Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Australia's Digital Education Revolution is Truly Revolutionary

It's been less than a year since I wrote an Open Letter to the Australian Prime Minister (Kevin Rudd, then newly-elected) suggesting that when he delivered on his election promise to equip every schoolchild with a computer, he should favour Linux and Open Source software.

Now I don't know whether he read that letter or not, but the New South Wales state government (not to be confused with the Australian federal government) may be independently doing just that, using federal government funding provided to the states under the banner of Rudd's digital education revolution.

From the news item, it looks like NSW students are about to be introduced to Edubuntu, a variant of the extremely friendly Ubuntu distribution that I use, a variant specially designed for schoolchildren and packed with educational software. My son has been using an Edubuntu desktop for a year now, and has recently been introduced to the pleasurable power of the GIMP and XBMC as an aid to doing school projects.

Revolutionary indeed!

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