We want to recruit headteachers and senior leaders to our conference to show them the potential benefits and cost savings offered by open source software whether used alone or blended with proprietary software. We don’t have a marketing budget so we are looking to the community to help us promote the event. We have produced a flier which can be found here. 

We would be very grateful if you could circulate it as widely as possible, through your networks, on your blogs or through twitter, targeting those senior leaders who are not yet using open source. We are encouraged by the line up of speakers so far, including Ian Usher, Tony Parkin, Paul Hynes, Paul Haigh, and Miles Berry.  Let’s make sure they have an audience. Thank you.

http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/oer/2010/12/07/eight-things-that-i-took-away-from-opened2010/

Vic Jenkins has a new post discussing lessons learned from OpenEd 2010. From the post:

Reading Harold Jarche’s latest blog post From learning to working technologies – it is interesting to see how he uses the graph of Moore’s Technology Adoption Curve and applies it to the Learning Technologies Industry.

It has lessons for the schools’ ICT industry in the UK. The Late Adopters and Laggards are still stuck in the doldrums of LMS (VLEs) Compliance and features and functions.

Today sees the publication a report from NWLG CEO Gary Clawson on the savings that would follow from a move to open source, open services and open content in schools and across local authorities. Gary argues that a switch to open source and open content would offer 25% savings on IT spend with relative ease, with a further 30-35% if LAs looked seriously at re-modelling how ICT is implemented and supported. Across a local authority with some 20 secondaries and 120 primaries, this would amount to over £1.4M pa.

Oh yes, and you get more flexible, sustainable IT and systems which support generic transferable skills in the classroom.

This page is based on a presentation given to the Ubuntu in Business event and draws on experiences of an open source strategy in a 400 person, 5 office Anglo-French heritage services company. Those who think that schools are fundamentally different to other organisations in the way they should implement , manage and strategise around technology should maybe stop here. Everyone else, pitch in!

 “Openness at the heart of the EU Digital Agenda”

From http://www.futurelab.org.uk/events/listing/research-insights-day

We’ve added a few software titles to the Software Directory recently, but this is not by any means, a final or definative list. 

Are there applications that you are using that we’ve missed?

Are there applications that you would like to see, but don’t know if they exist with Open Source licences?

Many of the tools that we have listed are Windows based.  Are there FOSS tools that you use that are Linux or Mac only?

Most important of all, which tools are really, really good to use in a school setting and which are just "ok".

The Cabinet Office has launched the new Government ICT Strategy today, applying across the whole of the public sector. Open source, open standards and re-use is one of the fourteen strands for delivering the strategy, which promises £3.2 billion savings annually from 2013/14.

Last year’s Action Plan on open source, open standards and re-use has been revised, with a new version released today, which:

• brings this in line with developments in cloud computing, most notably the G-Cloud (G for government, not Google, this time),
• stops open source from being rejected because proprietary software has been purchased up front, and
• adds a line to say that "If [suppliers] are unable to provide evidence of fair consideration of open source solutions, their bid will be deemed non-compliant with government policy and the proposal is likely to be automatically be delisted from the procurement."
  

The latter point would have significant implications for BSF and other managed service procurements.

The Government Application Store, sort of like an iphone App Sore but for really, really big apps, is another of the strands. This will offer ‘an online portal for the sharing and reuse of online business applications, services and components across the public sector’. If applied to education as well as the rest of the public sector, this could bring big savings and provide a firm basis for interoperability. Given its popularlity in schools, colleges and local authorities, Moodle must surely be a strong contender for the G-AS, as perhaps are other important web-based apps popular with teachers and pupils, such as Drupal, WordPress and Elgg.