[TOS] Feed-back of the FOSSa conference in Lyon (France)

[Sebastian Dziallas]

This is a great article, thanks for posting it! I'm copying the
opensource.com education channel authors list; I'm sure it'd make a
great addition there.

--s

On Mon, Oct 31, 2011 at 12:53 PM, Ivaylo Ganchev
<ivaylo.ganchev at univ-paris8.fr> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I was the last week in Lyon (France) where I assisted at the annual Fossa
> conference. The first panel was Education and it had 5 presentations. I
> will try to give you a brief feed-back of the this panel.
>
> It started with a presentation usually held by Roberto Di Cosmo, but he
> couldn't came and it was presented by his colleague Albert Cohen. The
> presentation was about a tool developed by Roberto and colleagues called
> Mancoosi that deals with the complexity of the package management in
> modern operating systems. More about it over here :
> http://www.mancoosi.org/.
>
> Albert also gave a brief overview of the activity of Research and
> Innovation Initiative on Free Software (Initiative pour la Recherche et
> l'Innovation sur le Logiciel Libre http://www.irill.org). It is a project
> between the  Universities of Paris 7, Paris 6 and Inria. It's main goal is
> to bring together researchers that do work on subjects close to the
> free/open source world.
>
> After this talk, a talk by Benjamin Nguyen from Inria was given. He spoke
> about the experience in training high school CS teachers at the university
> UVSQ (http://www.uvsq.fr).  This initiatives was a consequence of the
> decision of the French education administration to create a CS class in
> the last year in the science grade in high-schools in France. Due to the
> lack of teachers in CS, some universities offered such a training for the
> wanna-be CS teachers.
>
> Benjamin discussed the difficulties that they had during the training
> (organizational, methodological etc...) and spoke a bit about the
> continuation of the program. He was a bit skeptic about the way it is
> organized and about the final benefice for the teachers. The
> administration decided for the next year to substitute the (around) 240
> hours of training with a 60 hours online training. For Benjamin it was
> quiet scarce -- he sad that this year in 240H they just managed to give
> them the absolutely necessary basics and that with less than that, the
> success of such a training is highly suspicious.
>
> The next talk was one by Thierry Stoehr. He is involved with the promotion
> of Free Software technologies in his university (Paris 7). He is also a
> CEO of the Center for Free Software Training (Centre de Formation aux
> Logiciels Libres -- CF2L), a public structure which goal is to provide
> training on FLOSS technologies to the employees of the universities of the
> Paris region --
> administrative workers and teachers/researchers. The center is open for
> more than a year now and offers training courses in different technologies
> -- Mozilla (Firefox, Thunderbird), Libre/Open Office, LaTeX, Gimp,
> Inkscape etc... They also offer on demand training if sufficient number of
> people want to be trained on given technology.
>
> His speech was mainly on the FLOSS technologies used in his university.
>
> The next one was a talk by Olivier Ricou -- a member of the EPITA, on of
> the famous "Ecole d'ingénieurs" in France. He gave us a feed-back of his
> involvement with the Francophone Open School (Ecole ouverte Francophone --
> EOF) and the OpenSE program.
>
> Finally Albert Cohen put an end of the Educational panel with a
> presentation of his experience on an Android teaching and his idea to
> create a Semester of Code program (SoC) inspired by the Google's Summer of
> Code. His main wish is to have
> more students involved in FLOSS development. His proposition is to
> organize a Semester of Code in two flavors. For those who would like to
> work on a FLOSS project and thus validate a course it would be possible to
> choose a not-so-difficult projects from a list.  Otherwise for students
> that wish to spend a whole semester to code on a full-time basis on FLOSS
> they can do it
> instead of their internship (mandatory in the last 3 years in French
> universities).
>
> The efforts of Albert for now are focused in finding people to work with
> him on this initiative, to find companies that would like to provide some
> grants to students that wish to work on FLOSS projects and to create a
> web-site that would list FLOSS projects available to students.
>
> You can find more information about the FOSSa conference on their web
> site: http://fossa.inria.fr
>
> For now not much of the slides are online, but I hope that more of them
> would be made available.
>
> Best Regards,
> Ivaylo Ganchev
>
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