An education supplies company has announced a portable science education computer that runs embedded Debian Linux. Pasco says it designed its sensor-equipped Spark Science Learning System for collaborative science experiments by students, for example measuring conductivity or tracking temperature changes.

Open Source is getting bigger by the day in India. Success stories such as Tamil Nadu going completely open source, NRCFOSS and CDAC launching Debian based BOSS Linux distribution tailored for India in many Indian languages and the recent steps by Gujarat State Education Board(GSEB) to give 50% weightage to Open Source and Linux in Computer subject across all streams (Science, Commerce and Arts).

According to wordnetweb.princeton.edu, Computer Science is "the branch of engineering science that studies (with the aid of computers) computable processes and structures". It's the study of computer architectures, languages, and mathematical structures as applied to the process of computing. So what have Campbell, et al produced in this book...a Computer Science textbook that teaches Python?

Jordanian Minister of Education, Ibrahim Badran, announced Jordan's intention to start BLOSSOMS II in ten selected high schools of the kingdom. BLOSSOMS (Blended Learning Open Source Science or Math Studies) is an Open-education initiative started by MIT in partnership with Jordan and Pakistan.

In my last post I mentioned Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS). Many people don’t know what FLOSS is, but it’s really quite simple. FLOSS is software that anybody can see and that they are free to change to suit their needs. FLOSS is programs that that don’t cost an arm and a leg and a first born son. Examples are Linux, OpenOffice.org, GIMP, Apache Web Server, MySQL, and many more.

Teemu Leinonen asks some important questions about the Open Education Conference, OpenEd 2009.
1) Why is the title “open education” and not “free and open education” or “libre education”?
2) Why there aren’t any talks/presentations about language learning?

Open Education encompasses a wide range of ideas and practices: open educational resources, open learning support, open credentialing, open access, open scholarship, open teaching, and others. Sometimes open education is enacted by a national government or as an institutional initiative, other times an open education practitioner can feel like a lone voice crying in the wilderness.

I heard a phrase today that reminded me of my childhood: “...learning and sharing together”. I’m not sure if I ever heard this exact phrase, but it was definitely a theme that was central to my early education; it’s now a central theme of my life again, this time through free software.

Seneca College students in the School of Computer Studies will work
within the Fedora Project while learning open source development and administration. As the principles and methodologies of open source are changing the software industry, Red Hat and Seneca College are committed to driving change through new models of computer science education.