[Glastonbury] no stopping it then?

[glastonbury@mailman.lug.org.uk]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3090918.stm

btw i have just been credited as assessor for the OpenOffice.org INGOTS 
*(International Grades in Office Technology)
*at levels broze and silver and will be getting training for the Gold 
/Platinum levels as they are written.

this is a FLOSS training package that is not MSOffice dependant like ECDL.
it also only costs £3 per student to get certification at each level
the money for this goes back into OpenOffice development and indeed the 
Gold/Platinum level will require that students contribute to 
opensource/free software development eg: OO , mozilla, thunderbird, etc 
this could be through reporting bugs like bugzilla or indeed writing 
code or maintaining a webpage.
we will of course be introducing this scheme at the school for students, 
but there is no reason why it cannot be offered to adults at a later date.
if you want to know more look at www.theingots.org

i have said that LUGoG as a group could support the early days of this 
worldwide initiative and have suggested that i (or any other interested 
party) could offer training in OpenOffice to teachers in the south west ~
they would be trained as assessors and could cascade back in their own 
centres.
this could bring in approx £200 per head into the school that i would 
agree with the head would be put back into more FLOSS and more hardware.
what do people think?
anyone interested in helping out?

if you don't know what OpenOffice is ~ (there may be some) ~ get it here 
http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/source/1.1rc4/
runs on  Windows | Linux | Mac OS X (X11) | Solaris

will speak more at the next meeting ~ still yet to be confirmed

also the Open Source in Education Conference is due on the 17th October 2003
details are here http://www.mpowernet.anglia.ac.uk/conference/

kind regard to one and all,
s~TV