OLPC-content: how to govern content and stimulate contributions

[Bruno Coudoin]

Hi, good year on long life to the olpc project.

Within the GCompris project (http://gcompris.net), some person including
me raised their interest in having a port of our project to the olpc. So
far we have some concern that I will try to describe within your mail
bellow:


> Question 1, how to govern content
> §       How do we take care that best-of-breed content can be shared?
> 
> –      How can best-of-breed content be identified? (E.g., large scale
> “exams” on a topic to compare different modules covering the same
> topic)
> 
> –      In how far is it necessary to prescriptive the look-and-feel of
> best-of-breed content? (E.g., should constructism prevail over
> instructism?)

I am not an educator, just software developer. It's very hard for me to
talk about constructism or instructism. What we try to do with GCompris
is pragmatism, just try to provide the children useful activities.

> How is quality of the content signalled? (E.g. can a teacher rely on
> it or does (s)he have to understand the content in depth to be sure it
> is correct?)
> 
> –      What highlights the comprehensiveness of a module? (E.g. what
> additional material do pupils need to study on the same topic?)
> 

As far as GCompris is concerned, there are some activities that children
can discover by themselves but for some, it's mandatory to have a
teacher, parent, educator to introduce the concept and follow the
children.

> Question 2, how to stimulate contribution to content 
> 
> §       How can a wide base of contributors be developed?
> 
That's a good question for us. It's hard to involve ourselves in this
project because we don't know if our project is welcome. I mean porting
software to the olpc require some work, we don't want to go this path if
we are not sure it will be used.

> –      How can learning-modules be divided into small enough tasks for
> people to contribute? In particular, should we set up a market place
> to link up schoolbook writers with programmers?

Hum, you are trying to mix schoolbooks and software. This require 2 very
distinct tallent. Won't it be easier to provide a digital version of
schoolbooks on one side and on the other side provide meaningful
activities that can help the children understand or going further in a
concept.

For example, we have an electric simulator in GCompris were children can
freely create and test their circuit. Alone, it's not very useful but
along a schoolbook explaining electricity, it makes a good complement.
More, you can provide a very different schoolbook depending on the age
target, culture, background of the country while keeping the same
software electricity activity.

> –      How can the potential content providers be motivated to
> participate? What form of reward should they get? E.g. acknowledgement
> of individual contributions, potential commercial links etc. etc.

Our main problem is that our workforce is very limited. All work on
GCompris is done as a hobby project, nobody work full time on it. What
would really help is being able to raise enough interest to fund a full
time developer. By the way, acknowledgments are always welcomes  ;)

-- 
Bruno Coudoin
http://gcompris.net Free educational software for kids
http://toulibre.org Logiciel Libre à Toulouse