Time for edu news again. Here’s what I collected in February:
Community
- CC licenced FS promo material
at the FLOSS Competence Center Network, they started to provide some creative commons licensed promo material to spread the word.
- Pressing need for FS skills
Well, I admit, the source for this news item might be seen as biased, but it’s still interesting and well worth mentioning while advocating Free Software in education: “2013 Linux Jobs Forecast: Pressing Need for Linux Talent“
- Interesting article about SchoolTool
The article about SchoolToolby Tom Hoffman explains a little bit the history and who is behind the procjet. What I found worth mentioning here is the statement:“The leading cause of other failures has been turnover among staff in institutions we are trying to collaborate with.”
This finding seems to me very valuable for any FS advocate and should be kept in mind when trying to deploy a FS solution in an educational institution.
Government
- UK curriculum
It’s been almost a year since we submitted our position on the UK Department of Education proposal to disapply the National Curriculum Programme for Information and Communication Technology, Glyn Moody wrote a short article what happened since then.
Software
February Events:
- FOSDEM
I wrote about it before, there was not much going on with education except:- The lightning talk about “Coding Goûter”
- Searduino – Arduino simulator and C/C++ devel environment by FSFE’s vice president Henrik Sandklef
And the main thing of course was to meet and chat with a lot of interesting people about our work. Let’s see what the outcome will be.
- UNESCO event “Towards Knowledge Society
One part of the event was a panel discussion titled: Adoption and teaching of Open/Libre technologies in Higher Education curricula and Professional recognition for FOSS engineers and practitioners (One of the panelists: Simon Phipps)Ivaylo, who made us aware of this event, and Bastien were planning to attend. We are awaiting their report 🙂
Upcomming events
- Very near Future: Mar 13: Day of computer science teaching methodology (de) in Graz (AT).
- James Burton informed us on the edu-eu Mailing list, that the call for papers started for the 2013 International Workshop on Distance Education Technologies. The event will take place in the Holiday Inn, Brighton – Seafront, United Kingdom on August 8 to 10, 2013.
Not much this time, but February is a short month and due to FOSDEM and the corresponding follow-up work, I didn’t find much time to follow the usual news channels.
If you have any infos on news or events that might be of interest to Free Software activists in education, please let me know!