Open Source

The Learning Registery Plugfest is a hands-on technical event. Attendees will experience two days of hands-on work to connect their repositories, content collections and communities to the Learning Registry; to build tools, to explore the data the Learning Registry has; and to work on the Learning Registry code to add new features. Attendees should have programming/software engineering/development skills and plan to come [...]

New York Times 
Google is bringing Android software development to the masses. The company will offer a software tool, starting July 12, that is intended to make it easy for people to write applications for its Android smart phones. The free software, called Google App Inventor for Android, has been under development for a year. User [...]

New York Times 
A number of websites have compiled free online resources for educators. The OpenCourseWare Consortium offers free course materials and lectures in multiple languages from 250 universities worldwide, as long as members post 10 courses within two years. Another Massachusetts Institute of Technology website offers introductory courses in calculus, physics and biology to prepare [...]

New York Times 
Putting free courseware online was a first step in reimagining education. So what now? Wiki universities, smart courses, and—maybe—improved learning. A decade has passed since MIT decided to give much of its course materials to the public in an act of largesse. The MIT OpenCourseWare Initiative helped usher in the “open educational resources” [...]

PC World 
Imagine controlling Apple iTunes from inside Microsoft Word without having to switch applications. That could be possible thanks to the efforts of researchers at the University of Washington who are working on a project that could essentially make any proprietary software act like open source. “Microsoft and Apple aren’t going to open up all [...]

While some educators have been quick to grasp the potential and promise of open source software, many others have been hesitant to stray from the comfortable zone of commercial applications. Yet that’s changing. These educators are beginning to see that the open source philosophy has the power to transform education in several key ways. First, [...]

Some of the world’s largest technology companies have banded together in a bid to push open-source software on the United States government. They’ve formed a group called Open Source for America, which seeks to make sure that government agencies at least consider open-source software as an option in their buying decisions.
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Microsoft is bringing its widely adopted Live@edu collaboration suite to Moodle, the open source learning management system (LMS) that’s installed at more than 35,000 registered, validated sites worldwide. Microsoft also unveiled today its new Education Labs site, which will serve as a repository for education software developed on an accelerated cycle.
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State education officials have a new tool to help them predict which investments will pay dividends as they try to boost the number of college graduates who major in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. The computer-based model will simulate how schools can draw students to STEM fields most effectively–a trend that would bolster [...]

A recent campus conflict reflects the tension that exists between open-source ideological values and an academic system in which collaboration and the ability to repurpose existing work make it difficult to measure individual achievement.
Click here to read more from Ars Technica.

Education Week’s Digital Directions:  As the movement for “open” education resources continues to grow, encouraging educators to share online curricula and materials­ for free, it’s become vital for ed-tech leaders and classroom teachers to understand the different types of licenses that make the process legal and safe. …

A federal judge has ruled that The SCO Group doesn’t own the lines of Unix software code it claims were misappropriated by developers of the open-source Linux OS. The judge’s decision removes a legal cloud… freeing schools and other users of Linux from the threat of copyright infringement. . . . eSchool News reports.