By the power of the POSSE alumni fund I had the pleasure to present a paper on the RIT efforts at this conference yesterday. The paper discussed the history of our efforts and, most importantly, the way in which HFOSS service education efforts have motivated our students to continue the if FOSS experiences and participation beyond the classroom and oaths and years after they've taken the course. Now that the paper has been officially presented it will be posted on FOSS@RIT in January when I return from my travels.
The paper was well received with questions about the course curriculum, FOSS and general and on the XO.
Another interesting project built on FOSS tech was an education effort for engineering education. Engineering Island used Moodle, SLoodle and Second Life to build a 3D world in which students race their avatars around a course under a timed challenge to calculate resistance and voltage balance. In an interesting real world portion of the exercise, the world is connected to a real world power supply and banks of resistors, rather than hard-coding the values. This teaches the students that the real world components "drift" and don't always work the way the "should". The developers have ported the world out of Second Life to work on Open Sim tech, so it's a fully open project now.
You can see more by surfing over to sgvwtv.ulster.ac.ukand looking for the education Island info.
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