Community members and visitors who are using Moodle in their schools or authoties might be interested in presenting a paper at April's UK Moodle Moot in London. The Moots are friendly gatherings with a stong culture of learning from and sharing with fellow delegates from all sectors of the UK Moodle community, and it would be great to have a strong representation from schools at this year's moot.

From www.dev8d.org

Dev8D is 4 days of 100% pure software developer heaven. It will be intense. It will be exhilarating. It will make you a better programmer.

From moodlemoot.org

From UKUUG. See http://www.ukuug.org/events/spring2010/ for details.

UKUUG's annual Large Installation Systems Administration (LISA) conference and tutorials will be held in Manchester on 23-25 March 2010 at the Manchester Conference Centre. The call for papers is now open and we are accepting submissions for tutorials and conference talks.

This conference is a must-attend event for system and network administrators.

From BCS Open Source Specialist Group. See http://ossg.bcs.org/2009/09/20/public-funds-in-the-uk-open-source-for-document-and-content-management-london-070110/ for details.

Is Open Source a viable way for the public sector to contain its IT costs? Government policy is gradually becoming more favourable to open source (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7910110.stm).

Open Source Schools and Open Forum Europe, supporters of open source and open standards, have joined forces to create something rather special for this year's BETT.

We hope that teachers, techies and leaders who are successfully using open source software in education will join us to share their experience and expertise in an informal, friendly environment at the Open Source Café on Stand L20 in the Supporting Next Generation Zone (formerly the Policy in Practice Zone). In open source barcamp style, there will be at least 24 slots throughout the four days for community members and supporters to host 30 minute sessions in a manner of their choosing; this could be a presentation, workshop or round table discussion. We plan to film sessions for later upload to YouTube etc.

Update: Press release below

Update: session sign-up wiki online, plus further details.

Open Source Schools will also be presenting a BETT seminar on 'Creative Computing with Open Source' at 15:45 on Wednesday 13th January. We will showcase a number of case studies about how school students are learning to program and contribute to the development of open source projects using a range of free, downloadable tools. Examples range from Scratch programming in primary schools, through Greenfoot in the secondary curriculum to the development of modules in PHP for web-based applications such as Moodle.

OSS Watch, a parallel organization to Open Source Schools sponsored by the JISC to provide advice and guidance on open source for the UK FE and HE sectors, have a couple of interesting workshops scheduled for 7th December, covering Open Source, Open Development and Open Innovation in one, and Open Development: Building an Engaged Community in the other. Both take place at The University Club in Oxford, and are free to those working in FE and HE.

OSS Watch's latest newsletter is also now available, featuring an article on ATutor (an open source learning management system that's not Moodle) and an interview with Ubuntu community manager Jono Bacon.

It was a great pleasure to attend last Tuesday's Mirandamod to hear Etienne Wenger discussing communities of practice (CoP), with particular relation to education, both in schools and, particularly, in relation to teachers' continuing professional development. I'm sure that the CoP approach to CPD is both more fulfilling for the individual and more effective for the profession than the traditional training model of courses and powerpoints that we see so much of: my own professional development has owed far more to colleagues in the various staff rooms, communities and networks with which I've been associated, not least MirandaNet, SchoolForge and Naace, than the training courses I've occasionally been sent on; I doubt my experience is that unusual.

Mirandamods are a particular style of unconference, bringing something of the reflection of an academic seminar to the participatory, micropresentation format of a teachmeet, and thus I took my turn presenting, taking the above title as my theme.

The larger open source projects, such as moodle (which I used extensively for my examples), drupal, wordpress, firefox and ubuntu have a great deal in common with Wenger and Lave's notion, which Wenger admitted was certainly not a new one, of the Community of Practice:

• There is clearly a shared domain - the project, and I guess at its heart, the code itself.
• Whilst it's certainly possible to use the code without participating in the community, these big projects have very active communities, happy and eager to "engage in joint activities and discussions, help each other, and share information."
• Furthermore, there is, at least because all members of the community share the use of the same code, a shared practice: members: "develop a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems—in short a shared practice"

http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/events/2009-10-09/programme.xml

"Why should software developers who create local customisations of open source
software take the further step of submitting their changes back to the main
project? While it takes more effort initially, having these changes integrated
in the project becomes efficient in the long run: local modifications need not