Month: February 2014

Speaking at FOSSASIA 2014 tomorrow!

Posted on by Pockey Lam

fossasiaI will be giving a talk tomorrow at FOSSASIA 2014 in Phnom Penh, Cambodia about my work in Open Education. The talk (entitled “Let’s Raise Kids Up”) will be part of the opening keynotes. It will give a quick introduction of the Greenboard project and all the works done around Beijing since 2007. I will also be joining the panel discussion about Women in IT together with Hong Phuc Dang (FOSSASIA), Cat Allman (Google), Sindhu Sundar (GNOME), Sneha Priscilla Makini (GNU Mailman) and Richa Jain (Mediawiki).

If anybody is interested in deploying free and open source projects in schools, I am running a workshop on 1st March (10am) too. I will present all the tips we discovered the hard way from running our own open education project ranging from hardware donation, curriculum design to using Free Software and customizing or translating the possible solution. It will of course talk about GNU/Linux, some of the GNOME and KDE educational applications we are using as well as putting it all together and allowing teachers to control the classroom.
Thanks for Mario Behling and Hong Phuc for hosting such a great event! And of course thanks for FOSSASIA sponsoring my trip to participate!

Introducing Greenboard to Teach For China

Posted on by Pockey Lam

greenboard-bannerThanks to Education Freedom Day, we started a conversation with a local NGO here in Shantou, Teach For China which is non-profit working on Chinese education inequity and founded in 2008. They are currently looking at developing some e-learning solutions with the schools they are involved with this year and we have been invited to present Greenboard during their mid-year professional development conference. The conference is happening this weekend (22/33 February) in Shantou, China and we will most likely spend the whole Sunday discussing with their fellows. As we already had a pre-meeting last weekend we feel there are a lot of things which could be used from the work we did in the Beijing area and we are looking forward to share our experience on the matter. Hopefully, we’ll have more to tell soon!

Hardware Freedom Day celebrations 15 March 2014

Posted on by Pockey Lam

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For its second edition Hardware Freedom Day will be celebrated on March 15th (Saturday) this year. The HFD 2014 registration has been launched about a month ago and the map of currently registered event is available here! This day’s purpose is to get your area familiar with your work and get them interested to join and participate. Should you be a hackerspace or simply a FLOSS user group without a space but with motivation and projects it’s a great opportunity to make the extra effort and get more people to know about what you’re doing.

For registration, simply create a wiki page and fill up this form. Please also make the event shine by using our HFD countdown and banners.

If you want to get some insights for your HFD events, we have had a few ideas submitted to the mailing list to enhance the celebration and we definitely need to see how those can be implemented. In the meantime, get your team ready, your hackerspace (or not) in order and celebrate HFD with us!

Celebrate Hardware Freedom Day with us on March 15, 2014!