I will be talking about Open Source Video in particular the new HTML 5 standard and how open source video codecs are important for the future. I will be talking about Kaltura’s collaboration with Wikimedia and the Open Source Video Alliance
Open World Forum took place in Paris October 1st and 2nd. This conference was sponsored by Microsoft among others and shows how the acceptance of FOSS is now firmly in the mainstream industry. There were representatives from most of the big IT companies, venture capitalists, and the communities. I managed to meet up with some old acquaintances including Louis Suarez-Potts, the OpenOffice.org community manager, Simon Phipps, Sun’s Open Source evangelist, Mark Shuttleworth the man behind Ubuntu, Mark Taylor of Sirius and Steve Lee of OSSwatch. Some key things I came away with (Steve might have some comments of his own)
Hi, I’ve updated www.freesoftwareforstudents.org.uk to add a link to the CD that has given our students FOSS applications.
Why so late 20th Century? you may well ask, but we found that giving pupils links to apps like openoffice.org, etc seemed to frighten some parents, “Download! that’s illegal isn’t it?” was a typical response. We found that by putting it onto a CD and putting a pretty lable on it gave it credibility. We now give it to all parents of yr7 before they arrive so they don’t feel they have to buy expensive software for their kids.
One of the things we are funded to do for the INGOT EU transfer of innovation project is produce a manual on Open Source/Open Systems for teachers. If anyone has any ideas for chapters, topics etc I’ll pass them on to the Bulgarian partner who is managing that part of the project.
Just a bit of small news.. Wilsden Primary School (Winners of the Hand held learning 2008 award) have okay’d me doing an open source project to create a web presence to enable pupils, teachers and parents to access what they want from the school.
The process is being outlined but it should be a great opportunity for me to bash out a load of open source stuff as Wilsden has been an ICT flagship for many years and always committed to ICT.
I have been finally making some time in the holidays to make some extensions to the following Moodle block Moodle.org: Modules and plugins
This block allows integration with Serco MIS system. My contribution so far had been to document how to get this system working on Debian/Ubuntu based systems rather Redhat.Debian integrates with mssql/sybase and freetds differently so documented how to get apache/php playing nicely with the existing system.
Thank you to everyone who came along to the Wikipedia session today at the Open Source unConference – hope you found it useful and interesting.
I’ve uploaded my slides to the Wikimedia Meta website [1] – please feel free to reuse these – they are licensed under CC-BY-SA except for the copyrighted logos or screenprints which are fair use or used with permission.
Further copies of the Schools Wikipedia DVD which I gave out can be ordered from their website [2] or it can be downloaded straight from there.
BBC Open Lab aims to bring developers and teachers together to create simple open source software.
We plan to run a number of small projects over the next couple of years to help get people started, and it would be great to hear from people with experience in the field what support would be most useful.
The discussion will likely focus on what sort of projects we should focus on; how to foster communication between developers and people in education and what methods we should use to encourage people to get involved. Any other questions or suggestions are very welcome.
A perceived advantage of open source development of educational software is that it potentially allows teachers to make their own adaptations. This link between making software and learning is echoed in a constructionist approach, as proposed by Seymour Papert and pioneered through the use of Logo in schools, in which model-building activity is seen as the medium for developing domain understanding.