How adorable is this?

Qimo is a desktop operating system designed for kids. Based on the open source Ubuntu Linux desktop, Qimo comes pre-installed with educational games for children aged 3 and up.

Qimo’s interface has been designed to be intuitive and easy to use, providing large icons for all installed games, so that even the youngest users have no trouble selecting the activity they want.

I would love to see this on the children’s stations in public libraries and schools!! In fact I’m going to add it to my open source talks for school librarians.

Found via DownloadSquad.

This from CNET:

Open source creates better software, Whitehurst argues, so why not expand its value by expanding its community?

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology apparently has heard the call, opting to open-source its Mobile Web project, as reported by ReadWriteWeb. The code “offers a staff and student directory, a campus map, the shuttle schedule, an event calendar, class announcements for students, emergency information, and status updates for many of MIT’s tech services.”

This makes me wish I was working in an academic institution so I had an excuse to play with this code. Check it out and let me know how it works!! Sounds like a great development in the world of open source for colleges and universities.

While this post by Ramón Casero Cañas focuses on open source in education - it fits perfectly with libraries as well:

So maybe we should look for the reasons to adopt open source somewhere else. The main characteristic of open source, if done properly, is that it promotes the formation of a community of people who can get involved with the project. This is arguably a good thing in education: engaging students and letting them play with the tools. Open source projects also function as a tutoring environment, where students can learn good practice from more experienced users and developers.

Thus, maybe the main reason for promoting open source in education is that it will help students learn more. But how? In fact, the ‘why’ leads to the ‘how’. If open source is to be successful in education, it cannot be just a matter of policy or, in general, a top-down approach. Its community and playful nature needs to be acknowledged and promoted amongst students, be it through local Linux User Groups (LUGs), creating fun projects (write a computer game in a collaborative way), or joining external projects.

Read the entire post here.

There is a very comprehensive article on using open source in academia, including pros and cons, in Educause Quarterly:

Academia has adopted open source software for some online learning initiatives because it addresses persistent technical challenges

Read the entire article! It’s well worth it.

About 70,000 students and their 7,000 teachers in the Geneva school district will gradually be moving to Open Source.

The decision to move to Open Source was taken by the Geneva Public School District (Département de l’Instruction Publique Genevois (DIP) in March 2006, says Manuel Grandjean, project leader for the Geneva district’s Open Source migration. “The district wants Open Source software to become the default.”

Very cool - this is what I love to see. Learn more here.

While this article is about schools and not libraries - I think the two organizations have a lot of similarities. The article titled: School districts serve up lessons in Linux by Andrew Hendry appeared on the Computerworld site in January:

School districts in the US and Canada find Linux and open source offers better support, cheaper setup costs, and improved educational value

I think this is great! Not only does open source save these schools money, but it also teaches kids about open source!

This from the SchoolForge discussion list:

On Saturday March 1st, Untangle and the ACCRC are organizing a massive installfest for Bay Area schools. We are refurbishing hundreds of older/discarded computers with Ubuntu and donating them to Bay Area schools. We need your help from Linux users installing Ubuntu at the 4 locations, which are San Francisco, Berkeley, San Mateo & Marin County.

Signup sheets for each location are here:

http://wiki.untangle.com/index.php/Installfest

What a great idea! I’d love to see more events like this on the east coast - or anywhere else in the world for that matter. If you’re in the area and have the skills this would be a great way to help spread knowledge of open source to future professionals.

Learn more from Untangle.