The department at the French Ministry of Education that is handling purchasing of software and software licenses is increasing its Open Source offerings to some 1.5 million teachers and education workers in 250 institutes France.

The department at the French Ministry of Education that is handling purchasing of software and software licenses is increasing its Open Source offerings to some 1.5 million teachers and education workers in 250 institutes France.

More teachers and institutions are now participating with organizations like SchoolForge, the Open Source Education Foundation, and Open Source Schools. These educators are beginning to see that the open source philosophy has the power to transform education in several key ways.

"The sections below develop reasons for adoption of free software exclusively for school education. Towards the end, a list of policy guidelines and recommendations are provided for discussion. The document does not cover the pros and cons of using ICT for education. I will try to intervene during the deliberations on these issues. Why Free Software for education? ..."

Yesterday I speculated that the open source model in the software world is going to undermine the basic delivery system for higher education in the United States (and perhaps elsewhere). Today I want to consider what, exactly, a transformed system of education might look like.

The educational community has discovered open source tools in a big way. Analysts predict that schools will spend up to $489.9 million on support and services for open source software by 2012, and that only includes charges related to operating systems and learning management systems.

"September 15 is Software Freedom Day, a celebration of free and open source software “to educate the worldwide public about of the benefits of using high quality FOSS in education, in government, at home, and in business — in short, everywhere!”

"I believe it's important to emphasize to all education technology people (or anyone else, for that matter) that they should not view open source simply as a cheap replacement for something else."

Officially sanctioned open source and free-to-use software could be in use across the UK education system within months after government education agency Becta issued a tender for a four-year framework agreement.