Fedora 14 Released

Fedora 14 is on track for a final release date of November 02, 2010. If all 14 does is improve upon 13, Fedora will have another winner on its hands. Why? Fedora 13 was one of the strongest releases the Red Hat sandbox has had in a while. And with what Fedora 14 has under and above its hood, the next release should up the ante yet again for the Fedora distribution.

But what exactly is in store for Fedora 14? And who is this release really targeting? Historically, Fedora was a distribution that attracted only those that wanted "bleeding edge" software and a distribution they could (and almost needed to) tinker with. With the release of Fedora 13 things started to change a bit. The end user could happily use Fedora out of the box. It was stable and it had plenty to offer users of all levels.

But when you first read the list of features highlighted for Fedora 14, you might think the release is targeting developers. What with new and updated programming languages, simpler and faster debugging, and better developer tools the feature list looks like the only users would be those that actually develop the distribution or applications for the distribution.

Technology Strategy Board Driving Innovation Competition

I have just attended the Knowledge Transfer Network's Briefing Day for their new innovation competiiton - Technology-Inspired COllaborative Research and Development.

This has six strands the relevant one being Information and Communications Technology (or software as one person put it...

There is a pot of 18 million pounds for people who manage to form collaborative consortia that are usually underpinned by University research. Open Source was mentioned a few times!!

The Technology Strategy Board is keen to support business-oriented innovation across a broad range of technologies that fall within six areas.

All projects must contain a significant element of technology innovation.

This competition will focus on projects where recent technological discoveries or breakthroughs have inspired people to innovate in a context of significant technology risk, demanding highly skilled, multi-disciplinary resources, working in a collaborative project teams.

They are especially keen to encourage innovation in new enabling technologies that have the potential to span different disciplines and may not be directly driven by society's challenges. An example is innovations that lead to new technology platforms or 'springboardsa', from which the potential commercial benefits could be realised across multiple applications.

The scope includes taking a new technology into new application areas where significant technical challenges need to be overcome. Projects will generally be at the applied research stage leading to(and possibly including some) experimental development.

ICT STRAND

The ICT Strand of the project involves invitation of proposals regarding:

Engineering of ICT systems - means to configure new and complex end-to-end ICT-based systems that are fit for purpose.

The following topics are also in the scope:

Data-driven systems - techniques and tools to build and deploy whole solutions for continuous and reliable data collection in complex environments, to serve demanding data needs.

Intelligent Systems - ways to design and exploit autonomous and/or autonomic systems that perform safely in dynamic environments, but excluding ways to extract value from collected data and information.

User-centric systems - methodologies and tools to ensure that ICT systems align with user needs, values and preferences.

Sounds like a good remit for any Open Source firms out there - interested? Download the brief here.

Open Services: Sustainable ICT for UK Schools

Today sees the publication a report from NWLG CEO Gary Clawson on the savings that would follow from a move to open source, open services and open content in schools and across local authorities. Gary argues that a switch to open source and open content would offer 25% savings on IT spend with relative ease, with a further 30-35% if LAs looked seriously at re-modelling how ICT is implemented and supported. Across a local authority with some 20 secondaries and 120 primaries, this would amount to over £1.4M pa.

Oh yes, and you get more flexible, sustainable IT and systems which support generic transferable skills in the classroom.

Gary outlines the first steps for schools and LAs:

Do an immediate review of ALL of your current licence costs and look at the alternative Open Source products. Pay particular interest in your Learning Platform and Digital Resources and cost up an alternative Moodle/National Digital Resource Bank implementation. This is incredibly easy to physically implement. Examine what you spend on Microsoft Office, you do not need it on the curriculum desktop, most of your students use Open Office at home. Do a software build for an edubuntu/Openeducation disc and try it at teacher and student level. If it works well, start the process of replacing every curriculum desktop with it. Brand it and distribute to all of your students for home use. Check performance of new desktop and re-assess any hardware replacement and refresh cycles you may have. 

The report is online at http://www.nwlg.org/downloads/docs/papers/openservices.pdf

Open Source Computing

What follows are notes from a brief presentation to the Computing at School working group meeting in Cambridge this morning.

 It has often seemed to me, and thus I’m sure others, that open source tools and methods provide a diverse and fertile ecosystem in which the craft of programming might be mastered and computer science studied. My own discipline is education rather than computing, but I hope some of the following aspects might illustrate the opportunities which open source offers for those concerned to encourage computing at school. 

 A number of interesting and accessible programming languages are essentially open source projects, in which source code for interpreters and compilers in the reference implementation is available for all under an open source licence, and where the standard build of the language includes open source libraries. The most obvious examples here are of scripting languages for web based applications such as Perl, PHP and Python, which represent a way in to software development for many who may not have studied academic computing.

Open source tools can also be used to provide rich, fully featured development environments for a very wide range of programming languages. Examples here would include the tools such as the Gnu Compiler Collection (C, C++ Objective C, Fortran, Java and Ada), which lies at the heart of the Gnu/Linux project, as well as multipurpose development environments such as Emacs, Eclipse and KDevelop.

Beyond this, it’s worth acknowledging the opportunities presented by Linux for open source development at operating system rather than application level.

In a school setting, such open source environments not only offer the opportunity for pupils to become familiar with alternative operating systems and interfaces, but also provide one way of offering the freedom which many network managers might be reluctant to provide on their networks, either via live Linux distributions booting from CD or memory stick (such as the splendid Sugar on a Stick GUI for children), via shell access to a dedicated Linux computer or within a Linux powered virtual machine.

It seems significant that so many of the great educationally focussed tools environments for programming at school level are available under open source licences, including Scratch, Alice, Squeak E-Toys and Greenfoot. Scratch’s share button and the resultant collection of open source scripts uploaded by its user community is, I suspect, one of the significant factors in its success, with the Greenfoot Gallery providing similar encouragement for those learning Java using this tool. It’s because Scratch is open source that variants such as BYOB Scratch, used at Berkeley for their beauty and joy of computing course, as well as my own ‘creativity and computing in the primary school’ module.

Enshrined within the free software definition are the freedoms to:

study how the program works – thus allowing those learning computing to learn from and critique ‘real’ software in all its complexity from kernel modules to scripts for web 2.0 applications;change it to make it do what you wish – allowing young programmers to build on as well as learn from the work of others; anddistribute the modified version to others – which is crucial from a constructionist perspective, reflecting Papert’s insight that the most effective learning happens when we create public knowledge artefacts. 

These freedoms create the opportunity for anyone to contribute to open source projects, from supporting others and helping with documentation (‘legitimate peripheral participation’) through spotting and then fixing bugs to contributing and maintaining modules and even the core code of a project. The communities that develop around the best open source projects have much in common with Wenger’s notion of communities of practice, with all that this implies for those learning the craft of programming through a modern, self-directed form of apprenticeship. As well as constructionist learning through creating public software for others to read and use, the young open source programmer also creates their own portfolio of source code snippets and projects, which contribute to their reputation within the community and employability in the software industry.

Google’s Summer of Code scheme has been one way to formalise this sort of programming apprenticeship, by matching up undergraduate computer scientists (and others) to small open source development projects with designated mentors from within that project’s developer community. I wonder if the joint forces of CAS and Open Source Schools might be in a position to create a similar scheme for some of our sixth formers, or perhaps even younger students.

The Guardian on switching to ODF

A good piece from the Guardian's Charles Arthur yesterday, reporting teacher and Windsor & Maidenhead councillor Liam Maxwell's analysis, of how much councils could save by switching to Open Document Format, as used in OpenOffice.org: some £200M if all councils did this for all their staff. There was some background to this, about the problems encountered by Windsor and Maidenhead, on Computer Weekly's site on Wedensday.

The key stumbling block for councils, as for schools, appears to be compatibility with others systems, most notably those supplied by Capita. Liam calls for the Cabinet Office to strengthen its present position on open source and open standards by mandating ODF as a standards across the public sector, were this to happen I don't doubt that we'd see Capita quickly make SIMS and their other products compatible with OpenOffice.org, making it far easier for schools and councils to choose their office suite from all those available, rather than forcing them to pay for MS Office, bundled with 'features' which many will rarely if ever use. Charles seems to think that such a requirement is far more likely with Francis Maude at the Cabinet Office than it had ever been under the previous administration, even in Tom Watson's day.

Charles' research suggests that the annual running costs for a central government desktop are some £800-£1600, compared to just £130 in Extremadura, Spain where the switch to open source has already been made. Any members have cost per PC or cost per pupil figures for their schools?

Comment space below Charles' post includes a link to Joe Gardiner's analysis of how the DFT could save £770K pa by switching to open source for it's web hosting. 

Public consultations

There are a couple of public consultation exercises happening at the moment to which community members may wish to respond.

The DfE is inviting views on the future of capital funding for schools, now that many BSF projects have been put on hold for the foreseeable future. There aren't, surprise, surprise, many questions here about IT's place in big educational procurement, but members may still wish to register their views. Be warned that the online response form is not a shining example of web form design, so the attached Word file (I know...) may be of more use if you would like to share your views. I'm happy to collate a collective Open Source Schools response if there's sufficient interest. The closing date is quite soon for this, on Friday 17th September.

With a fair flurry of publicity back at the beginning of August, the Royal Society launched its 18 month study of computing in schools, its importance and its implications for the economic and scientific wellbeing of the UK. The press release speaks of a belief that the 'design and delivery of ICT and computer science curricula in schools is so poor that students' understanding and enjoyment of the subjects is severely limited', which I suspect may strike a chord with many here, who've struggled against the Office training culture now prevalent in many schemes of work and specifications.

The study is chaired by Prof Steve Furber FRS, who was one of the original BBC Micro team :-). He said:

"We are now watching the enthusiasm of the next generation waste away through poorly conceived courses and syllabuses. If we cannot address the problem of how to educate our young people in inspirational and appropriate ways, we risk a future workforce that is totally unskilled and unsuited to tomorrow’s job market.”

... but I'm sure he'll approach the evidence with an open mind.

The call for evidence is now open, until 5th November, see the other attachment. I think it would be worth putting together an Open Source Schools response to this, so I've created a wiki style page so that community members can collaborate there if they wish. Just click the edit tab once you've logged in.

Open Source Schools Steering Group

After the election and looking to the post-Becta future, Open Source Schools has been making new plans to ensure that the community is able to respond to the changing educational landscape where the benefits offered by open source are becoming ever more important.

A number of core community members were invited to a meeting on 29 June 2010 to develop an action plan for the future, and this group will continue to meet virtually or in real space on a regular, monthly basis. The group initially consists of:

Tim Bateson, Network Manager, Houghton Kepier Sports CollegeAlan Bell, CTO, Open Forum EuropeMiles Berry, Senior Lecturer in ICT Education, Roehampton UniversityPaul Haigh, Assistant Head, Notre Dame High SchoolBrian Lockwood, Head of IT, Egglescliffe SchoolAnne Matthews, Director, AlphaPlus Consultancy LtdDavid Willmot, Head of D&T, St Thomas More Language College 

This informal steering group agreed to work together on a voluntary basis and a number of tasks are already in hand.  Over the summer work on the website will be undertaken to develop the navigation to provide tailored content for specific audiences, initially senior leadership and network managers.

The withdrawal of the Harnessing Technology Grant is requiring senior leadership teams to review their IT strategies. within the community there is wide experience of the challenges, successes and benefits of implementing open source solutions as well as information about cost savings. This information will be shared on the website, and will form the basis of a conference for senior leaders planned for early November following the Comprehensive Spending Review. 

Wikis and turnkey solutions for network managers are also being developed.

For its part, AlphaPlus has offered to continue to host the website and to make some funds available to support the work of the community in these early stages. 

The group will also consider the longer term governance of the community and its resources, and welcomes involvement from all members of the community, whose views and character it seeks to represent.

Strategic planning for migration to open source

I have fired the starting gun on an exercise to create an information pack for schools on open source software. It will have sections on what open source is, a workbook of strategic questions to ask before embarking on a migration, implementation hints and tips a set of case studies (from this site) a directory (again from this site) and questionaire / feedback contacts and so on. The document will be public domain or CC license which is compatible with this site, and I intend to create a "release candidate" for peer scrutiny of this community as I know a lot of you actually work in schools (unlike me).

For me the low growing fruit is in the case studies and software directory that are already documented. I want to take these and cross reference them in the pack based on types of deployment, skills required and a set of other categories. In some cases a school board may have an idea about deploying an open source tool, but no current reference point, hopefully the pack will be able to link a target with a particular case study. On the other side of the coin a school may be looking for ideas but not be aware of their choices, in which case outlines of case studies with references to the full case study would be able to assist. The aim is to make one generic universally accessible pack that puts the case for open source and provides a roadmap to assist getting from concept to implementation.

However what I really need help on is the strategic planning for migration to open source. Ideally I would like to know the kinds of questions that those that have already implemented open source solutions in schools have asked themeselves or (if they were to do it again) would ask themselves before deployment.

I don't work in a school but from my experience of ICT the kinds of questions I would ask as a head or board of governers before making strategic decisions are:

What level of OSS skills do I currently have?

Would the teachers and support staff be willing to migrate?

How can I mitigate the risk of a key staff member leaving?

What will I need to invest in?

These are just 3 that come off the top of my head, I am sure that there are others out there that could think of more. If you could spare the time could you please post your suggestions (and the reasoning behind asking the question)  here so that I may include them in the pack. Similarly if you have any other ideas / suggestions for other sections mentioned (or additional sections) please discuss here.

Thanks for your assistance.