We are on the cusp of a global revolution in teaching and learning. Educators worldwide are developing a vast pool of educational resources on the Internet, open and free for all to use.

Open Education encompasses a wide range of ideas and practices: open educational resources, open learning support, open credentialing, open access, open scholarship, open teaching, and others. Sometimes open education is enacted by a national government or as an institutional initiative, other times an open education practitioner can feel like a lone voice crying in the wilderness.

Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales and Ubuntu's Mark Shuttleworth are backing a scheme to make publicly funded education materials freely available on the Internet.

Teemu Leinonen asks some important questions about the Open Education Conference, OpenEd 2009.
1) Why is the title “open education” and not “free and open education” or “libre education”?
2) Why there aren’t any talks/presentations about language learning?

Schools should be looking to open source for students, both for lower cost and far greater learning potential, and there are a number of excellent education-oriented Linux distributions. Paul Ferrill takes openSUSE For Schools (Linux For Education) for a spin.

Jordanian Minister of Education, Ibrahim Badran, announced Jordan's intention to start BLOSSOMS II in ten selected high schools of the kingdom. BLOSSOMS (Blended Learning Open Source Science or Math Studies) is an Open-education initiative started by MIT in partnership with Jordan and Pakistan.

Yesterday I presented on 'Open Sourcing Education in South Africa' at the Ubuntu Live conference in Portland. The main idea was to start making links between that Shuttleworth Foundation and the Ubuntu community. I also wanted to test out some language from the Foundation's emerging theory of change. Some quick learnings:

More teachers and institutions are now participating with organizations like SchoolForge, the Open Source Education Foundation, and Open Source Schools. These educators are beginning to see that the open source philosophy has the power to transform education in several key ways.

Heavily funded by the European Union, the Science, Education, and Learning in Freedom (SELF) consortium launched the beta version of its site this week with the motto, "Be SELFish, share your knowledge!" By the end of the year, SELF hopes to develop into the Wikipedia of free learning materials, with a heavy emphasis on material about open standards and free and open source software (FOSS).