The Yolo County Child Development Conference is a county-wide conference for with exhibitors and speakers, which is run by the City of Davis Child Care Services. Attendees are people who are either working with children, or parents of young children. (The conference is for adults only.)
The 2008 conference took place on Saturday, April 26th at the Davis Veterans Memorial Center, located at 203 E. 14th St. (near Davis High School and the Davis Branch Library, where LUGOD typically meets).
The event was a success! You can see photos here.
At the February 2008 LUGOD meeting, Bill Kendrick said that he was thinking of attending the conference to demonstrate his Tux Paint project, but thought that LUGOD may want to go to demonstrate and discuss a wider variety of Open Source software. Attendees of the meeting agreed that LUGOD should participate in the conference, and a number of them said they could volunteer at the event.
It cost $30 to have a 6-foot "resource table" (suitable for organizations and services which are not selling anything). A table and chairs were provided.
The sign-up form stated "Booths will be ready for set-up after 7:30am on Saturday, April 26th. ... Exhibitors must agree not to have any part of their exhibits dismantled, packed, or removed before 2pm on Saturday, April 26th. Exhibitors are strongly encouraged to stay until 4:30pm." The conference started at 8:30am.
(Thanks to Tamiko Kwak, Resource & Referral Coordinator at Child Care Services, for answering all of our questions.)
News
- April 28 - The conference was a great success! Thanks to Jessica, Chris Horsting, Mike Simons, Bill Kendrick, Nick Schmalenberger and Alex Mandel for putting the event together.
- April 25 - Bill made 50-60 copies of each of the three new handouts, and picked up the new sign (note: Henry orderd laminated, not vinyl, due to cost). Jessica has a laptop running Edubuntu and she and Chris Horsting will be providing some discs to give out.
- April 21 - Bill Kendrick created a third handout for this event: Freedoms. Henry House has put an order in for a vinyl LUGOD banner for events like this. He will also photocopy the handouts for this event. Chris Horsting accepted a dozen blank CDs and sleeves, to create some CDs to give out at this event.
- April 13 - Bill Kendrick has created two handouts for this event: Open Source in Education: In The News and Places To Find Open Content.
- March 15 - Our table at the event is confirmed.
Volunteers for the 2008 Child Dev. Conf.
- Bill Kendrick - handouts, photocopies, booth staffing, set-up, laptop
- Henry House - created new LUGOD sign
- Alex Mandel - booth staffing
- Jessica - booth staffing, laptops, discs, childcare
- Nick Schmalenberger - booth staffing
- Chris Horsting - discs
Our purpose was to demonstrate, discuss, and disseminate information about the kinds of open source software that is available for education, including (but far from limited to):
- Linux operating system
- Firefox web browser
- OpenOffice.org office suite
- Tux Paint drawing program
- GCompris educational software suite
- KDE Educational Project suite
- Squeak programming language
- Educational Linux hardware, such as the OLPC XO and ASUS Eee PC
- Audacity sound editor
- Cinelerra video editor
- Moodle course management system
- Open Admin For Schools web-based school administration program
- MediaWiki and other Wiki software
- Drupla content management system
- K12LTSP Linux Terminal Server project for K-12 education
- Linux Live CDs
- Open source software collection CDs
- 'Portable software' (suitable for USB memory sticks, etc.)
We also discussed online resources for educators interested in utilized open source software and open content, including:
- Wikimedia projects:
- Schoolforge foundry/umbrella for open educational resources
- Creative Commons archive of sharable content
- Open Clip Art Library
- ... etc.
We printed some articles about Linux and Open Source in education:
- LUGOD's page of "Reasons to Avoid Microsoft", filtered to articles about Education
- LUGOD's page of "Reasons to Avoid Microsoft", unfiltered
- Schoolforge.net Case studies on Linux and Open Source in education
(See the handouts we've created for this event!)
We also, of course, let people know about the Linux Users' Group of Davis, and Linux and Open Source in general, including:
- Upcoming meetings
- Installfests
- Our mailing lists
- Linux versus other operating systems
- GNU GPL and other OSS licenses, Creative Commons, etc.