The best things in life are free - Software Freedom Day

Sometimes people say in response to free software, you get what you pay for. They are thinking about free beer and not freedom. The best things in life are free and often free in both senses of the word, free as in beer and free as in freedom.

We had a nice article in todays Borderwatch. In fact we have had quite good media coverage about Software Freedom Day along with the visit to Mount Gambier by Richard Stallman, the Free Software Foundation founder. Each year interest grows in the event and the idea of free software. The numbers we have come to our event increase each year. We know that 500 visitors this year is ultra conservative as a library person indicated that the figure could be as high as 1000.

It concerns me the number of people that talk to us that are not aware that there are these free (as in freedom but also as in free beer) options. They are keen to hear about them and keen to give them a go. We heard about vulnerable older people going to computer shops to find out why they could not access attachments from their grandchildren to be sold expensive proprietary software when their needs could be met with free software. They were not aware of their options and the thing is that school is all about giving people options.

I was proud to overhear people on the day talking very positively about the free software that we give out at Grant High and saying that it made good sense and was a good idea.

This SFD event is a timely reminder for us to think about using the free software in our classes and encouraging its use. Richard Stallman advocates that schools should only use free software. While he has a very good point, the softened stance of 'Learning with the free software first' means that students can continue with their learning beyond school unencumbered and the door is open for other software to be introduced later if needs be. For many people, the free software serves their needs well.

The language that we use is also important. We use a wordprocessor not word, a spreadsheet not excel, a graphics package not adobe, etc.

Please consider

Virtual Staffroom - the future of professional organisations questioned

It was rather impromptu but last night I was once again part of a discussion that today is published on the Virtual Staffroom. It was interesting the way that this happened. About a half hour before the recording Chris Skyped me to indicate that it was happening and come along. I was, at the time, in a training planning meeting for a school where the focus was on web2 and collaboration. My planning partners reckoned, in jest, that I set this up but felt that it was a great example of what we had just been talking about.

The podcast discussion was all about the use of free software in education. I had to leave the discussion early as I had another online meeting to attend to discuss arrangements for Richard Stallman visiting my city in Sept 17th. He is one of the founders of this free software thinking. His statement about "Why schools should exclusively use free software" is a worthy and very quick read.

It felt like dominoes falling, the celestial bodies were aligning.

The dominoes keep on falling.

This has got me to thinking about the place that professional organisations have in the education food chain.

One of the things I've been struggling with for some time is the value of professional organisations now that we have access to the 'big thinkers' and 'movers and shakers' in our fields via Twitter, blogs, podcasts, vodcasts, .....................

For people that are connected in this way, when was the last time you learnt something new via a professional organisation? and if you did, was the cost of membership and attendance at the event worth it?

My guess is that the professional organisations are struggling more than ever with membership and conference attendance. Perhaps one of the key benefits of these events is the chance of meeting F2F some of the characters you have been mixing with online, but I notice that people are doing this via Twitter now as well with broadcasts like - I'll be in [location name] tomorrow, catch up for coffee at [venue name] at 2:00pm.

So, professional organisations, what is their future? Are they really dieing? Should we persist or let them die?

Software Freedom Day report

Last year we held Software Freedom Day at my school, Grant High School. This year we held it at Penola High School - another FOSS oriented school in our region about 50km away.

I think that many of the SFD events across the globe happen in capital cities. Ours is regional and in a country where we have some large distances.

WE had about 50 visitors with a good percentage of those travelling 30km or more. Of those there were a number that travelled 100 km or more. I think that maybe the biggest might have been from Kingston which is about 130km.

This provides evidence to the success of the emails that Jason from Penola (Event team leader for 2008) sent out to schools and also to the work that Robert did in drumming up interest in the radio and paper news media. Nice work.

Schools can be regarded as societies agent for conformity. They are also societies change agent where we want people to conform to new directions or values. Making schools aware of the choices that they have regarding FOSS is really important in that context.

A feature of the event was the number of school teachers who came and travelled some distances for. When I talk to teachers about FOSS I invariably get HUGE agreement on the philosophical reasons why we want students to have access to this stuff. They are BIG on access and equity and invariably ask why so much money is paid for other software when there is this stuff available that they can just give to the kids. People from the broader community ask the same question but often in the context of why so much public money is spent on software that may not be necessary, as they look around the computer lab classroom that then event is run in.

I think that there will be a number of new schools who will be giving away the OpenEducation Disc to students soon as a consequence of our work on the day.

I did notice that none of the ICT coaches in the region showed up and so perhaps we need to target these sorts of people who carry some regional influence next time with special invitations.

The people who came, often also asked "Why haven't I heard about this before?". They sounded almost like they had been cheated out of something. This was a question asked by teachers as much as other visitors. In response I generally asked them the question "how do you find out about what you can put on a computer?" Many came to the conclusion that it was through sales people and so they were able to draw conclusions from their answer fairly easily.

From some I got the question 'So what is in it for you?'. Being a teacher I could rant about the access and equity thing for students and how I wanted to create an environment where students could continue with their learning outside of school unencumbered. They invariably saw the sense in that and felt comfortable with the explanation.

The other thing that I heard a lot was thankyou. I felt that these words were very geniune and sincere. Thanks for putting on this event and thanks for showing me this stuff. Thanks for giving me these options.

Last year, being the event organiser, I did not get to feel and observe these things as I was too wrapped up with making the event happen. My sincere thanks to Jason for being the event organiser this year.

Software Freedom Day - 08

I am on the SFI board that organises “Software Freedom Day”, a global event that supports local communities to celebrate and educate how Free Open Source Software can benefit people in their area. This year it is on September 20^th.

FOSS fits well with the ideal 'Free and Open Education' by being able to give the learning tools to students so that they can use, share and build upon them. Collaboration and sharing fits well with this ideal and FOSS.

One of our objectives for 2008 is to better support schools to host Software Freedom Day events. For schools already making use of FOSS, it is a great way to help their community understand what and why they are doing this and to involve their FOSS communities in the process.

I would like to start some conversations about this so that we can better understand how to help schools participate and to share stories, resources and experience. If you want, you could put these ideas straight onto the SFD wiki

http://softwarefreedomday.org/Resources_to_support_schools

Schools give communities options

Reflecting on the parent teacher night last night I am filled with satisfaction. Having predominantly taught at year 11 and 12 levels, I was given a year 9 class this year. I was filled with fear at this and that fact that it was all boys. It is now the class that I would fight to keep. Their enthusiasm and curiosity fills me with joy.

Last night I explained to parents that the course is structured around various activities that last about a fortnight. The entire content is on my Moodle site (www.watiwara.org) and so there is flexibility for students to spend more time on topics of interest to them and dig deeper and to also work through topics of less interest quickly. I explained that I have chosen, in all cases, to use software that is free for students to take home and continue with their learning there.

Parents were thrilled with this and each had a story of something that their son had taken home and was almost obsessed with. In one case the student had hooked his mother into the activity and she spent time talking about how much she loved it.

One parent asked 'How does one find out about these things?' and then proceeded to answer her question with “I suppose that's why we go to school”. Schools have a responsibility to show students and our community options.

Google Apps for schools demo

A search for videos using the criteria 'google apps in schools' produced some interesting results. One was the Google@school - Google Apps Technical Q&A but the more engaging and informative for me was Chris Iremonger speaks at Google@school - Google Apps Demo


Chris Iremonger is a very skilled presenter and comes across as confidently representing Google Inc. I felt that he could be trusted. I was encouraged by the many and consistent references to the importance of open standards. It was more than clear that Google wants to make open the possibility for people to integrate their solutions with them and so open standards are central.

This particular video was posted 2 years ago and has had only 673 views. This video needs to be viewed by every education technology strategist/coordinator/CEO/? within education sectors. There are surely more than 673 of them. As we are thinking about the future and options for our schools, this would have to be one of the options we explore.

There are lots of questions and considerations for us to consider but some of the questions that could be asked include

• Is it technically feasible to offer this to the staff and students in our schools?

• What would the transition look like?

• What are the pros and cons?

• Could offering the basic apps in this way allow us to make use of lower spec machines for longer?

• Are there security or privacy issues that need to be considered?

• Would administering this be easier than edumail, ms office, ..........?

I appreciated the fact that the Google Apps solution provided options and choice and it was clear that the developers had a grip on the needs of educational institutions and the protection of their students.

I was hit with the notion - what if they decided that education had to pay sometime down the track? Provide the service for free for now to produce 'lockin'. Hmm. The whole time that education had made use of the free service they were also eliminating the alternatives from growing. Students should not be presented with hurdles (legal and/or financial) to continuing with their learning outside of the school and we need to approach this with vision so that we can achieve this in the short and long term. I guess that the use of open standards throughout the Google Apps means that 'lockin' is less likely to be an issue.

I like the way that collaboration is built into all aspects of the suite of Google apps. This was very evident in the video and begged the question, why would a school pay for Groove?

The video runs for about 60 minutes and at the 51 minute mark Chris talks about the upgrade process. He states that when they update software it allows the user to continue with their operations. When they log out and then log back on they then take advantage of the upgrade. Seamless, nice.

We're in for a hard time

Economic oversteering is the latest Mark Shuttleworth post. He does a great job of explaining the current economic climate and it is clear that the next few years are going to be painful. This is a time of finding ways to improve productivity and reduce expenditure.

With the issues around Vista (instability and resource requirements) and Office 2007 (interoperability) there are many saying that the effort to roll out these products is not worth it. Pain without gain. In this article "Windows Vista, Office 2007 Expelled From British Schools" they report

The agency said U.K. schools can consider using Vista or Office 2007 software only when they are buying new batches of PCs. Even then, however, they're advised to take a long looked at alternatives based on Linux and other open source products, such as the OpenOffice.org desktop package.

Makes sense.

At the end of 2006 the following report was published, commissioned by the EU as I understand it. Study on the: Economic impact of open source software on innovation and the competitiveness of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector in the EU

It is 287 pages long. The main recommendation relating to education is found on page 216.

9.5.5. Education: avoid lifetime vendor lock-in for students
The reason it seems desirable to promote the use of FLOSS in education (ICT education and more generally all educational activities that have a bearing on the cultural relationship with information technology) is threefold:

1. It is obviously likely to have a strong impact on the future usage of FLOSS products and the build-up of the related skills.

2. It builds up essential ICT skills rather than the knowledge of specific applications from specific vendors (leading to the current locked-in-for-life situation, where vendor lock-in applies not only to organisations but to individuals who have typically not chosen their software but been provided it for free by schools).

3. It is likely to install an attitude towards information technology that favours the ability to create and actively participate rather than just consume – i.e. the scenarios under which FLOSS is most likely to deliver a strong positive economic and societal impact, by encouraging collaborative prosumer usage and a reflexive attitude on usage and the technology that supports it.

There are some specific references to productivity gains here. "It is likely to install an attitude towards information technology that favours the ability to create and actively participate rather than just consume" is clearly one of those. The technology on its own will not do this IMHO but we are talking about a creative attitude, a thinking process of can do and how can we make this work. Is it my hobby horse of hacker thinking?

There are short term and long term economic advantages. The short term is that schools spend less on software. As the students use this software and leave school, the long term advantages are seen in businesses around the country.

So there we have it. Economic and productivity improvements possible for Australian Schools - doing our bit to reduce the hard time ahead.

All the best for Linux.conf.au starting today in Melbourne. I am sure that the Education Mini.conf happening today will be talking about openness in education not only in terms of software but more broadly in terms of content and collaboration.

Is the FOSS debate null and void?

George Siemens posted "Is the IT department Dead?". He pointed to a review of a book written by Nicholas Carr titled The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from Edison to Google.

I am interested in this from three perspectives.
How this thinking impacts on

1. ICT in schools
2. IT as a subject of study
3. skills and careers in my community

Some comments from the review

"The IT department is dead, and it is a shift to utility computing that will kill this corporate career path."

Carr's rationale is that utility computing companies will replace corporate IT departments much as electric utilities replaced company-run power plants in the early 1900s.

Carr explains that factory owners originally operated their own power plants. But as electric utilities became more reliable and offered better economies of scale, companies stopped running their own electric generators and instead outsourced that critical function to electric utilities.

I reckon that Carr has a point and that this thinking has implications for the skills debate we have going at the moment.

He says even IT professionals are indistinguishable from one company to the next. "Most perform routine maintenance chores — exactly the same tasks that their counterparts in other companies carry out," he says.

Maybe the job of IT professional has become just plain dull?

Carr offers a grimmer future for IT professionals. He envisions a utility computing era where "managing an entire corporate computing operation would require just one person sitting at a PC and issuing simple commands over the Internet to a distant utility."

The nature of software programming is evolving and morphing. We are currently lamenting the shortage of high level ICT skills but the future need for these skills does not seem to be there. The number of people involved does not seem to be a need in the future. The smarts will be few and involved in managing these large utilities it seems.

He not only refers to the demise of the PC, which he says will be a museum piece in 20 years, but to the demise of the software programmer, whose time has come to an end.

If nothing else, this supports my previous posts "The return to mainframes and terminals" and "Google releasing package for office". The PC will be dead and the terminals will be very portable. This also points to the importance of having and developing sound connectivity infrastructure.

In some ways it makes the FOSS debate in schools null and void. Certainly Linux OS with Firefox because they are free and provide that terminal like apparatus needed to access the online services. So where is the need for other productivity software like Open Office, GIMP, Inkscape, Thunderbird, etc when the technology is emerging for us to just do it online?

To me this also confirms my opinion that MS Vista is a non-event. What are these buggers thinking over there in lala Redmond land?

FOSS in education prediction for 2008

Why 2008 will be a bad year for Microsoft’s Ed Tech market share, January 1st on ZDnet.

The author makes the following points

• FOSS provides a solution for students to continue with their education outside of school unencumbered by cost and legal issues
• School administrations are looking for ways to cut costs and FOSS may help
• There are a growing number of people familiar with FOSS and Linux and these tools are becoming easier to use making the management issue more manageable
• As students become accustomed to using FOSS in school, they will demand its use in the workplace

The last point is important and reinforces my thinking for the past few years. We should be filling our school networks with the free stuff. I'm happy for the proprietary products to be there as well but I think it is poor form that schools are paying for it.

In addition to filling the school network with the free stuff, consider giving away a copy of the OpenEducationDisc to all students as they enrol. This facilitates students being able to freely and seamlessly continue with their school work at home and helps our young people and their families stay legal.

NZ Ministry of Justice discussion paper

http://nzoss.org.nz/system/files/moj_oss_strategy_1.0.pdf

Two of the quotes from this paper are of particular interest

The Ministry has stated its commitment to be an 'employer of choice' for skilled technical professionals. Adopting OSS in development and deployment is consistent with such a commitment. (Put bluntly, technical professionals want to keep their skills sharp and current; in 2007, working with open source tools and contributing to OSS projects are the way that's done.)

Broader issues within NZ government related to economic development. More widespread adoption of OSS is a form of 'Buying Kiwi' by means of encouraging growth of NZ-based software and service providers.

Could it be that a contributing factor to the high level skills shortage that we are facing is government sector preference for the use of proprietary solutions where the high level skills are effectively imported?

Reluctance to invest in our people.

The article of Graeme Philipson that I referred to in the previous post has some ring of truth but there is also some tension with it in my view of the world.

Two years ago, and three years after the Graeme Philipson article, I recorded an article that stated the there was a huge ICT trade deficit except for Open Source which was producing an export income.

There is not doubt in my mind, from personal experience, that there is a HUGE skills deficit in this FOSS area, so much so that South Australians, on the whole, may well have the idea that there is no choice but for proprietary software. By and large schools perpetuate this view by the mere fact that proprietary software is generally the only software on the computers in their classrooms. The perpetuate it in other ways as well.

So why would we perpetuate something which is contributing to our trade deficit rather than invest in something that is earning us exports? Graeme possibly hit on an answer -

They do not wish to train people, even graduates, because this costs money.

What sort of legacy are we leaving for our children?

Surely we are not that short sighted?

The importance of hacker thinking

The word 'hacker' has evolved from a desirable trait to a word that implies evil and bad yet hacker thinking is so vital to creativity and innovation.

Watch the following set of videos that make up a documentary about the History of Hacking.

Part 1 of 5



Part 2 of 5



Part 3 of 5



Part 4 of 5



Part 5 of 5



Then lets add some FUD






















Image source

Is it any wonder that we have an ICT skills crisis?

Learning involves making mistakes, improvising, trying things out, experimenting. A good education is going to be messy. (some insight to that here).

Is a mono culture of proprietary software conducive to creating such an environment?

Are school networks and computers which are locked down so that kids can't 'break' them helping?

What about using programming languages that are not as accessible because of the cost?

Not rear of lead dog solution

Clinton has announced a significant event in his post Edubuntu terminal client getting there. A lone edubuntu terminal client in the corner. My thanks to Clinton for his persistence and to the people that have helped him.

We have some observations and improvements to make and slowly expand this service. There is no doubt in my mind that this technology will be the answer to us making some improvements to what we can do with our limited ICT budget.

The services that this provides should cater for a significant proportion of the needs of student learning and at reduced cost. It should also give us some space to deal with some more specialised needs.

This is not a rear of lead dog solution and that is also something to be proud of.

Hmmm - what's next?
Maybe Google apps.

The rear of the lead dog

Confused of Calcutta has a great post called "Build versus Buy versus Opensource".

His advice-

For common problems use Opensource.
For rare problems use Buy.
For unique problems use Build.

and his closing comment had me in stitches

Maybe this way we can all stop building solutions that look like the rear of a lead dog….

Peer produced knowledge sharing in education

What are the practical and philosophical challenges in using technologies for ‘peer produced’ knowledge sharing?

A response to the Jimmy Wales seminar in Adelaide, 'Challenging how knowledge is created', 23/4/2007

If we were to leave the practicalities out of the picture for a minute I reckon that we could agree that core to teacher's hearts is unencumbered learning. We would all connect with the idea that we want to remove the encumbrances to learning for all children. So the idea of free access (free in both senses of the word – free as in beer and free as in libre) would resonate with teachers everywhere.

We can categorise the issues around peer publishing for educators into two main categories
1. The first is the classroom where we make use of peer produced materials and have students involved in the peer publishing process
2. The second relates to peer publishing for professional sharing


Classroom use

Teacher's technical skills.
Just as our teachers vary in height they vary in their technical skills. Generally speaking, the skills required to make web 2.0 peer publishing tools work are fairly minimal. So this is good news.


Infrastructure
Education system filtering mechanisms generally eliminate online or peer publishing. The one size fits all filtering systems can fail to recognise the different needs of children as they grow and develop.

Infrastructure in schools tends to be focused on desktop applications with mainly web one level access because of the filtering system. School systems tend to be locked down rather than trying to build a community based on trust in our schools. We often think about systems from a systems perspective and so we want to protect the system and forget about the fact that education is trying to help us build a better society. Two of the core values for this is trust and respect. The accountability model rather than the gate keeper model that Jimmy Wales talked about is a key concept to making schools a better place and in so doing, make our society a better one. Acknowledging that children will make mistakes and this is important for their learning, having methods to easily undo or fix the damage is critical for system design.

We are at a time where we can provide an excellent learning environment where most of what we do is through a browser interface and using FOSS on the desktop. There are considerable advantages to this, one of them being cost.

Costs of bandwidth are still far too high for schools and the pipe is far too narrow.

Concerns about the accuracy of the information being published and shared.
Teachers often feel the need to ensure that all of the information presented to students is correct.

Concerns about being able to control the communications.
Student peer produced knowledge sharing involves publishing that can be used for inappropriate goals. A phrase that I have been hearing more of lately is that a good education is going to be messy and peer publishing certainly can be messy.

Nature of information is changing
We don't need to keep everything in our heads anymore. Information is disposable, used to complete current goals, probably document what we did and then move on.

Constructivism
Peer publishing offers students the possibility to learn about things that are of interest to them. The variety and depth of the information on Muppet Wiki is a great example.

As a final comment on classroom use, I like the idea of students preparing resources for other students.


Use for professional sharing

I have been intimately involved in the establishment of cegsa.org. It is a wiki for SA and NT senior secondary IT teachers to share learning and assessment resources. Working on the setting up of this has highlighted a number of issues relevant to this discussion.

How do we avoid copyright issues?

Should we enforce logins and only allow teachers into this space?

Why should I contribute when others aren't?

Feelings that my work is not complete and polished enough for sharing is a barrier to contributing

Some people feeling that the wiki markup is too hard to use.

It actually takes effort to share resources. Wouldn't it be good if we had a button on our browsers that said, 'Remember this Delicious,SACSA and SSABSA' and then presented us with a range of relevant tags that we could pick from.

There are too many places to log into these days and this takes time and too many credentials to remember.

The open sharing approach of peer publishing is somewhat chaotic and messy. There are not necessarily answers for everything on the wiki and for other things there is an abundance. Some teachers feel that we are doing the wrong thing and just want a text book – forget the wiki just point me in the direction of the approved text please.

As a closing remark, when you are working with others publishing your work in this way you develop a commitment to each other. It is a shared obligation and it is enjoyable. Peer publishing is great news for country folk where we have often felt left out of the PD loop. Now we are interacting with people in our fields globally. This of course has implications for our professional organizations like CEGSA and our employer.

The kids meet PODMO

I took three students with me to Adelaide to check out mobile technologies including Podmo. My thanks to the DECS Learning Technologies people, especially Paul and Karen, for their support and assistance. The information that I got about Podmo is a bit jumbled.

We met Holly and some of the key words that I recorded don’t make sense when I try and use Google to help to get to the bottom of them. ‘Champagne of the ladies’, pixel play and pixel art. That’s fine because I will be bumping into Holly again in a couple of weeks when she comes here to run a workshop with a bunch of year 9 and 10 students re making multimedia artefacts for mobile devices.

Karen wore a Podmo T-shirt. She gave us some good hints regarding multimedia design constraints for mobile phones. Some of the key points were

• - Screen sizes will increase over time


• - Wallpapers and screen savers


• - 72dpi for images


• - 3:4 image ratio although some phone screens re square


• - the Podmo server resizes images on the fly based upon the phone type it is serving – nice


• - The GIMP was recommended as a good program for manipulating images for the mobile medium


• - screen savers need to be a 3-5 frame animated gif


• - videos need to be 30sec-1minute in duration - short attention span


• - longer video stories need to be broken down into short episodes


• - videos need to be in 3gp file format


• - SUPER © was recommended as good free program for converting movies to 3gp


• - There are different video encoding settings and basically it is a process of experimentation to come up with the best settings for each video artefact. Key frame rates should be about 10-15. Bit rates make a difference to file size but basically the greater the bit rate the better the product looks. Some video does not compress well and is a result of too much colour data and too much movement in the frames.


• - Data transfer via Podmo is free so file size is really only an issue for storage on the phone.


• - Mp3 is supported for most phone ring tones

Che talked mainly about game design for mobile phones. Some of the points I noted were
Java is the programming language and the development of these games sounded complex.

• - Have graphics based on 100 x 100 pixels and then to vary the size of the background to suit the phones screen


• - We saw some sprite strips and I understood better how they were used. The key thing about a sprite strip is to base them a consistent grid size.


• - Given the smallish storage on phone devices, programming needed to be like it was in the Vic20 and C64 days – very memory conservative. Now that I can remember with great clarity


• - Use index colours – keep colours used to the 32 colours


• - Images need to be in png8 file format (I assume that PNG8 means 8 bits per pixel or a bit depth of 8 pixels)


• - Do not use semi transparent pixels as many phones do not support them


• - PNG crush can be used to compress images


• - Paint and Fireworks are two of many possible tools that can be used to create images and sprites but turn anti-aliasing off


• - Photoshop adds to much to the size of the images for this application

An important resource for validating artefacts created for mobile phones is Sun’s mobile phone emulator for PC. I need to find this. Efforts so far have been in vain.

A recommended site for checking out and comparing phone features http://www.gsmarena.com/

I also need to keep an eye out for the Podmo developers pack

I was encouraged by the fact that all presenters referred to their extensive use of FOSS and this included the GIMP. Teachers in the graphics area seem to be fixated on proprietary software usually citing ‘industry standards’ as one of the key reasons. I felt that a hacker mindset enabled the Podmo people to be very creative because they were comfortable with picking up different tools and using them in sometimes usual ways and combinations. Relating to this, today I was alerted to the release of Ubuntu Studio next month.

Ubuntu Studio. A multimedia creation derivative of Ubuntu. Ubuntu Studio is aimed at the linux audio, video and graphic enthusiast as well as professional.

The Podmo people gave me the impression of wanting to ensure a fair go for all parties involved. Where artists want to sell their artefacts via the Podmo network they will receive a huge 50% of the takings. It is good that they want to build respect and a fair go for artists into their business model.

We have some bluetooth dongles and the Podmo server software coming soon so we will be able to have a play. I am going to find out if the Podmo mob will sell me a XL Podmo T-shirt.

FOSS in South Australian Public Schools CD

A very interesting and promising project is unfolding in South Australia. It is a grass roots innovation that has achieved a lot in the last week. A group of educators and technical support people in South Australian schools are collaborating to produce a FOSS CD specifically for use in South Australian public schools. Well it is not quite a true FOSS CD as there are programs being considered that are closed source but free.

The collaboration is happening via the technical talk list and wiki . CD iso's are starting to appear for sharing and various people are working on ways to make the customisation of a CD possible for schools that struggle with skilled technical support. Consideration is being given to a core group of programs and then making it possible for schools to choose from some elective options.

I am wondering how central office will work with this. Will it be supported by them? Will they encourage this software to also be installed on all computers in schools?

Implementation of FOSS across the region of Extremedura - Video

This video is very powerful. It provides an excellent statement about why we should be looking to FOSS as a key educational tool right here in South Australia. I lament the fact that the decision makers are taking as rapidly away from this to what i think is the long term detriment of our communities.

The video describes the implementation of FOSS across the region of Extremedura in Europe. The video also points to other countries and regions that are adopting a similiar path. Video length is about 8 minutes.