Next week from the 14th to the 17th is the BETT 2009 show in Olympia. Each year 30,000 educational professionals (yep, a full 30 kiloteachers) meet up in London Olympia for an educational technology conference. We were there last year generating lots of excitement about the OLPC project, I wrote up a couple of articles about the experience here and here (you can also see where later in the year I met Elonex for the first time). This year will be the same, but bigger as The Open Learning Centre has joined forces with our partners at Open Forum Europe to get a stand twice as big as last year (SW104 upstairs in the National Hall). We will be demonstrating loads of Free and Open Source Software (Moodle, Elgg, OpenOffice.org, Edubuntu, GCompris and loads of others) and telling people how they can save money and deliver a better education to our young people by taking advantage of Free and Open Source Software. One of the four core freedoms of Free software is the Freedom to study the software, personally I think that this should be considered an essential Freedom that schools should insist on for all the software they use (whether or not they have the other Freedoms). In fact, whilst I am on the subject, here are the four Freedoms for those who are not already familiar with them:
- The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
- The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
- The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
- The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
Back to the show, Elonex themselves will be on stand D80 but I can’t find them in the BETT show website. Our friends at Canonical will be squatting on a corner of the Intel stand E150 (although a corner of the Intel stand is probably bigger than our whole stand). There is an interesting looking seminar running on Saturday 17th about the Open Source Schools project.
Registration for BETT is free and open to everyone, but it might be best to pre-register if you fancy popping in. If you happen to be involved in a school (governor/parent/teacher/student etc) then do make sure that if someone is going to BETT representing your school that they spend some time learning about all the great Free software that is on display and available to use.