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?

Today sees the launch of the Cape Town Open Education Declaration which aims to make learning and teaching materials freely available online, to improve the quality of education in schools in South Africa and the rest of the world, leveraging the potential for open collaboration on the Web.

We are reaching an exciting time for Open Source in UK education as government interest is increasing and many teachers, support and management staff are using Open Source to greater effect in schools, colleges and universities.

We are on the cusp of a global revolution in teaching and learning. Educators worldwide are developing a vast pool of educational resources on the Internet, open and free for all to use.

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.

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.

Open source and education are natural fits-- open source encourages experimentation and exploration, and the opportunity to learn computing, rather just how to be a little cog in a giant data-processing machine. Cynthia Harvey gives us a taste of the possibilities with this list of 55 open source educational applications.

Can open source succeed where Windows and the Mac have failed? I’m talking here of K-12 education. An eSchools report (right) says open source spending is growing 70% per year, and will be up 800% in 2011 from last year’s level.

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.