While it may not let you go where no man has gone before, Celestia is an amazing desktop application that lets you go anywhere in the known Universe.You can view any object in the Solar System, travel to distant stars, and even leave the Galaxy, traveling faster than the speed of light, viewing high-res images of objects millions of miles away.

Alexander Ponosov, director of the school in the village of Sepych, Perm Territory, who has found guilty of installing pirated Windows software in 12 school computers, has changed jobs. He is now engaged in popularizing the free Linux operating system, Window's biggest competitor, after winning a competition held by the Russian Federal Education Agency (Rosobrazovanie) to test Linux in school computers in three regions of the country. Ponosov received wide attention after the local prosecutor charged him with installing pirated software in school computers.

Providing high school students with PCs is seen as a first step to preparing them for a technology-literate future, but in the Philippines many schools cannot afford to provide computing facilities so after a successful deployment of 13,000 Fedora Linux systems from a government grant, plans are underway to roll out another 10,000 based on Ubuntu.

Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales and Ubuntu's Mark Shuttleworth are backing a scheme to make publicly funded education materials freely available on the Internet.

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.

First distributives developed on the basis of Linux OS within the program to equip Russian schools with the open source software have been handed over to the informatics teachers in the Perm Region. The developers are sure their product will not only protect teachers from copyright advocates but might result in the technical literacy of pupils to improve.

"The Free Knowledge Institute (FKI) is a non-profit organisation that fosters the free exchange of knowledge in all areas of society. Inspired by the Free Software movement, the FKI promotes freedom of use, modification, copying and distribution of knowledge in four different but highly related fields: education, technology, culture and science."

I’m on an Edubuntu users mailing list where, more often than not, veteran users can answer questions for new users. I usually give it a quick skim for any new features or fixes and then leave it to accumulate like so many other pieces of information in my Gmail account (hooray for increased storage!).