[TOS] Fwd: [EXT] Greetings to the GNU Education Project from the TOS community!

Mel Chua mel at purdue.edu
Sat Mar 24 04:47:40 UTC 2012


Wow. Things have... happened since I sent the first email in this thread 
and went off to write my paper. Okay. Digesting...

> It's interesting -- and I'm not accusing anyone here of this, just
> making an observation -- that tribalism always comes up when there's
> dissent. Rather than rational discourse, the tendency is to force
> people into camps.
> Can we do better than that here?

Yeah, this conversation has gotten a bit... off track (in interesting 
ways, though!) My initial email to the GNU Education Project was simply 
to say:

1) Hi, we exist! We're a community of people who happen to call 
ourselves by this name (TOS) and also happen to do these sorts of things 
(for instance, here's our mailing list, and we talk about faculty 
workshops like POSSE and meet up at conferences like SIGCSE and teach 
courses and such...) -- and we wanted to make sure you could see what we 
were up to in case you were interested.

2) What are you up to? We're interested!

That's it.

The hope was that we'd open up the doors to discover that there might be 
some overlap in terms of goals or projects and find ways for folks to 
Collaborate For Awesome. Perhaps I could have written this more clearly 
in the original email; perhaps there's something I can do to clarify it 
better now... but it was a feeler/introduction email, that's all.

The responses were completely valid, even if they weren't what I was 
hoping for. The reply to (1) sounded like "we're not interested in what 
you do because we take issue with what your group calls itself," and the 
reply to (2) was "there's no way for you to find out what we're up to."

Again, not what I was hoping for, but valid answers that pointed to the 
larger message of "no, it doesn't seem like a collaboration is of 
interest at this time." (We're scientists, right? Negative results are 
still results! We learned something!)

And that's okay.

The GNU/FSF movement is fantastic and absolutely foundational. I have a 
great respect and admiration for it and for its people and the work they 
do. I hope to contribute (and that I have contributed) in some small 
ways to further the causes they are trying to champion. But the GNU 
Education Project and TOS don't need to agree on everything; two groups 
with two different purposes rarely will, even if their purposes align 
well in a lot of places. If you look at 
http://www.gnu.org/education/edu-team.html the focus is very much on 
promoting the *use* of Free Software in educational institutions, 
whereas TOS has been focused on helping teachers support students in 
stepping *beyond* usage to become contributors. Not conflicting aims, 
but certainly different ones.

Now, this doesn't mean that individual folks in each group can't or 
won't collaborate (heck, I hope people will!), but it just means that 
there doesn't seem to be a big collaboration on the verge of happening 
right now.

In any case, I'm struggling a bit in figuring out how to turn all this 
into a good reply to Dora, but am likely overthinking it. Anyone want to 
take a shot?

--Mel


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