Thoughts on A K-12 Strategy for Mozilla

[Richard Milewski]

I had a nice chat with Atul Varma after the design lunch last Thursday, mostly on the topic of his Magic Ink idea, and a brief conversation with Chris Blizzard on evangelizing to the K12 community.   Those conversations and Frank's email about what might be possible for Mozilla in K-12 has me thinking about what a K12 Strategy for Mozilla might look like.  It sounds as though any move into this area needs to be gradual and incremental, so here are some suggestions for fairly modest initial projects.

1. Identify a list of School Districts that currently offer advanced computer classes, and see if we can instigate High School clones of the current university Teaching Open Source program.  I know that in the past there have been a few districts that  have offered High School classes for which the MSCE certification tests were the final exam.  Some programs in the late '90s ended with Netware certification exams.  I don't know how many of those programs still exist, but they shouldn't be too hard to find.
   
   
2. Establish contacts with COSN, ISTE, SETDA, AASA, NSBA (and perhaps even SIIA's education division) to ensure that Firefox and the open web are represented in organization publications and initiatives. 
   
   
3. Set up some Mozilla web pages and mailing lists, directed specifically at K12 edtech.  We should do this to show the K12 community that Mozilla cares about K12 as much as Microsoft, Apple and Oracle do, and to actively begin bringing the most active K12 technology movers into the open web community and stimulate peer-to-peer discussions.   Some target audience and content suggestions:

• K12 District Technology Directors (and Assistant Superintendents for Technology)
• The Security Advantages of updating to modern browsers and plugins.
• Tools to help conduct a district network security review
• Sources of open source software appropriate for use in K12.
• Identify a list of "Microsoft Only" school districts for special attention.
  
  
• K12 Teachers
• Resources to help them lobby their administrators and school boards to move toward open source products and an open web. (Teachers bear the brunt of mis-configured content filters and poorly thought-out network use policies).
  
• Pointers to open resources for use in the classroom (could we work with Creative Commons and Curriki on this?) 
  
• Resources that counter some of the FUD coming from commercial interests about downloading.  Make sure teachers have authoritative sources for information about legal and responsible downloading, and a forum in which to discuss the issue.   An important part of this discussion should be pointing out that resources such as Creative Commons exist, and that students should be encouraged to use content from open sources in reports and other homework, and to correctly attribute sources for the material they use.   For an entertaining take on the issue, see: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-10348036-71.html
• Encourage discussions of the Microsoft Office hegemony in K12 education (especially Powerpoint).  Point out some alternatives. e.g. 280 Slides, Google Docs, etc.
  

• School Board Members, Superintendents, Asst. Superintendents for Finance, Asst. Superintendents for Curriculum.
• Resources to educate non-technical decision makers in K12 education on the topic of the open web, Firefox and open source alternatives for proprietary software.
• Resources to help decision makers fairly evaluate the financial advantages of choosing FOSS products.

The activities listed above are focused on the U.S. and Canadian K12 edtech community.   In other countries the organizational structure of K12 education is somewhat different, so there's some learning to be done as the community expands.   

It's not clear to me whether activities like these should be undertaken by Mozilla Foundation or would be more appropriately part of the Firefox marketing and evangelism efforts at Mozilla.com.



-- Richard

Richard A Milewski ric...@milewski.org
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[Frank Hecker]

Richard Milewski wrote:
> I had a nice chat with Atul Varma after the design lunch last Thursday,
> mostly on the topic of his Magic Ink idea, and a brief conversation with
> Chris Blizzard on evangelizing to the K12 community. Those
> conversations and Frank's email about what might be possible for Mozilla
> in K-12 has me thinking about what a K12 Strategy for Mozilla might look
> like. It sounds as though any move into this area needs to be gradual
> and incremental, so here are some suggestions for fairly modest initial
> projects.

Thanks for doing this. I'd like to talk more about these ideas on the
10/5 Mozilla Education call.

> It's not clear to me whether activities like these should be undertaken
> by Mozilla Foundation or would be more appropriately part of the Firefox
> marketing and evangelism efforts at Mozilla.com.

We can worry about that later. For now I think this should just go under
the Mozilla Education umbrella.

Frank

--
Frank Hecker
hec...@mozillafoundation.org