Today sees the launch of the Cape Town Open Education Declaration which aims to make learning and teaching materials freely available online, to improve the quality of education in schools in South Africa and the rest of the world, leveraging the potential for open collaboration on the Web.

"It really is good to see so many international NGOs and intergovermental organisations creating open educational resources and/or promoting open access. UNESCO has created a gateway to resources related to Free Software..."

A Chinese educational device vendor announced it will use Trolltech's Qt for Embedded Linux application framework in its Linux-based educational devices. Noah Education Holdings currently offers over a dozen handheld "digital-learning devices" (DLDs), three of which run embedded Linux.

What does education have to do with Linux, or free software in general, you ask? In this article, I am going to answer this question and describe available open source educational programs for your kids.

The European Union funded FLOSSCom research project is investigating Free / Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) communities as learning environments. The project aims to identify principles of FLOSS communities that could be transferred to educational settings, e.g. how the community model could help to improve education.

Developing countries are using open source technology to build educational initiatives that are impressive when compared to socially-devastating education policies in the United States, which is much richer and could easily afford to replicate these outstanding programs in countries like Brazil.

"There’s a new kid on the block in the education commons movement. It’s called SELF, a project dedicated to developing premium training and educational materials about Free Software and Open Standards..."

"Internet Society Bulgaria, the French Cultural Institute, Linux for Bulgarians and the SELF Project are organising an international conference in Sofia on "Science, Education and Learning in Freedom" with a focus on free educational materials about Free Software and Open Standards. The conference will be held on February 10th, 2008, at the French Cultural Institute in Sofia, 2 Dyakon Ignatij Str., Sofia, Bulgaria..."

What started as wondering how to contribute to my 5 year old son’s pre-school lead to the discovery of some absolutely terrific open source software that really aids the educational process. Here’s why even in this Microsoft world Linux is the best platform for early childhood education.