Here are three months of education news related to Free Software! Sorry for the delay, I was somewhat tied up with FuxCon and was traveling for a month. Enough said, here we go:
Finland
- Finnish education board funds Free Software cloud services for schools.
- A Webinar on KDE-based learning programs took place on April 24.
France
More info at April and Lucile also wrote about it.
Germany
- TU Berlin offers OwnCloud to 30.000 students.
- Kurt’s thesis that a bottom-up approach is needed is backed up by a German professor (German).
- Sebastian wrote about the final report of the collaborator initiative in Berlin
- Wolf Dieter Zimmermann (edu-team) and Michael Stehmann spoke at the Fachhochschule Düsseldorf
Italy
- Richard Stallman spoke on “Free Software and Education” in Biella, Italy, on May 02, 2013
Portugal
- Portugal’s annual school teacher allocation handled by Free Software ERP
Romania
- Interview: Victor Nițu, Technical Director of Fundația Ceata, which became an associate organisation of FSFE in April
- From what I got from auto translation, Romania is in trouble for having its schools use Windows for two years without having the license
Switzerland
Turkey
- Despite the worrying situation in Turkey right now, FSFE decided to send an open letter to Erdogan, which had been prepared before the protests even started. (Personally, I am not totally happy with this, but I guess we have to face the fact that big proprietary software companies will not stop lobbying either.
Other
- Scratch has finally reached the Debian repositories which is nice as Scratch day was celebrated on May 25 (Spanish)
General info on Scratch Day.
- I blogged about the final report of an UNESCO event in Paris just recently. The discussion
about it is still ongoing on the edu-eu mailinglist. Please join us!
- MIT and the Harvard University released edX, an MOOC platform, under the AGPL. Many Universities around the world already started using it, among them the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Karolinska Institutet and the Technische Universität München. The code is on github.
See also: The H Open: edX learning platform now all Free Software
- Red Hat POSSE event FS experience for educators took place on June 2-4 in Philadelphia.
- A posting about Teaching children how to code by Rebecca Lindegren
- A guide to free and open source education by Carolyn Fox
- KDE edu team started planning for the upcoming KDE Academy
- Steve Wheeler blogging from the EDEN conference in Oslo: “The Kids are all right”
- On the mailinglist on Schoolforge, David M. Bucknell wrote an email to GCompris developer Bruno Coudoin, suggesting a mentoring program to improve GCompris with English Phonics from FreeReading.net. Bruno explained a little bit what has been done within GCompris and pointed to art2apps and Abecedarium.
Distributions
- Debian Edu
- Debian Edu 7.0.0 alpha2 released 2013-06-10
- Interview: Jonathan Carter about the cross-over between Edubuntu and Debian Edu /Skolelinux
- Interview: Cédric Boutillier
One quote (emphasis added):
Q: What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux /Debian Edu?Cédric: Maybe the lack of manpower to do lobbying on the project. Sometimes, people who need to take decisions concerning IT do not have all the elements to evaluate properly free software solutions. The fact that support by a company may be difficult to find is probably a problem if the school does not have IT personnel.One can find support from a company by looking at the wiki dokumentation, where some countries already have a number of companies providing support for Debian Edu, like Germany or Norway. This list is easy to find readily from the manual. However, for other countries, like France, the list is empty. I guess that consultants proposing support for Debian would be able to provide some support for Debian Edu as well.
- And there is another interview from Debian/edu, although I don’t understand a word as it is in Norwegian with Nirosan Thiyagalingam, but it links to Raspberry Pi and Ubuntu, so I guess it is Free Software related 😉
- A post how to turn a regular Debian into a Skolelinux
- A bunch of edu software screenshots in Skolelinux
- Sklolelinux/Debian Edu developer meeting in Trontheim
- Interview: Victor Nițu, Technical Director of Fundația Ceata, which became an associate organisation of FSFE in April
- Doudou
- Edubuntu
- Edubuntu made it into Informationweek
Future events
- RMLL will have an edu track again. As far as I can see, on Monday (Jul 8) and Tuesday (Jul 9) in K.4.201 and K.4.401. Unfortunately, I will not be able to attend, again…
- RMS will be in Brighton and talk about “Free Software, Free Education” on July 13, 2013
If you have any infos on news or events that might be of interest to Free Software activists in education, please let me know!