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.

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

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.

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).

I heard a phrase today that reminded me of my childhood: “...learning and sharing together”. I’m not sure if I ever heard this exact phrase, but it was definitely a theme that was central to my early education; it’s now a central theme of my life again, this time through free software.

Yesterday I speculated that the open source model in the software world is going to undermine the basic delivery system for higher education in the United States (and perhaps elsewhere). Today I want to consider what, exactly, a transformed system of education might look like.

We are reaching an exciting time for Open Source in UK education as government interest is increasing and many teachers, support and management staff are using Open Source to greater effect in schools, colleges and universities.