11.20.06

Georgia Educational Tech Conference

Posted in EDU-Nix, EduTech at 11:43 am by Shane

A great report came across the School-Discuss mailing list from Daniel Howard, President and CEO Georgia Open Source Education Foundation, regarding open source at the Georgia Educational Tech Conference:

I was pleasantly surprised to discover that there were more sessions on Open Source than I predicted (about 15), everything from using Knoppix for fixing Win XP machines(!) to Open Source email and web filtering/security solutions for schools. Every session I attended, and mine, were nicely populated, and as we would expect, there were a lot of schools with old PCs that were not being used due to viruses, bad hard drives, etc…

All in all, a great success, and the buzz about Open Source is definitely getting out here in Georgia.

Daniel handed out CDs with Free Software to attendees, including Knoppix and the WinOSS CD-Rom.

Also, Daniel posed a query in his email which I think will really be a helpful exercise for evaluating the state of Open Source Schoolware:

If a brand new school/district came to us and asked for a complete, turnkey Open Source solution (assuming we got them a Linux consultant to integrate everything), what would we recommend?

I will be creating a section of EDU-Nix.org specifically for this topic, but would like to start the ideas and suggestions rolling in this posting. First, we’ll need to identify what exactly a school/district will need top to bottom, and what OSS solutions are available, how much customization would be required, etc.

So, how do we go about creating the “Open Source School in a Box”?

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