Monday, July 23, 2007

BOF: Open Source in Education

In a Birds of a Feather, we listen to each other, chatting about a given topic. Various teachers and curriculum writers are talking about their experiences using and/or teaching open source tools and/or languages. Michael Brewer is hosting this session.

The focus here is on college level computer science. Colorado State uses all open source. Elsewhere it's a function of the teacher, whether students boot Windows or Linux.

Alex Martelli is here with his family. Anna is making good comments about teaching group programming skills, sparking discussion about the social skills geeks need, as well as technical skills.

Some guy is making a long, passionate speech about the need for standards, backed by professional organizations.

We finished with some discussion of course management and collaboration tools, such as Moodle and Banner.