… says the headline of this piece in The Noblesville Ledger; does this local newspaper in Indiana know something we don’t? Unhappily not; for the good folk of Hamilton County, NHS is the TLA for Noblesville High School so only a small victory for open source.
Warming to the theme of open source in education, […]
… reviewed in a long piece from from PC Advisor.
The first £50 OLPC laptops could ship to children in emerging economies within months. PC Advisor speaks to the people behind the project to see how they made the impossible possible. When plans to build and distribute a £50 laptop to schoolchildren in emerging economies […]
Hard on the heels of French car maker Peugeot’s open source deal, comes news that
French authorities will give out 175,000 USB memory sticks loaded with open-source software to Parisian high school students at the start of the next school year.
Mozilla Europe President Tristan Nitot hailed the news as “an excellent surprise.”
Trying to keeping our […]
If you are not an academic or somehow involved in higher education, the row about Blackboard’s patent on ‘Internet-based education support systems and methods’ may have passed you by - here is an understated reaction to the news shortly after it broke, here (surprisingly) is a more combative piece, here is a typical reaction and […]
… and a lot about open source in this review, from Korea! The writer is a little behind the times in referring to “nineteen Members of Parliament” - 116 MPs have now signed the Early Day Motion.
… with a report on Sourcewire of a
a challenge to the government’s schools ICT quango to turn their promotion of Open Source software into action. Despite overwhelming evidence that Open Source software saves schools money and enhances learning, the Open Source Consortium states that Becta is taking no practical steps to help schools to […]
… in a Guardian interview with John Pugh MP. Things have moved on a little since the interview - 112 MPs have now signed Early Day Motion 179. Go here for our previous posts on this topic, which has been on the radar for well over a month now.
Also this week, BECTA published […]
Things have moved on since our previous post. BECTA published it’s Learning Platform Services Framework on 22 December. Today (8 January) The Register carries a report of a formal complaint to the European Union that BECTA’s procurement process was not properly carried out. No doubt this will be a topic of conversation […]
A month or so ago we mentioned an Early Day Motion in the House of Commons. A vigorous campaign by the UK FLOSS community and the increasing number of signatories (97 at the time of writing) keeps it in the news (here and here).
This is just a fascinating read:
These are some pretty raw notes from Negroponte’s presentation at NetEvents, Hong Kong, as it happens. He’s showing off the first “production laptop” - although it’s not the finished electronics. An ASIC - to run the camera, the flash memory and other functions - isn’t fitted, and it’s not possible […]
… in a leader setting out the arguments for FLOSS in schools, about which we have posted several times in the past few days, with politics:
Yet Becta, the government agency that sets education IT policy, … works according to the framework principle, which in best civil service tradition sets out approved suppliers who are easy […]
This is the title of the Early Day Motion which John Pugh MP has tabled in the House of Commons. Media reaction is moving up the food chain.
In case you have not seen it, this message is in circulation within the UK FLOSS community:
Dear FLOSS supporter
John Pugh MP has tabled an Early Day Motion […]
According to a press release on Source Wire:
Steven Lucey, a director at Becta, has admitted that Becta’s ICT model for schools is unsustainable. Yet DfES advice and Becta’s procurement frameworks continue to promote high maintenance, fat-client solutions that damage the environment.
A way out of this conundrum is outlined here.
The first $100 laptop has been produced - story here.
A fascinating tour of its Linux interface, courtesy of YouTube, starts here.
… here and here and here.
BECTA’s response is here and a follow up to this response is here.
This story is only in the technical press so far; we are watching for a breakthrough into the main-stream press next week.
UK Members of Parliament have identified Department of Education and Skills (DfES) and Becta policies as favouring proprietary software vendors thereby blocking the adoption of Open Source software by schools and colleges. An Early Day Motion tabled by Liberal Democrat MP John Pugh, has called for a fair approach to ICT procurement in the education […]
A piece from Guardian Unlimited explains the Open University’s commitment to Moodle. A slippery and evasive piece from a DfES mandarin can be found here (Health warning: reading this may be bad for your blood presure.)
Blogging for Media Watch is sometimes done in a 250-year old cottage up a mountain in North Wales so here is a recent story from Ping Wales and another rather older, but still current and worth reading.
Highly relevant to FLOSS offerings are two further stories, about the online Welsh dictionary and Welsh language […]
This story of Libya signing up to One Laptop Per Child, which seems to have started in the New York Times, has been reported many times over the past couple of weeks.
Earlier there were accounts in the mainstream press that
The $100 laptops planned for children around the world might turn out to be […]
Kings College School in Cambridge recently switched to an open source network infrastructure in partnership with Sirius Corporation. The move was not just an exercise in saving money - the move has also saved the IT staff precious time. Wendy Harris, the network manager at the school, said:
“Without open source we would spend our […]