Pilot/Education

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Overview

The Pilot Fish project is being developed to help integrate participation in the electronic frontier - especially open source and participatory online projects such as Wikipedia - into the modern educational curriculum.

Initial Goals and Milestones

The first stages of the project are designed to:

• quickly develop our understanding of what is currently happening in the intersecting space between participatory online projects, open source and education
• develop a list of the critical success factors for electronic frontier education projects
• identify the key participants, thought leaders and potential early adopters in the space

Budget

The early budget consists of Mozilla Foundation staff time.

Process

Our first pass at this is meant to be lightweight and quick. We'll improve the process and define our goals more clearly once we understand the space better.

Research

Most of the early research is focused on building a good understanding of the state of electronic frontier education. A key first step is cataloging the people and organizations who are (or have been) working in the area.

Key Deliverable: Catalog of Electronic Frontier Education Individuals, Initiatives and Organizations

Identify Critical Success Factors

As we gather information on the state of electronic frontier education, we will also analyze a small group of successful projects such as Seneca College's Free and Open Source Software education initiative and the innovative course at Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research where the course students organize the GNUnify conference.

From these projects, we want to identify the key success factors for running a successful electronic frontier education program.

Key Deliverable: Critical Success for Successful Electronic Frontier Education Programs

Next Steps

• Set concrete goals
• Get external participants engaged
• Further planning
• Get busy helping educators develop successful electronic frontier education programs

Ideas

• Survey Brainstorm
• Rationale for educators

Resources

• Challenges for Educators - a set of notes outlining how online participatory projects differ from a standard educational environment. Based on part on Chris Tyler's A Model for Sustainable Student Involvement in Open Source paper.
• Chris Tyler's A Model for Sustainable Student Involvement in Open Source paper provides a good overview of Seneca College's experience with their Free and Open Source Software education initiative.