An education e-primer, and more

Talking about education, if you've not yet come across the IOSN.net education e-primer, then it's probably worth a download. At Siem Reap, Cambodia, participants at FOSSAP-II got freshly-printed copies of this e-primer, together with others on government policy and localisation.

Tan Wooi Tong, Kenneth Wong and Anousak Souphavanh and Theppitak Karoonboonyanan (jointly, in the last case) have done a nice job of these texts.

In the case of education, Tan Wooi Tong makes an interesting case for Free and Open Source Software in education (lower costs; reliability, performance and security; building long-term capacity; an open philosophy; encouraging innovations; an alternative to illegal copying; possibilities for localisation; and learing from the source code). Tan then briefly zooms in on the requirements of educational institutions -- networking, internet connectivity, security, webpublishing, email, file-and-print services, network services, web servers and other server software.

Thrown in are some examples of what works, together with solutions like the made-in-New Zealand Koha GPL-ed library management solution, and PhpMyLibrary and OpenBiblio. Moodle for e-learning and ATutor that offers tools which allows the instructor to manage online content are also introduced.

To wind-up, there are links to the Open Content phenomenon of sharing information and knowledge -- MIT's OpenCourseWare, the ever-impressive Wikipedia and the Public Library of Science. This is a 40-page slim booklet packed with information. Considering that it's just a download away, there's no reason why you shouldn't click your way to it.