[Bf-education] Organizing / suporting education

Sat Dec 17 15:14:26 CET 2011

Hello All

 You can find me as oneliner in the freenode IRC network.

 Some considerations:

 According to the general schemata of the Blender Foundation and Blender
Institute, any initiative to support and or expand the official blender
offerings to the community must be:

 -*Self contained and managed*:

 Initiative surrounding blender are for the community , BY the community,
blender officials will remain largely uninvolved beyond overseer roles.

 In this regard in particular I would like to stress the fact that IRC has
been a core coordination tool for the far more extensive and complex issues
related to the development of the software itself.

 Please, if you feel inclined to truly attempting coordination and debate,
join IRC , for those of you that haven't used it, or who want to get
friends who haven't used it, think of it or explain it as “mutiplayer
notepad”.

 To get a taste of what IRC is and how it works you can use the freenode
webclient located here

 http://webchat.freenode.net/

 Recently two channels where named that could be used for this very issue
at hand, #blenderedu and #blendereducation , this is the true first
resource this initiative has at hand, I strongly make the case again that
we should make good use of it. For now these channels are mostly empty but
feel free to explore #blender and #blenderwiki for this topic.

 -*Free and Open*:

 Any investment done in the pursuit of generating blender products based
within the functionality brought forth by the community will be made under
the knowledge that any resulting service will remain available under the
same nonrestrictive and free policies of use as the software itself.

 This of course does never negate the right to build closed pay up front
highly profitable schema for teaching Blender, rather what it means is that
any contribution you will make to the community will immediately become
sole property of the community, you are free afterwards to use those very
resources in your own initiatives, as long as the differentiation between
your entity and the blender foundation are clearly stated.

 Also, although I am unable to speak on behalf of the Blender Foundation, I
see no reason why private substantial contributions (e-learning bespoke
platforms, massive amounts of data, etc) wouldn't be acknowledged in the
official site.

 -*Cohesive:*

 It has come to my attention that various replies already contain what
could be a rough draft of organizational content, in particular it is quite
interesting to note that these drafts are strikingly parallel.

 What truly needs a radical approach is the overall teaching tool
experience, that is, I believe, what will define any tangible breakthroughs
in this initiative.

 In this sense user experience and content should, above all, be in line
with the two previous points and also work as teachers aid, student
platform, self taught tool, all in one, in a seamless fashion.

 We should as well consider the fact that there already are documentation
initiatives and sharing tools (the blender wiki docs and pasteall.org ),
these should be capitalized and are a valuable resource for the purpose at
hand.

 -*Independently Certified:*

 Currently, the Blender Foundation and / or Blender Institute are unable to
certify user level accreditations due to the sheer volume of processes this
would incur into.

 The case has been made very clearly that most of us, as educators, value
and cherish the importance of certification as a means to asserting the
Blender software as a professional grade tool in the industry, and I truly
agree with that point of view, non the less, the viable working method we
have thus far is independent certification, wherein knowledge of the
software by a user is guaranteed directly by the teaching entity.

 The true scope of this initiative in regards to accrediting and certifying
is to build a common “universal” range of “topics” that could be arranged
in “aptitudes” that would, in turn, be grouped into several tier level
accreditations.

 One main objective is to attain such a body of study, and craft it in a
way that the Blender Foundation can make it “Official”, thus, institutions
and individuals would claim adherence to the official standards for
certification in their training programs.

 -*Crowdsourced:*

 This point is just a sly move on my side to talk once again about IRC.

 Everything in the software at one point or the other has gotten the IRC
debate treatment, from Gsoc to launch dates to new improvements and
features to mayor bugs to minor issues to splash screen styles.

 The assignments of individual tasks, supervision of progress, evaluation
of strategy, delivery of final products, all can benefit from people
joining a given IRC channel once in a while with agreed upon times.

 This method is faster and more involving than any other besides face to
face collaboration.

 There is also the issue of mutability; certifying knowledge of blender
will require the content of the certification to be in constant flux
(private certifiers should see the potential for repeat customers here and
become an active driving force for updating the material and content of the
official structure).

 I believe this “moving target” can be a show stopper for usability, if the
certification body of course descriptions were ever to fall behind the
actual software offerings, this initiative would end up hurting more than
helping the overall Blender image.

 One straight up solution is for the educators to keep close taps on the
development conversations that happen in IRC.

 This would have the added benefit of including an important and educated
portion of the community to the development support areas of testing and
evaluation because I foresee educators working with SVN branches and trunk
in order to get the insider story on the next coming features.

 -*Professional:*

 It doesn't have to be huge or look expensive (although we wouldn't mind it
being that way, would we?), but is has to feel solid and overall,
professional.

 There are plenty of big boys with big corporations that would love to see
this initiative fail, Blender is entering the big leagues, and its counting
on us, the community, to get it there, and keep it there.

 -*Fun!:*

 If you are in it for business, profession, hobby, pride, challenge,
pleasure, you have to foremost bring home the fact that Blender is probably
the single most impressively awesome mix of tech, people and art that has
touched your life, at least thats true in my case.

 Above all, this should be fun in its challenges, frustrations, efforts,
achievements, and rewards.

On Sat, Dec 17, 2011 at 9:30 AM, Laurent David <laurent at tdm.info> wrote:

> On a second thought...that's probably the way forward...but we need a lot
> of questions...
>
> On 17 Dec 2011 11:41, "Laurent David" <laurent at tdm.info> wrote:
>
> Ok. Point taken. I find this an interesting point of view...
>
> My only concern is that answering questions is not the only aim of a
> certification. The key is in the preparation and the amount of information
> processed/learnt in preparation for the exams. Path vs end result...
> I would say that objectives/criteria should be public definitely.
>
> >
> > On 17 Dec 2011 11:28, "Knapp" <magick.crow at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
>
> > On Sat, Dec 17, 2011 at 11:12 AM, Laurent David <laurent at tdm.info>
> wrote:
> > Sorry... We need to crea...
>
>
> >
> > I have to disagree with this. If the people taking a test know what
> > will be on it, then they ...
>
>
> >
> > with open source software!
> > http://douglas.bespin.org/CommonsFilmGroup/phpBB3/index.php
> >
> Massage in G...
>
>
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Bf-education mailing list
> > Bf-education at blen...
>
>
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>
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