On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 07:43, Alexander.Trubin@sun.com <Alexander.Trubin@sun.com> wrote:
I'm now preparing for a talk at Urals State Technical University (Russia) about OpenSource usage in Higher Education, so if anyone have some thoughts about what should be covered in this broad topic your help would be greatly appreciated.
Who's your audience? Students? Administrators? Faculty? The Great Unwashed? Not that this will be any help to you at all... "Back when dinosaurs ruled the earth, a Tower of Babel was built. God smote the arrogant and the result was EBCDIC, 7-bit ASCII, 8-bit ASCII, SIXBIT, etc. And computers could not talk to each other." ;-) When I'm talking to the unwashed masses, I like to start out by trying to get them to see the conflict that arises from incompatible data formats right down to the codes used for character encoding, and then discuss open, standard formats vs. proprietary formats. It's not a perfect discussion, since I don't usually talk about PDF, which isn't completely unencumbered, but works well across multiple platforms. For those old enough to have used WordPerfect and still miss it, I often say two words: "Reveal Codes" and it becomes clear to them why being able to look at and modify source at a deeper level is a very good thing. Once there's some recognition of standard forms of communication -- Unicode, the "net" (with a superficial mention of TCP/IP as the mechanism for that), etc, talk about images, video and audio and the proprietary software and licensing required for some of those. Then, finally, move into code, having laid the groundwork for data sharing as a way to increase the body of knowledge, state of the art, etc, etc. If this makes little sense, I blame the cold medicine I'm taking. ;-) -- Ubuntu Linux DC LoCo Washington, DC http://dc.ubuntu-us.org/