Talk:Classrooms for Free Culture

Stuff we could make

for teachers

• A guide for teachers on how to teach students about free culture
  • lesson plans?
  • hand-outs?
  • videos?
• lists of good local speakers willing to visit a class
• project stipends/minigrants

for students

• project stipends/minigrants (even loans)
• A guide for students on how to start/run/contribute-to free culture projects
  • college-student-centered version of ESR's "how to become a hacker"
• match with mentors
  • older students from their school who have done open license projects in the past
  • people outside their school, but in the open content/source community

general

• networking/idea-sharing space online
• local gatherings in person
• a section on instructables for fully open-sourced or public domain projects
• tshirts, because you can always make tshirts.

Resources

• ccLearn
• ESR's "how to become a hacker" manifesto
• How to run a successful free software project book

potential partners

• Olin College
• MIT?
• Creative Commons
• OLPC
• Wikipedia/Wikibooks (Wikimedia in general)
• Make Magazine
• Instructables
• Sourceforge?
• O'Reilly

notes from lauren

In general, professors like to teach around their research interests. It seems like your best bet would be to contact professors who already have practical assignments built into their syllabi, and then talk to them about how they could make their projects/assignments apply specifically to OLPC. Good places to start-- game design classes and ed schools.

Off the top of my head:

• WorldWideWorkshop is running some sort of pilot at George Washington, or American, or one of those DC schools. That might be a good place to start.
• Fred Benenson, who I met at the Columbia Free Culture meeting, is enrolled at NYU's ITP program. I know a few other people who go there, too.
• Columbia Teachers College might also be interested, since they're really focusing on their tech/education programs. If I talk to my friend Jess Hammer this week, I'll mention it. (She goes/teaches there).
• The CMU HCI and ETC masters programs. When I was working at Elias Arts, we "commissioned" some research from them, so they're not averse to gearing class projects around an outside organization. Not sure if that requires money, though.
• The new director of IT where I work, at the CUNY Honors College. He started this summer, so I haven't had to interact with him yet. Will prob be able to tell you more after the school year starts.