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.

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.

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.

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.

...the use of free and open-source software is an education issue. What I mean by that is that if we want FOSS to be adopted in a more widespread fashion, if we want projects to succeed (and FOSS-focused companies to succeed), we need to make sure that people know that alternatives exist.

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.

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.

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.

"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."