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Laura Hilliger is a writer, educator and technologist. She’s a multimedia designer and developer, a technical liaison, a project manager, an open web advocate who is happiest in collaborative environments. She’s a co-founder of We Are Open Co-op, an Ambassador for Opensource.com, is working to help open up Greenpeace, and a Mozilla alum. Find her on Twitter and Mastodon as @epilepticrabbit
Authored Comments
(oh, I can't edit my comment...) Just wanted to add that Educators are multipliers – the more open ethos we can share with educators, the more they'll share that ethos with their learners. Pyramid Scheme for spreading the open source luv ;)
Just to expand on that a little (because you're right!), those budgets also provide educational institutions with some fantastic professional development and training programs that help educators use proprietary software. Nice package deals - a district buys X number of licenses for their schools, the corporation will train x number of educators.
I'm pleased that the open source and the non-profit communities have started taking more notice of educators. I've run a wide variety of FLOSS workshops and classes for educators, as have many other open sourcers that participate in Connected Learning communities. However, I think that more non-profit budgets should be allotted to the development of educational programs designed, built and facilitated by the FLOSS community – we know how to engage and participate in digital spaces, loads of educators need the guidance that we can give.