The Open Source Café at last week's BETT show was an undoubted success. Open Source School had teamed up with friends from Open Forum Europe to host the Café over the four days of the show, with a rolling programme of barcamp style presentations, advice and copies of open source software available on CD ROM. The Café had a very vibrant atmosphere throughout the show, with familiar faces stopping by for a chat, visits from schools, both at home and abroad, who are successfully using a range of open source software, and much interest from those with little or no experience of open source in educational contexts.
The 'Barcamp' provided much of the café's buzz with a wonderfully varied programme of presentations and workshops, including Robert Costello of Code+ on Drupal in Education, some great case studies from Brian Lockwood, Tim Bateson and Paul Haigh on how they'd used open source in their schools, and lots of Moodling from Ian Usher, Drew Buddie, Dai Barnes, Ashley Garner and others. We've filmed most of these and will be sharing at least some of these sessions in due course. Particular mention should go to Leon Cych of Learn 4 Life who streamed many of the 'barcamp' sessions live via twitcam, and recorded some excellent voxpops for our YouTube channel, such as Tim Bateson's below. These did much to capture the excitement on the stand and share the message with those who'd not been able to make it to BETT.
The Café's barcamp format fitted in well with the fringe events of TEDx, Amplified, Teachmeet and Teachmeet takeover, in which educators and others shared their insights, experiences, projects, and free resources; events which themselves draw on open source principles of community involvement and the interchange of ideas.
(Further videos and alternative formats available on YouTube)
Our seminar on Creative Computing with Open Source, presented by Miles Berry and Ian Utting, was very well attended, with standing room only for this introduction to Scratch and Greenfoot. Miles's seven minute demonstration of Scratch at Teachmeet on Friday drew many appreciative comments too, with lots of folk indicating they'd try it out for themselves.
Wednesday morning saw the launch of the latest version of the Open Education Disc, including both Scratch and Greenfoot, which proved a great success, with some 600 of these being collected by delegates during the show, and a similar number of Ubuntu Karmic Koala discs finding their way home too. David Wilmot and Peter Kemp, the educators behind the Open Education Disc, conservatively estimate that the proprietary equivalents of the software on the disc would cost around £1300, and I'm told Linux Format estimated the value of a proprietary equivalent to Ubuntu to be around £3000, which means we gave away over £2.5 Million worth of software at BETT ;-)
I do hope that folk will try out the great software on the discs, and get involved in our community, where we'd be very pleased to help them use open source in their schools. Many, many thanks from the Open Source Schools team to Bob Blatchford, Alan Bell and the rest of the Open Forum Europe team, Leon Cych, our sponsors (ULCC, Red Hat, The Learning Machine and LinuxIT), to Canonical for the Ubuntu discs and to all those presenting on the stand.
