Open Source Victoria on a White-ant Trail

Anyone who follows The Age "Next" section will have seen the influence of Open Source rapidly growing in the headlines this year. Open Source Victoria has been funded $50,000 to inform businesses about open source alternatives. The Victorian Government is reportedly about to investigate alternatives to MS Office, as part of a review into software expenditure. (Link to article, read while you can. The Age only leaves their articles freely online for a few minutes these days.) (More detail at Multimedia Victoria.)

By the way, if you're interested in freeware in general, i've put some links up in the "about open source" section, including the amazing "tinyApps.org". If you haven't seen this site, take a look - all the best programs that fit on a floppy disk. Special "green awards" for the programs that don't mess with the windows registry.

aceweb e-conference!

.. if you're interested in flexible learning communities, you could head over to the AceWeb e-conference at TafeVC .. there's a session at 8pm 12november .. about open source .. actually hurry, there's one right now from the crowd over at the source - a place for flexible learning developers and teachers. Ha ha here's the funny thing - you're probably there already, not here :)

NetWorkingNow03 Exhaustion

Finally back from NetworkingNow03, in the Blue Mountains outside of Sydney - what an exhausting experience! 600 people all drinking tea in one small space, rushing from room to room, overheating and then moving out to the fresh air and incredibly beautiful views of the mountains. Delightful, but not much chance to meet people you didn't already know.

One highlight was Marty Cielens' session on Open Source - (and if you head to Michael Coghlan's audio blog and subscribe, you'll hear that Mardi Dwyer agrees). As well as showing us all the great tools that he's experimented with, Marty compared the philosophy of the Open Source movement to that of our educational sectors. He asserted that it would be great if we could embrace the concept of Open Design - allowing teachers to create and share a range of learning materials - within a framework of a kind of General Public Licence for teachers.

Also Barbara Pitman presented us with a great new resource for Indigenous Health called "Livin in a House" - an inspiring speaker, Barbara's not one for using text-based technology without good reason. She also told a terrible story about how technological progress can mean democratic regression - back in the seventies local people in the Northern Territory relied on free community radio to get their messages rapidly between groups of people. Opponents of the Land Rights movement were amazed at how quickly word was getting around. But now there is only the pay phone.

Barbara showed us how to use animation and music, as well as a well-known person with street credibility, to get a message across. You'll find her keynote address at Human Services - worth a read!!