Open-Source in Education - Links and Resources

Open Forum Europe - Open Skills Initiative:

Don't know how I missed this before. Many thanks to stuart Yates from the UK OSSwatch who told me about it.

This looks a great initiative - there are a sereies of projects in europe looking to promote education and training in Open Source and i think agreement to adapt this frameowrk woudl provide a degree of coherence to these steps. Need to look at this in some detail. But what interests me even more is the way the framework has been designed to allow a common standard for education and professional development without forcing unessarily rigid stanadrisation of learning.

In Europe major effort is being expended into trying to develop a common framework for qualifications - effort which in my view is making little headway. this is largely because moves towards standardizing qualifications fails to recognise the diversity of contexts in which learning takes place and the different cultures which have not only shaped our education systems but also impact on the organisation of learning at work. Will come back to this in next few days....

"OpenForum Europe introduces a new OSS skills initiative "The OSCoP Competency Framework" a definition of the skills needed by IT Professionals to excel within the open source environment. It has been developed in conjunction with many of the major open source product providers (including HP, IBM, Novell, Sun, RedHat), and endorsed by independent organisations such as the LPI.

The Competency Framework is at an early stage of development and nows needs review and input from the OSS community before the next stage of drill down is undertaken. We therefore welcome your comments and suggestions on both the concepts behind and the current limited detail within the OSCoP Competency Framework.

Authors/Editors:
Geoff Mulgan, Omar Salem, Tom Steinberg
Publication Type:
Book
Publication Date:
2005
ISBN:
1841801429
Cost:
£10.00
Categories:
Citizenship, Innovation, Organisational change, Technology & Science

Download (pdf) the full report, or order a copy.

The rise of the Internet has made it possible for knowledge to be created and shared in ways that emphasise its character as a common good, rather than as something to be owned.

In the world of open source programming, the computer software is distributed under licence, allowing users to change or share the software’s source code – the human readable version of a computer programme.

This open and collaborative approach to creating knowledge has produced remarkable results, such as the Linux operating system and the web-based encyclopaedia Wikipedia. In defiance of the conventional wisdom of modern business, open source methods have led the main underlying innovations around the Internet.

Other fields have much to learn from open source methods – because they bring principles and working methods which can help to produce better knowledge, goods or services, or make them available on more widely beneficial terms.

From the formulation of public policy to more open forms of academic peer review, setting up mutual support groups for people facing similar health problems to collaborative forms of social innovation, the principles of open source promise to radically alter the we approach complex social problems.

The future potential of these methods is such that they will soon become commonplace in our lives. Just as it is now impossible to think about getting things done without considering the role of the Internet, so will it soon be impossible to think about how to solve a large social problem without considering the role of open methods.

Geoff Mulgan is Director of the Young Foundation and former Head of Policy in the Prime Minister's Office. Tom Steinberg is Director of mySociety and is currently a fellow at the Young Foundation. Omar Salem is a student at Oxford University and an intern at the Young Foundation.