The Aberystwyth University located in Aberystwyth, Wales provides a Bachelor of Science degree in "Open Source Computing" within its Computer Science Department. The Aberystwyth's Department of Computer Science is ranked first in Wales and came number 17 in the United Kingdom.

For the last several years, I’ve organized sessions on open source software (OSS) at ed-tech conferences. But this year was markedly different, with an awareness of these tools among educators that I’d never seen.

Two of Europe's open universities, the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya in Spain and Open Universiteit in the Netherlands, are about to start the first courses of what will become a Master programme on free and open source software and open standards.

Today, I'm going to discuss the Gcompris education suite. Gcompris is meant for younger children from 2 to 10 years old, though it seems to focus on the younger part of this range.

If we could digitize paper, music and video and store them in files on a computer and then bring it alive when needed, why not a digitize a whole computer into a file? These days, computers are so fast that it is possible to feed them a description of an ideal child's computer and have it bring it alive on the screen in a flash.

"Post tenebras lux" is the maxim of the republic and city of Geneva. It means something like "After the dark the light". Although it is related to the Reforme, coincidently (may be not) it applies nicely to the recent move of the Geneva's State Council and particularly the Department of Public Education to open format and free software.

One of the things I love to hear about is success stories of Linux in education, especially in the K12 arena. Early adoption and exposure to Linux and Open Source has the very positive effect of opening the horizons of these students to the vast array of options available to them.