeks. We also have both Community
Council, and Canonical approval now so I will be drafting an announcement
about the project, and asking for help crowdsourcing our programs that will
be posted to this list (ubuntu-learning@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx) for review before
being posted to planet.ubuntu and to the fridge team. This will be our first
official announcement about the project so I hope to see everyones opinion
on the draft announcement.

What we have to do now
We need to finalize our licensing issues. We have to decide to use CC-BY-SA,
or CC-BY-NC-SA for our content. Unfortunately regardless of the decision,
some of the content will be CC-BY-NC-SA. An example of this issue is the
Canonical Desktop Training course which is a great resource, but is in a
format that is not easy to link into, or work off online. As a result it
seems likely that this content will be massaged into Moodle courses under
the same CC-BY-NC-SA license. The Community Council is also currently
looking into what license the materials under the Ubuntu Wiki come under
unless explicitly stated. The problem with a non commercial license is that
it has not really been defined. That being said, we can have a more
restrictive license and allow the project board to authorize waivers for
other organizations to use the content.

We need to create a professional Moodle theme based on the Ubuntu color
scheme. I will be putting some hours into doing this, however I am not the
greatest with CSS/GIMP so any help would be appreciated.

We need to decide on a series of overall objectives and a team structure and
part of the idea for that has been outlined in the strategy document viewed
by the Community Council found
here<https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Learning/StrategyDocument>.
Please think about how you would like to see the project structured and give
your input to the list.

The project board has to meet up in the next few weeks to map out exactly
how we plan to implement the list of topics we will be receiving, develop
standards, and look at when content should be linked, and when it should be
integrated to keep a uniform style. We also have to make a decision based on
the feedback about the licensing.

As you can see, we have a busy few weeks before we start implementing any
materials into our shiny new server. <http://learn.ufbt.net> We have a good
team of people and I look forward to seeing some lively discussion of
opinions on some of these topics.

Acknowledgments
Id like to again acknowledge the great work of some very key people over the
past few weeks:
BodhiZazen (As himself) has paid for a dedicated server hosted on an ISP
line for our Moodle installation, he has also set up a domain so we can
access the installation while we develop content. When the content is
approaching the level we are after learn.ubuntu.com will be the new site
name. Id like to express the appreciation of everyone to Bodhi for putting
his money where his heart is and funding this project himself. We are lucky
to have you here.

Charles Profitt (cprofitt) has done some great work despite being very busy
in getting courses onto our Moodle installation on how to work with Moodle,
if you haven't looked at these already take a look because your going be
using these skills before long. Great work CP in achieving our first
milestone for the project and I hope to see more of it coming.

Marten Owens (DoctorMo) has again been immensely helpful in reviewing and
editing documentation regarding the project, his critical evaluations have
been of great help to me in drawing up documentation, and to others I'm
sure.


As of today the project has begun, lets have some fun with it.

-Matthew Lye

<No tree's were harmed during this transmission. However, a great number of
electrons were terribly inconvenienced>