Open-Source in Education News

Eduforge was founded in early 2004 as part of the New Zealand Open Source Virtual Learning Environment (NZOSVLE) project (https://eduforge.org/projects/nzvle/). The NZOSVLE is a major collaborative education project funded by the New Zealand Tertiary Education Commission, an arm of the NZ Government. The project’s goals are to adopt and contribute to open source solutions for education. The consortium is composed of polytechnics, universities, and a private training organisations. Part of the vision for Eduforge is to create an environment that is robust enough to support large scale collaborative software development, but friendly enough to be used by non-programmers who want to collaborate on a range of projects. Projects may include learning materials design, application testing, and research as well as contributing documentation, tutorials, and help files to software development projects. In addition to reducing the economic and organisational barriers associated with large scale distributed collaboration, Eduforge is envisioned to reduce the technology usability barrier often confronted by non-ICT professionals. We've recently added Planet Eduforge, a blog aggregator at http://planet.eduforge.org, and integrated a fully featured blogging tool. Eduforge is developed using FOSS - GForge, Serendipity, and PHPWiki. While this started with somewhat of a NZ flavour due to the projects on it, the intent has always been a global shared resource. Recently we shifted the hosting to the US to improve latency for many of the interantional users. We would very much welcome participation - either in using the resources or in helping us develop the reources available on Eduforge. Or simply feedback, we're committed to continuous improvements. regards Richard Wyles

This is a development that should make many educators and open source advocates very happy:

We have just launched BBC OpenSource – the new repository for open source code released by the BBC.

For the BBC, open source software development is an extension of our Public Service remit. Releasing open source software helps our audience get additional value from the work they've funded, and also get tools for free that they couldn't get any other way. It also allows people outside the BBC to extend projects in such a way that may in future be used in the BBC.

We hope there will be opportunities for cross-pollination between backstage.bbc.co.uk and BBC OpenSource.

backstage.bbc.co.uk :: Backstage News :: BBC launches Open Source website

Via Dave Wiley...

It's that time of year again! Last year's Open Education Conference at USU was described by several as "the best conference I ever attended." This year's conference should be even better. Keynotes this year include John Seely Brown (Social Life of Information) and Yochai Benkler (Coase's Penguin).

The Call for Papers is available now. Please submit something! General information on the conference, including a Flyer and Presentation Slide you can use to help us advertise, is available at http://cosl.usu.edu/conference/.

iterating toward openness " Open Education Conference 2005

Advances in information technology have spread communications capabilities to every clime. There is a great potential and responsbility for educators, instructional technologists, and learning scientists to leverage these advances in order to extend educational opportunity to literally everyone who desires it. As Epictetus said, "Only the educated are free."

...Please join us September 28 - 30, 2005 on the Utah State University campus to discuss, share, and work together in this important area of educational and technological research...

Advancing the Effectiveness and Sustainability of Open Education Conference

more from the Call for papers...

Advancing the Effectiveness and Sustainability of Open Education Conference is a multidisciplinary event designed to promote discussion of research and development activities that advance the effectiveness and sustainability of the open education movement.

We invite you to present at the conference. Presentations should address at least one of the four conference themes: open educational resources, overcoming barriers to open education, international issues in open education, and policy and administrative issues in open education. Preference will be given to presentations that synthesize multiple themes in robust ways.

Submissions are due by July 15, 2005.

Acceptance announcements will be made by August 1, 2005. Once accepted, we strongly encourage you to submit your paper for publication in the proceedings. Full papers are due no later than September 1, 2005, and must be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License.

Via Dave Wiley...

It’s that time of year again! Last year’s Open Education Conference at USU was described by several as “the best conference I ever attended.” This year’s conference should be even better. Keynotes this year include John Seely Brown (Social Life of Information) and Yochai Benkler (Coase’s Penguin).

The Call for Papers is available now. Please submit something! General information on the conference, including a Flyer and Presentation Slide you can use to help us advertise, is available at http://cosl.usu.edu/conference/.

iterating toward openness » Open Education Conference 2005

Advances in information technology have spread communications capabilities to every clime. There is a great potential and responsbility for educators, instructional technologists, and learning scientists to leverage these advances in order to extend educational opportunity to literally everyone who desires it. As Epictetus said, "Only the educated are free."

...Please join us September 28 - 30, 2005 on the Utah State University campus to discuss, share, and work together in this important area of educational and technological research...

Advancing the Effectiveness and Sustainability of Open Education Conference

more from the Call for papers...

Advancing the Effectiveness and Sustainability of Open Education Conference is a multidisciplinary event designed to promote discussion of research and development activities that advance the effectiveness and sustainability of the open education movement.

We invite you to present at the conference. Presentations should address at least one of the four conference themes: open educational resources, overcoming barriers to open education, international issues in open education, and policy and administrative issues in open education. Preference will be given to presentations that synthesize multiple themes in robust ways.

Submissions are due by July 15, 2005.

Acceptance announcements will be made by August 1, 2005. Once accepted, we strongly encourage you to submit your paper for publication in the proceedings. Full papers are due no later than September 1, 2005, and must be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License.

Ominous little bit on page 99 of the UK Labour Party election manifesto. Didn't hear anything about it in the election campaign - but then again its not exactly a bedtime read. Presented on their web site in a horrible Flash electronic book format. I have a nasty fear this means the UK government is going to try to revive the long contested EU copyright proposal during their EU presidency. (For quick summary of labour party manifesto ICT policy commitments see Catherine Howell's excellent and niftily named blog "Ida takes tea".

"We will modernise copyright and other forms of protection of intellectual property rights so that they are appropriate for the digital age.We will use our presidency of the EU to look at how to ensure content creators can protect their innovations in a digital age. Piracy is a growing threat and we will work with industry to protect against it.