Activities

Unit 1 - Open Systems and General Knowledge

In this unit you will learn about open systems, open source software and open standards together with their relationship with intellectual property. The internet has made it much quicker and easier to make digital resources widely available and intellectual property is particularly important to the economies of the most developed countries. To what extent is there a moral obligation to share this wealth and to what extent do we need to provide financial incentives to the wealth creators to carry on developing?

To complete all the work in this unit you will need access to You Tube for video clips, a computer to practice installing software (one where the current installed software is not too important) and your e-portfolio. You can set up an e-portfolio on the INGOT community site if you didn't already do this for the Silver INGOT. Just set up an account and add the required pages in Drupal on the community site log in at www.theINGOTs.org. You can of course use any e-portfolio and just make a link to your work here in Moodle or set up an e-portfolio in Moodle. The choice is yours. If you or your teacher don't like some of the ways I have presented the work in this course feel free to use this as a basis of a course that fits your needs better but please make your work available to others in the same spirit.

Unit 2 - Document Processing

Unit 2 - Graphic Design

Unit 2 - Using Spreadsheets

Unit 3 - Contributing to the Community

The purpose of the Community Service Project is to provide the candidate with a flexible opportunity to learn by making a more prolonged, meaningful and useful contribution to the wider community. They will apply the skills learnt in other aspects of the the INGOT certification together with new skills acquired as needed. This increases motivation and encourages progress to self-sufficient learning in keeping with contemporary ideas about learning how to learn and lifelong learning. Learning through participation supports understanding of technological development in the context of the international use of the Internet. The over-arching criteria for judging success in a project are.

• Is the project of interest to the candidate?

• Did the candidate spend the required time working productively on the project?

• Is the outcome of the project useful or potentially useful to the community?

• Did the candidate demonstrate appropriate communication with the community eg with their assessor, through their BLOG and on mailing lists?

• Is the project documented so that it is easy to see what was achieved and the process that led to that outcome?

• Does the project documentation include appropriate reference to the UK National Occupational Standards?

Community Projects

• Provide support for teaching the knowledge sections of the INGOT qualifications

• Provide open learning resources for the community section of the INGOT web site

• As a group set up and manage a web site to promote open standards

• Devise an entry for the school in Wikipedia

• Provide clip art or diagrams to support an OS application or applications e.g. www.openclipart.org

• Provide graphics for an OS web site

• Provide new document templates for an Open Source word processor

• Provide support for new users of OpenOffice.org

• Provide support and training locally to help others benefit from Open Source software

• Take part in the quality assurance for an Open Source project, identifying bugs and filing them as issues eg catalogue currently logged quality assurance issues in the OpenOffice.org project and identify duplicates

• Produce advertising posters for marketing an Open Source product

• Get publicity for an Open Source project by writing articles about it and submitting them to the news media

• Help with language localisation improving the English of non-native speaker translations

• Write “How to” guides for OpenOffice.org aimed at specific audiences e.g. primary school teachers and students and submit them to OOoAuthors

• Write useful Macros for an Open Source spreadsheet

• Produce presentations in OpenOffice.org Impress to teach an aspect of a subject to young children.

• Support a charitable group in the community with a computer running Open Source software for printing leaflets, newsletters and circulars.

• Make contributions to the OpenOffice.org Marketing project Wiki at http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Marketing

• Help with computer re-cycling community projects installing Open Source software

• Organise a conference to inform people about Open Source issues