Ed Tech Day Ithaca College in NY

[Mel Chua]

> Synopsis - What if a community of educators could get together to 
> produce one single electronic 4th grade textbook?
> Of course I'll cover history and mission of OLPC, but I'd like the talk 
> to focus on the NA Ambassadors work on the 4th grade math curriculum.  
> By then I also hope to have RIT on board and helping so I can show that 
> it's not just a hypothetical.

That what-if sounds awesome. If there's time, perhaps get folks to talk 
about why that what-if is hard/impossible - what are the blockers? (Why 
/haven't/ communities of educators gotten together to produce a single 
electronic 4th grade textbook yet?)

That gives us a pedagogically-focused bug list of problems to solve. ;) 
(Some of the solutions might be technical, some might be marketing, some 
might be funding, policy, etc - we need the problems list first to find 
out.)

If that bug list exists already, that would be awesome. Then get folks 
to talk about how to attack them. ;)

Some common blockers that aren't:

* No funding. (Not true: open-licensed stuff can be profitable, as 
everyone on this list already knows. Also, writing sprints can be held 
on ridiculously small budgets to bootstrap - the Sugar and XO 
FLOSSmanuals(.net) got started that way.)

* Impossible to make a single 4th grade electronic textbook that serves 
all use cases. (Sure, that's true - but by that logic, it's impossible 
to make a 4th grade non-electronic textbook that serves all use cases 
therefore nobody should ever write 4th grade textbooks. You start with 
one to prove it's possible, not to solve everything for all time.)

* I'm sure people here can think of more and better ones.