Here’s what I collected in November. If you come across anything that might be worth mentioning in this series, please drop me a note or, even better: drop it on the edu-eu mailinglist!
Edu-Team:
We, and most of all Kevein, are still working behind the scenes on the NLedu campaign.
The German Open Source Business Alliance (OSBA) published a whitepaper on Free Software in education (German) Sebastian already wrote a quick review about it.
Alejandra reports that the University Rey Juan Carlos who offers an Software Libre master degree is looking for open communities to collaborate with them. As part of the master their students have to contribute with a Free Software community so they are willing to have communities that could offer activities to the students so they learn about Free Software.
Community
Richard Stallman spoke at Universidad Carlos III (Madrid, Spain) in December on why schools need to ensure that the software will be free to teach.
Framablog: How Microsoft fancies education in France (or something like that. My French went from bad to worse. Je suis désolé.) Actual title L’école selon Microsoft : comment j’ai appris à ne plus m’en faire et à aimer l’éducation privatrice et fermée
Apropos speaking French: This is supposed to be edu related, but I didn’t manage to grasp much and stopped listening to this podcast after 20 minutes: Le RDV Tech #121 – Spécial éducation. The shownotes mention http://code.org/ and http://aful.org so I suspect it’s justified to mention it here without having an actual clue 🙂
Essay on how to “Prepare students for a rapidly changing world by teaching with open source”
A Free Software in education workshop took place in Zaragoza, Spain
Audrey Watters looks at the tablet market in schools
Open hardware for education with littleBits library of electronic modules The circuits are licensed under the CERN Open Hardware License Version 1.2. and available on github
How to train college students to contribute to the Linux kernel (by Luis Ibanez) Teaser: The key is to start with very easy patches just to get used to git and the like.
Polish case study: Free Software faster and cheaper.
Government
Spain’s Galicia to research open source-cloud use in schools
quite long article on the Free Software situation in UK, which also covers education in one paragraph (Search for “School monopoly”).
Edu Software
What Is New for KTouch in KDE SC 4.12
Interview about SALSA (Styled & Accessible Learning Service Agreements)
Sylvain wrote (in French) about Sketcholt, a web whiteboard for schools.
Another sugar digest by Walter Bender
SUGAR activity report in Spanish (as far as I could understand)
Upcoming events
- Deadline: Jan 10, 2014: students (grade 10-13) may apply for RoboSchool, a 5 day workshop dealing with robotics, in Chemnitz, Germany. (I don’t know how much Free Software will be used there, but as Markus Dittman is involved, I guess FS will be used.)
- Jan 11, 2014: General Assembly of FRISK in Oslo-Trondheim, Norway
- Jan 23, 2014: Arduino workshop for teachers in Damme, Germany You’ll have to be a teacher in Lower Saxony in order to participate. But it is cool, that this is being done in general! 🙂
- March 2014: /ch/open educational conference in (Switzerland)
- April 3-5, 2014: Robocup German Open (Germany)
As always, if you have any info on news or events that might be of interest to Free Software activists in education, please let me know or dump it on the edu-eu mailing list!