# Schools and FLOSS

< FLOSS and education

## Examples

Please feel free to post examples of FLOSS and distributed and open practice in schools, particularly where they are supported by policies designed for open practice.
ALL
* The Google Highly Open Participation Contest Google's first contest to introduce pre-university students to the many contributions that make open source software development possible, concluded on February 4, 2008. We had nearly 400 students worldwide to produce a variety of open source code, documentation, training materials and user experience research for the ten participating organizations listed here. You can check out actual work submitted by student contestants by clicking on the results link next to a project's name on the right.
* Educating Tux: case studies of Linux deployments in high schools around the world by David M Williams 2008
* http://opencontent.org/wiki/index.php?title=Intro_Open_Ed_Syllabus --Alexanderhayes 23:34, 29 February 2008 (UTC)
* http://mscofino.edublogs.org/ --Alexanderhayes 23:42, 29 February 2008 (UTC)
* Wikibooks: Social and Cultural Foundations of American Education - Student authored book
* Wikiversity: Composing free and open online educational resources
* Wikiversity: Networked learning
* P2P foundation Category:education http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Category:Education
AU
* 4 years of Linux at Lorien Novalis http://www.lorien.nsw.edu.au/joomla/images/pdfs/linuxschoolweb.pdf
* Open Content syllabus http://opencontent.org/wiki/index.php?title=Intro_Open_Ed_Syllabus (alexanderhayes)
* Elliot M., Creative Projects Dissertation http://mark-elliott.net/view/Dissertation/CreativeProjectsDissertation
* Australian Bill of rights website http://www.re-public.gr/en/?p=142
* Wiki work http://bookrap.pbwiki.com/ and http://penrithpslibrary.pbwiki.com/ ian.mclean7@det.nsw.edu.au
CA
* Fisher, C., Blog: Remote access:OS and Education http://web.archive.org/20080723122710/remoteaccess.typepad.com/remote_access/2008/03/os-and-educatio.html
* via TALO Googlegroup. WCET conference website where Sylvia Currie participated in a round table discussion here: https://conference.wcet.info/2005/presentations/Currie_Sylvia.swf
   "I applied the framework retroactively to Nicola Valley Institute of Technology, a small Aboriginal college where we began using Moodle in 2003." Here is the summary of why Moodle worked for NVIT:
   * Willingness is key in our circumstances. Skill level low, motivation high. We have grown with the project, gradually increasing capacity.
   * Management style and character of institution a good match for open source - many voices, listen well, equality of input into decision-making.
   * Instructors and students have been innovative in their use of Moodle. Elders have also become involved.
   * Support is distributed - a culture of experimentation, research & sharing
   * No licensing fee has meant more resources devoted to implementation, unlimited users/courses has allowed for easy experimentation, and easy access to past iterations of
   courses for reuse and refining
   * Flexible and customizable - can use a course management system for NVIT community activities, everyone has input into customization, synergy in group innovation
   * New partnerships and opportunities - have developed because of community presence and ability to respond. Involved in software development projects, an interest that was not apparent in the past.
   * Chose our projects and partners wisely: stable and widely supported OS project. Community around Moodle use an asset. Faculty are motivated by the responsiveness, constant improvements
   * NVIT is involved in a unique project that other institutions are noticing.
   * Timing was right -- since initial implementation several institutions in province have begun using Moodle. This has helped maintain momentum in our project.
   Although this was done several years ago, much of it still seems relevant.
Downes, S., 2008 Options and opportunities
   National Proponents of public-school education will have to embrace not only new technologies that support learning and new pedagogies that leverage those technologies, but also new forms of organization suggested by those technologies and pedagogies.
   Where in the past we have relied on standardization as our guarantor of quality and access, we will in the future be looking toward more flexible measures — measures rooted in the needs expressed and pursued by an increasingly diverse population. We will be able, in ways we haven’t previously, to enable each person to pursue his or her own educational objectives in his or her own way. And as the economic imperatives that demand a standardized curriculum fade, the educational, social, and economic benefits of diversity not only will become clearer, they will become imperative.
USA
* OLPC at school High school students working with the olpc project on Maths and Science (mchua)
* Jeff Elkner http://openbookproject.net/ and other projects at http://www.elkner.net/ (mchua)

## Local thinking

Australian schools and FLOSS