Public education ideally provides a comprehensive education for every citizen as one of the greatest accomplishments of worldwide civil governments. Without a successful public education system, the well-being of society is threatened.

"...The following text has been crossposted from Stephen Downes: The Future of Education, liveblogged notes taken at the conference by Stephen Downes at the First International Conference Free Knowledge, Free Technology - Education for a free information society [...] The conference deals first with the concept of public goods and public education, and their relationship with Freedom.

France’s ministry for education has migrated 2,500 servers across its 30 local education authorities to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, in line with the ministry's open-source investment strategy to avoid problems associated with vendor lock-in

"Last Friday, 24th of April, the foundations for vendor independent ICT education in the Netherlands were laid down.

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.

Godin writes today about embracing the "lifetime value" of a customer. Open source projects may not have customers, but it pays to think about the lifetime value of users as well.

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?

The New South Wales (NSW) Department of Education and Training (DET) has today revealed its required specifications for custom-built laptops it intends to issue to students from grades 9 to 12 by the middle of 2009. In what is remniscent of a netbook, the budget is set at $500 per model, with hardware at that level.

"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? ..."