I've written before about the increasing uptake of, and innovation around, free software in Russia. Here's another fascinating experiment, involving the Vladivostok State University of Economics and Services, which is giving students netbooks running the Mandriva distro:

My school uses a SIS program called Infinite Campus. The SIS (Student Information System) is the backbone for any school. If you use, are employed by, and/or have high regards for the Infinite Campus company, I strongly advise that you not to read this post, as it may smash your high-held opinions about this fraud into little tiny shards.

The New York Times is running an interesting piece from IDG News on how administrators and IT chiefs for higher educational institutions are at odds over whether it makes sense to deploy open source software instead of proprietary products. The flap went on this week at the Educause conference in Florida.

Open Source with its promise of distributing source code and allowing anyone to modify it or derive other software from it, makes it an excellent choice for learning computer science, technology and engineering of software.

To mark the upcoming October 19th meeting of DFEY-NW (Digital Freedom in Education and Youth - North West) I have written a short essay about what I think DFEY exists for and why it came into being.
Let us know what you think!

The University of the Western Cape (UWC) and the African Virtual Open Initiatives and Resources (AVOIR) project have released version 1.0.1 of the Chisimba/KEWL3 Realtime Virtual Classroom.

The Australian authorities appear to be manipulated into exclusion of GNU/Linux in schools

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.