Dear Friends and Colleagues working or interested in "Bringing Open Source Solutions to Education."

Topic: "FossEdBk: Free and  Open Source Solutions for Education"

Rationale: http://flossedbk.flossed.org/rationale

When:

October 31st - November 1st (Saturday and Sunday)

Where:

We are very pleased to announce that KIS International School has graciously agreed to host the conference.

KIS is a leader among international schools in Thailand and Southeast Asia interested in Free/Open Source for Education.  KIS offers a beautiful school with up-to-date facilities near the MRT (subway) in Bangkok.

There is an auditorium and a cafeteria available for the conference and an entire floor of classrooms for break-out sessions (6 per floor in that particular building), centered around an atrium decorated by students' artwork.  Each classroom is equipped with an LCD projector, a screen and a computer.  Wifi will be available in the auditorium, the classrooms and in the areas outide of them both.

The space outside the classrooms and outside the auditorium will be available for mini-presentations by attendees and vendors.

There are two computer labs of 22 computers all of which run Edubuntu Linux, some of them also dual-booting to Windows.  These labs will be available for workshops.

Location: Bangkok, Thailand

Local Transportation: KIS will provide some transportation to and from the MRT (Bangkok's subway line).

We will have to look into renting one or more buses to supplement the KIS shuttle.

Accomodation:  We are negotiating with hotels easily accessible via the subway.

Costs: Projecting 3,000 Baht (approximately USD 85).  We want to provide teachers and students with full and partial scholarships.  We're hoping that government school teachers can come for approximately 500 Baht. We will have to find funding for this.

In addition to attendees' transportation and lodging costs, we will have to charge fees to cover conference expenses.  KIS has kindly agreed to provide the rooms free of charge.  We will have to pay for food and the vans, the price of which we will build into the ticket-price.  The other costs will be materials, advertising, office-staff time, connectivity and equipment costs, and, most importantly, the cost of the transportation and lodging of our keynote speaker.  We hope that individuals will request their school-employers to pay the conference cost and, for those who must pay themselves, we will provide a reduced rate.

Connectivity:

Wireless will be available in the classrooms and in the keynote presentation/ large meeting area.

Keynote:

We are hoping to be able to announce our Keynote speaker for the first day soon.

This person is a prominent author of Free/Open Source, educational software.

Call for Presenters:

We are seeking proposals for workshops.  

- Criteria for Proposals:

• Each session will probably be 45 minutes. (Schedule Proposal)
• Double sessions might be possible.
• Deadline: August 31, 2009

Three kinds of Sessions Possible:

1. Discussions (volunteer to moderate a discussion if you have experience in a particular area and are genuinely interested in talking to others about it).
2. Workshops (practical sessions aimed at showing as much or more than telling).
3. Talks/Demonstrations (typical lecture and slide presentations with time for questions built-in.)

• Topics should show consideration for audience:
  
  • F/OSS Level: Everybody, Beginners, Users, Experienced
  • Job/Interest: Teachers, Parents-and-Students, School Admins-Board-Members, System Admins, Teachers of Teachers.
  • Err on the side of practicality.
• Topics can be political
  
  • For example, "how to popularize open source software at your school"), "Gaining support from Parents, students and administration," Getting your best students excited about G/OSS, Winning-over Mac/Windows diehards to F/OSS, Overcoming WIn/Mac tech objections/fears/FUD.
• Topics can be based on specific tools
  • Open Office, Mozilla Composer, The Gimp, DrupalEd, Joomla, Elgg, Atutor, TuxPaint, KStars, GCompris, OpenAdmin, Koha, Evergreen, Moodle, Manhattan, Sakai, Site@School, Claroline, etc.
• Topics can be needs or job-oriented
  • For example, "Tools for Sysadmins," "Tools for teachers," or "Tools for Science Teachers," (or whatever you teach), Tools for school adminstrators, Tools for Parents, Tools for Students.

Topics can and should be based on both your interest and also your experience. 

•  
  • My Experience Teaching Python as an Introductory Programming Language," My Experience with KLogo to Teach Programming Concepts," "My LAMP Classroom," "Free/Open Source Music composition tools," "How I teach art concepts with The Gimp," etc.  These could be done in any of the above formats for any of the audiences.

NOTE 1: Although we are interested in a creative and useful mix of workshops, time for chance discoveries, job-alike sessions, and "birds-of-a-feather" sessions, we are interested in what _you_ think is important regarding bringing open source solutions to education, and request that you give the answer your best try.

NOTE 2: Pre-conference or Post-conference "intensives" on a particular application, operating system or topic such as "Linux networking" MIGHT be possible.

Submit your proposal here!